Johnny
Middle Eastern women are beautiful. I sincerely hope that ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban don't decide to behead this one for committing the sinful act of smiling..........
Ariq
I agree with you, but just to help you not get any hate from others in the future, call them Arabs, Arabic is language :)
Johnny
If I'm not messing something up, it's probably because I'm sleeping. Actually, now that you pointed it out, I think it's supposed to be "Arabian". Anyway, thanks for the free education my good sir....
SM-721
She is Iranian, Iranians are not arabs.
Johnny
SWEET MOLASSESS IN THE MORNING!!! You're right! OK, third times the charm. I'll go with "Middle Eastern" and hope for the best.......
SM-72
It's fine man. Middle eastern is okay. Iranian is better though. I hope I encouraged you to learn a little more about Iran (hell, start with wikipedia)
QueenSabaa
As an Iranian, ISIS has nothing to do with Iran, I am a Muslim Iranian girl who practices Islam. we do not support ISIS. Also we can smile and laugh in Iran!!, come on now, that is ignorant to say...
deathtokoalas
the iranian plateau is in a strategic fork between europe and asia, and has consequently experienced large amounts of migration, and, unfortunately, several rounds of genocide. the dominant cultural group in iran is a complex melting pot, and a good case study in separating the various aspects of a cultural group.
the earliest inhabitants would have been darker-skinned and probably migrated westwards from india. they have some descendants in persia. the keyword is balochistan. however, this substratum of iran is very deep and it's legacy today is largely subconscious.
next, there would have been a large migration into iran by people that would have looked like modern day russians. they have left their language to the region, as well as some religious customs; the jewish stories that claim abraham came from persia may have been meant to demonstrate that the monotheistic and dualistic aspects of the religion were persian in origin.
persia quickly became the dominant empire in the region, before embarking in a thousand year war with europe - first greece, then rome. rome and persia would periodically devastate each other, call a truce and then repeat. during one particularly devastating break in the fighting, arabs rose up to take advantage of the situation and conquered all of persia and most of rome at the same time. this is technically the end of the persian empire. for the next five hundred years, iran is inhabited by a primarily european people with shi'ite muslim customs.
then, the mongols appeared. what we now call iran dealt with the worst of their destruction. millions and millions of iranians were slaughtered, and replaced with advancing turkish peoples. the devastation was so severe that iran is understood as having gone through centuries of pure anarchy. and, the truth is that the continuing backwardsness in the afghan highlands is the consequence of the region never fully recovering.
around the year 1500, a new iran arises out of the destruction of the old one. the ethnogenesis mixes turkish genetics and arabic religion with the persian language and a complex cultural tradition drawing from every direction.
so, no - iranians are not arabs. they are generally very light-skinned, and have a similar ethnic background (iranian-turkish) to the great part of the russian federation.
saltyninja
Iran may have nothing to do with ISIS but your social and religious laws are still medieval. It's crazy. Here from Wikipedia: "Bad hijab" - exposure of any part of the body other than hands and face - is subject to punishment of up to 70 lashes or 60 days imprisonment. [11][12] In April 2007, the Tehran police, (which is under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's supervision), began the most fierce crackdown on what is known as "bad hijab" in more than a decade. In the capital Tehran thousands of Iranian women were cautioned over their poor Islamic dress and several hundred arrested.[13]"
QueenSabaa
Maybe years ago but NOW there are no lash punishments if your hair is showing, you clearly don't know about Iran. I am a proud Muslim woman. Religion is a choice as mentioned in the Quran and so I don't agree with any "religious" government law but then again it is not like women get killed/lashed for showing hair...
deathtokoalas
i do believe that the laws in iran are rather harsh, if somewhat laxly enforced.
Can Yildirim
I live in middle east and you girl, are lying. it has gotten milder in capitals but harsher in general.
They cant cuz she propably isnt living in iran. and dont believe these lyin comments situation is still somewhat the same. These women has stockholm. Their parents and social environment did that to them..
deathtokoalas
throughout most of the area, the state is generally more violent than the people. so, you have these two things working against each other.
it's like marijuana in the west. there are laws against it, but they generally aren't enforced, and pretty much everybody thinks the laws should be abolished. but, if the state doesn't like your politics or your skin colour or something else then it will enforce the laws as a way to "get you" for that something else. they even use similar language in the united states, where the federal laws have become stricter under obama even as the prohibition is being locally abolished. i'm a canadian on the border. as i was getting my visa information together last year, i learned that marijuana use (even medical use) was in a list of "immoral behaviour" that could lead to being permanently banned from the country for life. that's the language. "immoral". and, there are border guards, with guns, upholding this "morality". but, how many americans would look at the situation and react with anything but embarrassment? so, how can it really be enforced?
so, yes - the laws are terrible. but they don't really reflect the culture (except on the arabian peninsula) and are consequently not really enforced unless the aim is to punish something else.
regarding women's headdresses, i believe it's largely a generational concern that has no future but abolition. there was an absurd, conservative reaction against a type of forced liberalization. once that reaction dies off, the country should re-open from the ground up. the lesson is that you can't force people to "modernize", you have to let them make their own choices.
Pirouz Kas +QueenSabaa Hi, I am Atheist. It is hypocrisy, that you built up an Islamic Republic by massacring apostates. I feel so sorry for the HUMANS, who have suffered or fled from their home country.
Can you Islamic Republic supporters tell me, why it is worth it??
deathtokoalas
i'm not a supporter of the islamic revolution, or much into foucault, but i need to caution against wiki as a source for politicized information of this nature. it's open nature and quasi-authoritarian tone makes it an ideal tool for state propaganda.
Pirouz Kas
You do not need sources for that. If you live in the west, just go and search for any Iranian. 99% high educated, 90% not religious.
deathtokoalas
all states have unjust laws, and the culture in iran is of course very different, religious or not. a lot of the issue is consequently dependent on the actual brutality of the state. and there's propaganda coming from every direction.
i don't wish to discourage the discussion. i'd just caution against sourcing from wikipedia on politicized issues.
i've never been much of a beck fan. i mean, it's hard to be a fan of high quality pop music and be unaware of his existence, but he's always struck me as more than a little bit boring. you have to respect the production work. but, when you strip it back, there's never really been very compelling songs under the gloss. he's never had anything worthwhile to say in his vocals, either, so you can't retreat to the poet defense like you can with dylan or whomever else. so, i'm not approaching listening to a beck disc with any kind of attachment. if anything, i would have relatively low expectations based on his previous output being very, very overrated.
to be blunt, i'm astounded by this. i'd have never guessed it was beck. where's the snazzy drum beats that i can write off as hipster goofiness? the ironic cool that i can look down on as trying too hard to appear to not be trying? this is just generic, boring white revivalism through the tiring veneer of the pretend 60s, as they've been sold back to us through the commercialist gloss of 90s revisionism. the grammies aren't exactly known for being current, but this is dramatically out of date. why not just drop the bullshit and give the grammy to the velvet fucking underground?
however, i think it's more than just another head scratching decision. it's reflective of something that's been happening in settler culture for several years, now. it's not white culture, exactly. i have white skin, but i can't relate to this. i'm of mixed background, but (excluding some aboriginal ancestry) have no ancestors on this continent before the year 1900 and none of them ever owned any property. they came over as labourers in the industrial period, not as colonizers. i'm an urbanite to the core, my ancestors have been urban as far as i can trace them, and i'm consequently only able to understand urban culture. so, i identify mostly with urban european art music and the north american forms that have developed out of it. while i feel no inherent connection to either of them, i understand jazz as an urban art form far better than i understand country music; as a rural form, it is entirely alien to me. so, it's an important distinction.
but, this choice is a cultural decision. it's the result of some kind of rural revival in the remnants of what could be called settler culture. it's the result of this increasing ethnogenesis of white, settler-derived america around 60s "liberalism", and the artforms that are seen as reflective of it. rock is dead, but this kind of folk carries on and will likely carry on for some time. in a cultural sense, this is american classical music - or on the cusp of becoming it.
the grammy was given to beck, but it was really given to bob dylan and lou reed and the music of the era, in general. beck is quite honestly being recognized for his whiteness, and his contributions in furthering what is perceived as a dying culture. the decision was made by people in the twilight of their lives, grasping to their own existence. it was meant to further the legacy of their generation and their culture, not to award a current album for it's excellence or importance.
kanye consequently has a valid point, even if the soundclips aren't able to articulate his position very strongly.
listen, i think it's a little unfair to assign all of this to racism. some of it, sure. most of it is actually entirely legit. i'm a hard leftist, and i was thinking a lot of the same things at the time about not really knowing who this guy was, who he was really working for or what we were going to get. his policy statements seemed to be entirely in contradiction with the media narrative. on the other hand, hillary was a known commodity, with decades of identifiable policy goals.
now, as a hard leftist, i wouldn't have considered voting republican. and, the truth is i probably wouldn't have been able to convince myself to actually vote for hillary, either, despite cheering her on as the lesser evil from the sidelines up here in canada. but, i certainly wouldn't have voted for obama, as i realized from the get-go that he was very right-wing. and hindsight has demonstrated that these concerns were legitimate. hillary supported single-payer healthcare, for example. i think she would have taken a far more progressive approach on a number of things, and may have even had a less aggressive foreign policy (although i know a lot of this is coming from the military, and the commander-in-chief is largely a figurehead nowadays). judging by bill's obstructionism on a few things, i don't think she's as "captured", either.
it's not quite an adlai stevenson circumstance, but i think it's rather apparent that the wrong choice was made. and, i think history will largely uphold that. obama was an unknown, and the result has been a conservative in disguise that's been a real disaster for progressive voters.
it's a legitimate question for historians to analyze, and one they'll be analyzing for a long time: how did americans make such a clearly wrong decision? and, by any objective basis, it's a wrong decision. there's a lot of excuses. hillary won the popular vote. obama was the establishment, wall street candidate. etc. but it's still a serious question that needs to be grappled with, and no doubt will be for a very long time...
Thursday, February 19, 2015
again: elizabeth warren's solution to the crisis of capitalism is market theory. and this is somehow understood as left-wing? she's the textbook definition of a moderate republican. there's a really big problem when a right-leaning liberal republican like her is universally presented as "left". i mean, if this is as far as the spectrum goes then there's no answer to any of the problems in front of us...
the government tends to talk to her like she's an idiot. and, to a large
extent, that's the right approach. it's a type of very hollow populism
that seems geared for political mileage, but doesn't have any real
answers connected to it. and, everybody in the room seems to realize it
except the reporters.
lew is right. the size of the institution is not very important. that's
what we learned in the 30s. you can split a cartel up, but you can't
stop it from oligopolizing. much more radical solutions are required.
Gazzasore
No bail out should happen If a Bank fails close it. Jail the people that cause the problem Look what Iceland did
deathtokoalas
did you know that, if you did that, then everybody that has their money in the bank would lose everything?
the bailouts were initially a type of social safety net. by setting up a lender of last resort, people can be sure that their money is safe when they put it in the bank. if you take that away, the entire nature of the economy shifts to one where bank runs start happening regularly, and the whole system becomes inherently unstable.
i mean, personally? if i didn't know that my money is safe in the bank through the lender of last resort, i would keep it under my mattress.
we don't need more social darwinism. we need laws that prevent the banks from gambling private savings.
se7ensnakes
Its not american taxpayers that get stuck with the bill, that is a misnomer. The real people that get stuck with the bail out is anyone that uses money, because now you have inflation
deathtokoalas
this is correct. in fact, what we call "bailouts" are actually low interest loans and, in the end, taxpayers (in the vector of the state) actually make a profit from it.
the most current data suggests that the federal government has profited roughly 50 billion dollars (53.1 billion) on interest paid back on the loans, and there remains outstanding debt to collect. i have no idea where that money goes, but it's probably nowhere good.
the shitstorm is all media bullshit and opportunistic politics.
i'd much rather be hated and despised than loved or admired. love is mostly an illusion, driven by the false projection of idealized fantasies on to reality. love is solipsism. but hate is a real reaction, a legitimate interaction in objective existence.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
psyssi
Adolf Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, Charles XII, and Napoleon were all men who thought they could conquer Russia in the winter. Robert
Karl XII did not loose vs russia due to the winter. He lost because of an incompetent general, who led the last battle, and who surrendered with the bulk of the army intact, and thus because of the low morale of the army. Winter was never a matter of defeat for the swedish army vs russa.
deathtokoalas
it seems as though you need to add barack obama to that list.
deathtokoalas
i don't really want to get into this, but the great northern war is fundamentally different than the invasions pushed by napoleon, hitler and, now, it seems, obama. it's not a good idea to do direct comparisons.
The Basileus
Aha yes congrats to the mongols they are the true winners they conquered a land full of A: a whole load of nothing of other incompetent horse lords and a bunch of Russian principalities that were incompetent the only nations that were challenges for them was the Muslims and the Chinese and well the mongols are the master race right look at them today lets all face it people over glorify the mongols the European powers rocketed way above the mongols and the mongols will forever in history be known as a scourge and cancer had the mongols faced a united Russian empire under someone competent
deathtokoalas
the mongols were unable to conquer japan, despite several tries over several centuries.
Nickrr1992 +psyssi To be fair to Napoleon he did reach Moscow or what was left of it. Russia adopted a scorched earth tactic, so when the French army arrived there was no supplies or anyway to maintain the army also the Russian army was raiding supply escorts and coupled with the extreme cold the French army had a massive problem. Napoleon lost due to widespread disease, malnutrition and lack supplies to continue forward so was forced to retreat
deathtokoalas +Nickrr1992 i think the underlying context that everybody missed - and continues to miss - is that russia has never been a wealthy country. a look at the map can be misleading. when the rich parisians and berliners made it to the heart of the transcontinental empire, they seem to have been unprepared to adjust to the frugality of existence that is necessary at the northernmost tip of civilization.
the romans never conquered arabia. it wasn't because they couldn't - it was that they felt the land was useless.
jessica murray
think it through, guys. would a group opposed to a pipeline due to the
threat of spills decide to blow one up, thereby spilling oil everywhere?
does that make any sense? i've been involved with these groups, and let
me tell you that "highly disorganized and mostly on welfare" is the
actual truth of it. unfortunately, people end up drawn to activism after
they've failed at something else, and there's consequently a
substantial problem with a lack of education. under that, there's a core
of utopian socialists and quasi-anarchists that keep it running through
creative use of limited resources. the highly organized and
well-financed movement (with foreign backers) is the petroleum industry.
MH
Sure, just like the FBI saying the same about Martin
Luther King and his fellow "communist" Civil Rights Workers, and the
RCMP planting evidence to claim Ludwig Weibo was planning to bomb
pipelines. These activists aren't "anti-Canada," they're anti-the oil
and gas companies who own Harper & the Tories and will stop at
nothing to increase their profits. It's Harper & his cronies who are
"anti-Canada"; they'll destroy the Canadian environment and sicken or
kill Canadians to make that profit.
jessica murray
if these groups had any money or structure, they'd
use it to lobby parliament, like every other well-funded group
(including the petroleum industry) does in our money-buys-influence
"democracy". street protests are always the behaviour of the
disenfranchised.
jessica murray
keith, the kind of foundations you're talking about do exist,
but the purpose is largely to fund business opportunities in renewable
energy and whatnot. activists on the ground consider these groups to be
working against their interests in actually ending the fossil fuel
economy. the anti-pipeline groups i was involved with (who advocated
forms of civil disobedience like what was seen in new brunswick last
year) were actively campaigning against both the green party and the
ndp. that's part of the reason they're being targeted. so, the error is
in connecting these groups to the protest groups. these are two very
different things, with very different goals, and you can't conflate
them.
one of the dominant aims of the american military
establishment right now is in blocking petroleum exports to china. the
article that keith posted has a little bit about that. that's not
environmentalism, it's trade obstructionism. you can see some of this in
the ndp's line on the pipelines, as well. it's willing to support
pipelines that are connected to local refineries, and opposed to
pipelines that export oil to us refineries. that's not an
environmentalist position, it's a position meant to create union jobs.
the grassroots organizations pushing the visible protests mostly
understand all of this stuff, although they may get tricked sometimes.
the longer you think that police exist to protect the citizenry, the longer they will oppress you. that's the lie that allows the oppression to function.
the police exist to uphold class relations, and particularly to protect private property. their function is to protect the rich from the poor.
mass consciousness of this point is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to dismantling the police state.
the sad truth is that this was the second highest selling single in the us in the 60s. the only thing that outsold it was i want to hold your hand. and while it's depressing that that tune is the biggest beatles hit, it's even more distressing that this outsold all the anti-war music. by leaps and bounds.
the 60s, as they have been sold to younger listeners, are mostly a lie.
the beatles were very popular. but you need to go way, way down the list
to get to dylan or mitchell or anything else with any kind of social
conscience. the reality is that it was a fringe counter-culture.
but, you've probably never heard of this before, have you? the
counter-culture was fringe then, but it became dominant because the
fringe had the balls (with all due respect to the women involved) to
stand up against the market and wave it's freak flag high. now, the 60s
mainstream is lost in obscurity. you wouldn't recognize more than half
of the most popular songs of the era, but you'd recognize all kinds of
stuff that didn't sell at all.
people complain that the market doesn't respond to a counter-culture
anymore. but it never did. building a counter-culture is not a
profitable business venture. if it sees a financial reward at all, it's
not going to happen for years or decades. it's about changing attitudes.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
see, this is legitimately ridiculous. these people have no idea what this guy's views on the illegal occupation and ongoing genocide of palestine are. he could be the world's biggest noam chomsky fan; he could have helped fund some of those flotillas. what you're seeing here is flat out stupidity.
i got the impression that the doctor i saw today was finally taking me seriously. if i'm making progress, i'd rather play the process out than freak out. it's just that i'm running out of time.
i've set a mental deadline for the first. i have an appointment on the 3rd. if i get the papers in time, great. if not, the third is the proper opportunity....
Monday, February 16, 2015
i'm essentially certain at this point that i will be overdosing on aspirin at the windsor city health centre on the afternoon of february 17th. i do not expect the doctor i am going to see to take me seriously, and, as such, i expect this to be a necessary step. in order to pre-empt any malpractice by the staff there, and ensure they are held liable for criminal negligence should it occur, i would like to clarify a few facts about what is going to happen before it happens.
1) i will not be armed with any sort of weapon, and do not plan on harming anybody except for myself. should reports surface that i was armed, these reports should be understood as false.
2) i will not consume any aspirin before i enter the center.
3) i will inform medical professionals that i am about to consume the aspirin before i consume it.
2&3 together will provide ample time for an ambulance to arrive. should the ambulance not arrive, or should it arrive too late, the only conclusion will be criminal negligence, and i will expect that the relevant staff be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
4) my goals tomorrow are not to kill myself, but merely to draw attention to the high level of incompetency in the psychiatrists that i'm dealing with. i've spoken to several, and they all believe i am bluffing when i claim i am suicidal. but, i am not bluffing. the fact that i am not bluffing is the key point i need to get across. if there are professional consequences for gross incompetence in misdiagnosis, i believe they are appropriately enforced, in context. but the important point is that i'm able to get to a doctor that understands that i am not bluffing.
abstractly, i am reversing the work or die ultimatum that the market places on all of us and directing it at the doctors. they have the choice to diagnose or be held liable for the consequences. and, i'm a smart, and creative person - i can ensure that there are dramatic consequences.
the severity of these stunts will increase until the papers are filled out. i will broadcast certain aspects of the stunt before they occur, but not so much as would prevent them.
the one thing i want to make clear is that i have no intention of harming anybody else directly, through physical means.
however, the threat to myself will increase with each stunt as the necessity of diagnosis becomes increasingly clear and the liability for the doctors becomes increasingly dramatic.
i want to be clear that the only acceptable outcomes from my perspective are getting the papers signed or committing suicide; there is no third option.
so, this is all entirely preventable, if the right choice is made to fill out the papers.
the title is indeed some kind of weird civil war era troll baiting.
"yankees try confederate food"
who the fuck talks like that...
i can't believe he's still doing this skit...
triumph may very well be the most successful sock puppet comedian in american history.
i think you need to be careful with this animal.
he was obviously expecting you to throw him meat, and turned his back on you when you didn't. intentional or not, that's teasing it, and teasing a tiger isn't a good idea. it demonstrated it's displeasure.
the big area may seem like a good idea, but you kind of can't have it both ways with a "pet" tiger. you either need to leave it in your house and treat it like a dog, or you need to leave it in an enclosure and treat it like a wild animal. the reason is that the tiger is spending it's "alone time" being a tiger, rather than being a dog or a pet, which enforces various instinctual tiger habits. like eating humans, for example, which happen to be a part of a tiger's natural diet. there's an evolutionary relationship, there; a predator-prey relationship. don't forget that. but it's not really a consequence of a tiger being "wild" - the same thing happens when you leave a dog outside all of the time.
it's easy to think "a tiger should have a big area". and maybe that's true. but, a tiger in a big area stops being a pet and starts being a tiger. what's important is that that shift in mindset is not just understood abstractly but enforced concretely.
it seems like you want to put a lot of effort into this thing. and it's easy to anthropomorphize. but i see a lot of warning signs in this video, and need to request extreme caution.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
as i grew older, i'm consistently amazed at how far-reaching the satire on the simpsons truly was.
that's dr. hibbert, right there. clear as day.
it's easy to ridicule them as backwards savages or whatever, but they've
got somewhat of a point. they've been eating this stuff for centuries,
but it just appears now? see, there's an answer to that or there isn't; i
know records in the region are likely to be scant, but there must be a
way to demonstrate that transmitting disease from "bush meat" is not
new.
further, there's a history of industry acting like that.
example: when the auto industry shut down public transit in detroit and
toronto so that people would have to buy cars. and oil. you'd have to
expect industry to try and demonize the black market any way it can.
waving your hands at it doesn't negate the fundamental truth.
worse,
we bloody well know that whites have done some pretty terrible things
regarding vaccines and viruses, much of it aimed at blacks. every once
in a while, you continue to hear stories about how involuntary
sterilization still happens throughout the united states and also in
western canada. that's just a surface observation on a global eugenics
system that can get - and has gotten - downright gruesome.
so,
it's one thing to point out that they're jumping to conclusions - and
it's completely correct to point it out. but, you can't write their
suspicions off. every single thing i heard in this video is an entirely
plausible hypothesis. and, in the end, we may very well learn that
there's a level of truth in some of it.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
tigers can't pass the mirror test, which means that if you raise a young tiger with dogs then it will grow up thinking that it's a dog. worse, the dogs can't pass the mirror test either, so they think the tiger is just another dog. what you're seeing is hierarchical pack behaviour; none of the animals understand the danger they're in. which means there isn't really a danger.
it's interesting to note the practice of treeing cougars, who are thought to be the cheetah's closest relative. the logic in the video seems reasonable, and it would likely hold if you're talking about a wild cheetah vs. your cute golden retriever. but, you don't have to get as big and violent as a pit bull to instill a legitimate level of fear in most species of wild cats.
i think that variation is consequently the important factor. if 100 controlled experiments were carried out, i'd guess the cheetah would win something like 70 of them. but, i think there are some pit bulls that could pull it off.
Friday, February 13, 2015
i would expect that this dog will eventually maul it's owner for the purposes of eating it. that's like owning a pet tiger, basically.
it's horrific police state violence and everything, but you have to admit the guy deserves a darwin award.
we don't understand the causes and consequently can't make predictions; you can't take this seriously. however, the exceedingly weak maximum we're falling from right now does suggest that we can expect another five or six years of cold weather in the northern hemisphere. that's a long way from predicting an ice age. but it's absolutely an annoyance that the mainstream models need to come to terms with, and this is consequently worth listening to - even with that caveat. it's not as simple as to say more sun = more hot (otherwise mercury would be hotter than venus, right...), even though it comes off that way if you're standing in eastern north america, but the reality is that the strength of the sun seems to have a historical effect on the path the jetstream takes over the great lakes, and that that is and will continue to be a far more dominant weather occurrence than any kind of radiative process.......
if the sun rebounds in the next cycle, the result could be massive and almost sudden warning in a way that could be flat out catastrophic. and, while it didn't happen, i was hoping that the little bump at the maximum was going to be enough to save us from the worst of it for at least this winter.
but, for now, it seems like the medium term forecast in eastern north america is going to be very cold for the next several years. as the rest of the world warms...
as others have pointed out,
the elamites had nothing to do with the kurds. there's almost two
thousand years of history separating the decline of the elamites (and
rise of the persians) and the first mention of the kurds in the arab
invasions.
the kurds were probably merely displaced persians, fleeing the arab invasion. they have no history before that point in time.
the
elamites would have been the westward extent of the indus valley
civilization, rather than a euphrates-tigris one. the elamites are also
your "black persians", but they would have been of indian rather than
african background.
Murşil Manavis
İranians are Elamite origin.Kurds are Assyrian origin.Stop lying!
Murşil Manavis +Pedram
Mir What is real?Actually situation more complicated.Answers to your
questions is perhaps in this!
bznn +Murşil Manavis kurds are not assyrian in origin. you stop lying .
deathtokoals +Murşil
Manavis kurds are definitely not assyrians. there's actually a very sad
history here, in kurdish responsibility for the assyrian genocide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_genocide
the kurds are not an ancient people. the name translates to something
like "wanderers" and only first appears in the arab invasions. they were
probably persian refugees from that period, who were kicked out of iraq
by colonizing arabs.
bznn +deathtokoalas
kurds dosen't have a history. historian are trying to find but. I will
gurantee you its useless. you cannot trace back their ancestors. they
might of been here before anyone. point is you wil never. and I say
NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER find their linage. PERIOD. Stop looking !!
"they were probably persian refugees from that period, who were kicked out of iraq by colonizing arabs."
"Proabably" is not enough. I tell you this as facts...you have better chance finding aliens, than find where they come from.
they have no relation dna to elam, medes or persian empire. Murşil Manavis
Please read carefully my link!
bznn +Murşil
Manavis you have no real proof like many historians. just thoeries. I
have better argument. I'm gonna say kurds are gentically enginered by
aliens. you can prove me wrong? NO. becuase you don't know where kurds
come from. its just thoeries you have found. someone who has no history
and have no forfathers meaning no direct dna. meaning my argument will
stand for 1000 years or more. becasue you will never find their linage
lol.
they are untraceable like the perfect murder !
Murşil Manavis +bznn dude this is science.
deathtokoalas
well,
it's more than probably. it's extremely likely. arabs move in, kick the
persian-speaking people out, leaving them as "tent dwellers" to their
north.
what is absolutely clear is that they are a
product of the islamic invasion of sassanid persia. there isn't really
another way to make sense of that fact.
the dna has to
be interpreted very carefully, given that their ethnogenesis appears to
be around the year 800 CE. with a date that late, in that area of the
world, it's more or less useless in coming to much of any kind of
conclusion other than that they're from that area of the world. there
are exceptions like jews and assyrians, based on religion, but kurds
don't fit the exclusionary exception. so, it's not going to help much.
i
mean, what your link says is that there exists a genetic substratum
under the iranian invasion. that doesn't say anything of origins. it
just points out that when the iranians got there, they had sex with the
people who already lived there.
bznn +deathtokoalas
they have no relation to persians from culture to language. medes,
elam and the perisan empire is as far as it goes for iranic and
perisans.
deathtokoalas +bznn well, they rather clearly do. and the elamites were not persians..
bznn
the oldest cave in the kurdish area is 60000 BC.
deathtokoalas +Murşil
Manavis i don't know what "true aryan" means, but i stopped reading
that article when i noticed it cited the charlatan colin renfrew.
well, ok, i read it...
i'd
be hesitant to connect the movement of dravidian into india via
farming. i'm sure there were population movements with the spread of
farming, and that looks like the right direction. but that seems too
late for dravidian. renfrew's influence here has not been positive.
when
you said "true aryan", and i saw renfrew, i was expecting the usual
noah's ark nonsense, but, thankfully, this article actually reads sforza
correctly and upholds gimbutas on the matter, creating the proper
invasion route around the caspian.
so, i don't know
what you're talking about, what "true aryan" means or why you cited the
article in support of that. the article upholds the standard kurgan
dispersal theory, while being a little less informed about the age of
dravidian.
bznn +deathtokoalas
it means pure race. by that meaning langauge and culture. not not skinn
color. by that defination, they had to be green or purple. cuz
black,yellow, brown and white is taken lol.
deathtokoalas +bznn
i think most experts would agree that the closest thing to a pure
"indo-european" culture were the balts, pre-christianization. latvians,
lithuanians.
the article says nothing about anything of
the sort. it just speaks of the well understood indo-iranian invasions
from the caspian, presents genetic evidence of a movement of people from
iran to india during the neolithic and entirely speciously connects
that to a movement of dravidian languages.
bznn +deathtokoalas the cloest they have got to their origin is the zagros mountain. this is the earliest foundings of kurds.
deathtokoalas +bznn
that is correct. but it's a little silly to notice that the kurds
showed up exactly when the arabs invaded, note the large population
displacements that occurred and then not draw conclusions.
bznn
just their luck ? :P
Elam and assyrians and came first . to interrupt their way of living.
invasions
by the armies of every nation that ever acquired fame and name in the
Eastern world’s history-Assyrian, Parthian, Greek, Roman, Persian, the
Arabs under Muhammad, and the Mongols- the fine stability of the race
stand out, for among all the people of these lands they, the Kurds,
alone have withstood every army, and retained pure their language and
blood, and claim with a pride of race to which none can grudge
admiration, that they are the pure Aryan, the “holders of the hills and
possessors of the tongue.”
they have been the first (indigious) in zagros and antollia. both were parts of mesopotamia.
deathtokoalas
the
indigenous peoples of these regions are not iranian. the iranians are
invaders from the north. in very ancient times, this area would have
been a conflict zone between insular caucasus mountain peoples to the
north and more warlike semites to the south.
bznn +deathtokoalas Again kurds are not Iranian. Get that through your head lol!
Later,
the out-of-Medes theory of the Kurds was made popular worldwide by the
Russian Orientalist Vladimir Fedorovich Minorsky (1877-1966).
Kurds
are traditionally regarded as Iranians and of Iranian origin, and
therefore as Indo-Europeans, mainly, because they speak Iranian. This
hypothesis is largely based on linguistic considerations and was
predominantly developed by linguists. In contrast to such believes,
newest DNA-research of advanced Human Anthropology indicates, that in
earliest traceable origins, forefathers of Kurds were obviously
descendants of indigenous (first) Neolithic Northern Fertile Crescent
aborigines, geographically mainly from outside and northwest of what is
Iran of today in Near East and Eurasia. Oldest ancestral forefathers of
Kurds were millennia later linguistically Iranianized in several waves
by militarily organized elites of (R1a1) immigrants from Central Asia.
These new findings lead to the understanding, that neither were
aborigine Northern Fertile Crescent Eurasian Kurds and ancient
Old-Iranian speaker (R1a1) immigrants from Asia one and the same people,
nor represent the later, R1a1 dominated migrating early
Old-Iranian-speaker elites from Asia, oldest traceable ancestors of
Kurds. Rather, constitute both historically completely different
populations and layers of Kurdish forefathers, each with own distinct
genetic, ethnical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. These new
insights indicate first inter-disciplinary findings in co-op- eration
with two international leading experts in their disciplines, Iranologist
Gernot L. Windfuhr, Ann Arbor, and DNA Genealogist Anatole A. Klyosov,
Boston, USA.
deathtokoalas +bznn and, as i've pointed out, the article is incoherent in terms of defining ethnicity.
the
kurds speak an iranian language, follow iranian customs and identify as
an iranian people. the iranian government views them as displaced
persians. the genetic evidence indicates that there's been some mixing,
but it doesn't say anything else. it's not correct to suggest that the
people that lived in the zagros mountains before the islamic invasion
were kurds, whether one can construct some kind of genetic continuity or
not.
stated a second time: what that article states is
that invading iranians had sex with the indigenous people of the region
(semites) and the result is what we today call kurds.
but,
putting aside the fact that you're not understanding the article, the
genetic argument is simply weak in terms of defining culture.
genetically,
palestinians are not arabs, but jews. that is, they are the arabized
descendants of the indigenous jewish inhabitants of the region, who have
intermixed with arab colonizers. but, nobody is going to look at their
dna and say "you are not arabs".
one could also look at
spain and france. genetically, the people of the region are mostly
celts. but, they are the cultural descendants of romans. nobody is going
to argue that they are celts, not romans.
bznn +deathtokoalas Exactly, We have no prove what they were before. But they were Iraniazed. Thats why they are related now.
Here is the story that goes...
They
were from southside of Mesopotamia and got invaded by the assyrians
from north. They fleed to Zagros mountian. There they got invaded and
mixed up with the Medes. There the Medes invaded Assyria and conquered
them.
deathtokoalas +bznn i don't think there's any evidence of such a thing. we can tell stories all day, but it's not worthwhile.
nor
is there any evidence of a kurdish people through the lengthy
roman-persian wars. if they existed in antiquity, we would expect them
to exist in roman records. they simply don't.
the kurdish dialect is also relatively recent.
perhaps it's as simple as it appears: perhaps there were no kurds before the arabs created them through displacement.
bznn +deathtokoalas
have it ever occured to you that he kurds legacy got wiped out of
history? like ISIS are doing right now with babel and assyrians?
deathtokoalas +bznn this is not a grounded argument.
but,
i'm arguing that the kurds were probably the iranians (or iranized
mesopotamians) that occupied the area now called iraq before they were
driven out by arab settlers. that wasn't documented well; very little of
the consequences of the population movements that accompanied the
spread of islam were documented well, because the colonizers simply
didn't care. they didn't do body counts...
so, sort of. but i don't want to get stuck in the conspiracy theory view of history, here.
bznn +deathtokoalas
Most of the kurdish legacy wiped out this is no consipracy. Or you
could say the real iranians who lives in Iran today are not the real
persians. The ones who lived in Iran and Turkey are Imposters. The owner
of that land belonged to Kurds. Just like the real Europeans were black
not white like you. You are an imposter and cave dweller lol.
deathtokoalas +bznn
...or maybe the history doesn't exist because the kurds are not an
ancient people, but one arising from events in the historical period.
i think we've hit an impasse, here.
bznn +deathtokoalas And what do you define as ancient?
deathtokoalas +bznn do you recognize the foreign policy implications of the view that iran "belongs to the kurds"?
i'm
a canadian of mixed ancestry, part of it localized to the middle east
and almost none of it from western europe (my winter whiteness is
actually mostly finnish/uralic - north asian - and i get downright brown
in the summer.). i wouldn't know what a real european is or identify
with being one. but i do recognize that the inhabitants of much (not
all) of europe before the kurgan invasions where likely mostly of olive
complexion.
bznn +deathtokoalas
Europeans are liars and thives. They have way of stealing history. Did
you know bethoven was black. Thoven Bey was his real name. Socrates was
black also. The Jews in the freaking Bible was black. The Americans and
the Canadians are Europeans in origin. European also the reason why
Kurds have no land. Read about world war 1. All you can do is steal
history. Egyptian also black. Did you know you are subhuman? you are a
pale face devil, and you will pay for your ancestors did. the fact is
you have no history of your own. you are a cave bitch commimg from the
mount caucus. you are a Causcasian. A so called White. an imposter of
land. Your real home is back in the cave. Read your history. Canada was
never the land of your caucus ancestors. So technically you have no
right living there. you also didn't answer my question earlier . You
said Kurds are not ancient people. So I am asking you again. WHAT DO YOU
DEFINE AS ACIENT PEOPLE ?? And I don't even know if you are a girl.
And that person in the pic looks like a tranny lol !
deathtokoalas +bznn *plonk*
horse dreamer
No the Elamites are Ahwaz nothing to do with Kurds or iranies
deathtokoalas
it's not clear, really, exactly where they came from or exactly
what they looked like, but elam seems to have been some kind of meeting
point between the pre-semite inhabitants of mesopotamia (sumerians) and
the indigenous inhabitants of india (dravidians). it makes more sense
to me to think that they probable expanded from the harappans, rather
than the other way around, given the dates involved and the directions
of influence; the sumerians seem to have come down from the caucasus
mountains, whereas the elamites seem to have more in common with ancient
india. but, barring some remarkable discovery, this is unlikely to ever
really truly be settled..
horse dreamer
Maybe,
but the Ahwaz I spoke to said they are, they also speak like iraqies,
there accent, there just arabozied and yeah there Semitic, some of them
are still sabian mandians and speak the old language, same thing in Iraq
deathtokoalas
one of the very few things we can be certain about the elamites
is that they were neither semitic nor iranian, which is partly why
they're so hard to place in any kind of system. we have elamite scripts,
and they don't fit into any language group very well, but they seem to
have enough similarity to tamil that some fringe theories have
developed. the dravidian connection really seems almost inescapable,
through a crude process of elimination.
but, to me, the
stronger arguments have to do with the extensive trading networks that
existed between elam and india, indicating that they seem to have seen
themselves as culturally similar. we're talking about cultural trading -
pottery, for example. when you see that, it usually indicates a
cultural continuity. further, we're pretty sure that the elamites were
probably mostly dark skinned (as in indian dark skinned), whereas we
have enough evidence in the form of old statues to conclude that the
sumerians looked vaguely like russians. they were white.
the
agricultural theory i referenced above wants to argue that the spread
of farming brought the movement of peoples in an eastward direction, but
the ethnic and economic relationships i pointed out are not at all
consistent with this idea. if the movement of farming spread any kind of
language or ethnicity from west to east during the neolithic, that
movement had clearly been undone by the rise of urbanization. renfrew is
basically pushing a noah's ark story, and it simply doesn't add up with
the facts.
if your friends look like arabized
persians, they probably are. if they look more like balochis or
pakistanis or tamils, they may have a deeper genetic history in the
region.
horse dreamer
As
u said we don't know that much, maybe Iran should let us go and study
them in Ahwaz, they don't look Persians, they look like iraqies a lot ,
some blush call them selves Arabs lol
deathtokoalas
yeah. well, there was certainly a lot of arab immigration into
persia after about the year 700 ce. but, these people would be as far
removed (probably more removed...) from elam as english settlers in
north america are from the indigenous population. we're talking at least
a thousand years before present for the arab migration - and well over a
thousand years before that since the fall of elam. and, of course,
there's a very large iranian migration in between these things.
you're
really simply not going to find elamites or descendants of elamites in
today's world. the closest thing is probably the balochis, who today
speak an iranian language.
Azari Parsian
Todays persians in Iran are descendants of Elamites and Northern
Mesopotamians. Barely any of them have Iranian ancestry.
deathtokoalas
there are plenty of ethnic iranians left in iran, which is seen
mostly in their lighter coloured skin, which is very prevalent, but the
most recent population movement into the region was turkic and
mongolian. large parts of iran, today, historical and modern, are
primarily turkic.
we can't really define what an
elamite is, but they probably looked like modern baluchis and what is
left of them is probably there.
there were never a significant amount of "mesopotamians" in iran, and there is virtually no trace of them there, today.
to get your head around the turkicization of historical iran (which
includes most of central asia), you have to understand just how brutal
the mongolian invasions truly were.
entire cities were
razed to the ground. millions of people were slaughtered. there was mass
depopulation. this was followed by mass rapes by the thousands, which
repopulated the cities. it was a real ethnic replacement in just about
the most brutal terms imaginable.
over time, the turks
adopted the iranian language and customs. and, you'll see plenty of
iranian markers in the modern population.
but, a broad
genetic survey of iran identifies a very large percentage of the
population as genetic descendants of turks - regardless of the language
they speak.
Murşil Manavis +deathtokoalas this was done genetic studies. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707643523
Azari Parsian +Murşil Manavis I highly doubt the elamites were indian origin. You have evidence showing this? Murşil Manavis +Azari Parsian http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707641081
Azari Parsian +Murşil Manavis Interesting i found this too http://www.israel-a-history-of.com/elamites.html
deathtokoalas +Murşil
Manavis i still don't like the direction of dravidian suggested in both
these articles (i think it had to come from the east to the west much
later than the neolithic diffusion), but what i'm saying is consistent
with that study. mtdna is female. so, it traces the flow of genetic
information from mother to daughter, down many generations.
the turkicization of iran would be something that happened in the y-dna, on the male side.
the
historical records tell us that modern iran was repopulated by turkish
men raping iranian women. what you're seeing in this study is what you
would expect to see if that history was accurate, at least on the female
side.
Murşil Manavis
reasonable but no references.
Azari Parsian +Murşil Manavis although, i do agree the Dravidian languages originated in the zagros mountains.
deathtokoalas +Murşil
Manavis i find the historical sources more convincing, and will tend to
reject the dna studies when they don't conform to the history. it's
easy to measure dna, but it's much harder to make sense of it.
i
mean, i'm not suggesting that iran is entirely turkish (and turk,
itself, is hard to define in terms of y dna, as it's a mix itself -
you've got r, q and others in there, because central asia was a place
where nomads met and intermingled, rather than a place where lineages
settled and branched out. the best guess is probably that what we call
turks were mostly the result of white men intermingling with asian
women, creating white y dna attached to asian features). you're going to
find substantial indigenous iranian (r - but not discernible from the
turkish r) and arab (j) in there, too. and, it's all easy enough to
understand. but, i hope i've gotten across that the diversity in iran
really creates a hell of a problem in trying to disentangle it.
you
can really work this out well enough using phenotypes. historical
iranians and sumerians are pasty, european white. semitic people are
darker skinned. we don't know for sure what elamites looked like, but we
think they probably looked like indians. turkish people are light but
not white and have vaguely asian features - likely as a result of them
being a mix of white and asian peoples. because they tend to carry r, it
was probably mostly male white intermixing with female asian that
spawned turkic.
white iranians exist, but are a
minority. most have light but not quite white skin and vaguely eastern
features, indicating very strong turkish and arabic admixture. but you
can't truly separate one r from the other. the asian features increase
in numbers as one moves eastward and northwards from tehran and into
central asia - where r (iranian/turkic) remains dominant and j (arab)
begins to disappear.
Murşil Manavis +deathtokoalas
but most of Anatolian Turks are indigenous people of Anatolia.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166218X08003661 and
Iranians are hybrid.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0080673
Azari Parsian +Murşil Manavis also same with most persians of iran,
deathtokoalas +Murşil
Manavis i agree that a good guess is that most anatolian turks are
basically greeks and most iranians are hybrids, but what i'm saying is
that it's very hard to correlate the genetic markers well.
to summarize what i said in the last post is this:
-
there were plenty of arabs (j) in iran before the mongol invasions.
but, the majority white iranians would have no doubt been r.
-
when the turks invaded, they brought a bunch of stuff - c, q, n. but,
they were also primarily r, because they were themselves a mix of
iranians and mongolians.
so, there was an iranian r
before the mongols. then, the mongols brought an iranian r. the dna
cannot tell you who was there before the slaughter and who wasn't
because it's the same y-dna haplotype.
you'd have to
find some other marker, like a marker connected with "asian eyes". but,
we don't do these studies because we like studies related to direct
paternal (y-dna) or maternal (mtdna) descent, because we think this is
more useful.
until we do these other studies, we're
really better off relying on (1) the written history we have and (2) the
phenotypes we can observe that uphold that history.
btw, that study on iran is again on mtdna. you really need to find one for y-dna to see what i'm saying.
the achaemenids would have actually been much lighter-skinned than most of the current iranian population, even keeping in mind that the current iranian population is actually much lighter-skinned than is presented in popular media.
darius would have looked sort of russian.
i was a civ player when i was young, and they were usually pretty good at this. there's a fringe group of people that want to argue that the persians were from east africa, but it's a ridiculous argument [and that's coming from somebody that readily accepts arguments of a black egypt, or at least a black egypt up until about 1000 bce]. ridiculous with a capital r. on the same level as lizard people. zero chance of accuracy. there were likely some coloured people of roughly "indian" descent in the areas under persian rule, and the persians were in control of pockets of both india and africa so there would have been coloured people in the empire in a variety of contexts. but the persians' closest living relatives would be the slavic groups of eastern europe. and their ruling elite would have been white. not arab olive. not turkic tanned. pasty fucking white.
so, you have to wonder if it's some kind of joke. black aryans. right...
are there any rap songs about successful rappers investing some of their profits into their communities?
so, to get your head around canadian real estate, you have to understand that it's not a free market. canada did not go through the round of deregulation that the united states went through in the 80s and 90s. there's actually somewhat of a government regulatory monopoly at the top of things called the canada mortgage and housing corporation that can do things like eat debt.
so, you get people yelling "it's a bubble! it's going to burst!". well, sure - if you're using the rules of the american housing market, yeah. no other outcome is possible. but, it's not those set of rules that are in play.
the reality is that canada can let this bubble grow just about as big as it wants and let it sit there for just about as long as it wants it to sit there for.
there are some market pressures, related to an aging population trying to sell forty years of inflation to a generation that has seen forty years of decreases in real wages. that's going to force a correction, but it's not a consequence of bad lending.
so, there are some problems with the canadian real estate market. but, if you're going to react, it's necessary to make sure that your research is conducted by canadians that understand the canadian system rather than americans making assumptions that nothing changes when you cross the border.
to state what he's saying in one line, it's merely this:
housing
inflation has risen faster than real wages (which have actually
decreased). that's unsustainable, and must eventually correct itself.
wages aren't going up, so, prices must come down.
solidarity!
get used to this, there's more of it coming. you can't build an economy on subsistence wages, and then blame people for not being astronauts when they revolt.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
"Simon's there and he's putting the boot in, and not terribly hard, but he's going down and Simon can move on. Now Vivian's there. Vivian is there and waiting for a chance. Here he comes, oh a piledriver, a real piledriver"
i'm again astounded by how clueless these journalists are.
i think that people have to understand just how vulnerable an independent kurdistan would be, with or without us backing. it serves us interests to have this kind of wildcard it can throw around that doesn't have to abide by international law, or fit any kind of regional standards; the kurds have legitimate sovereignty issues, but they are essentially a western backed terrorist group, in the context of the politics of the region. an independent kurdistan would find itself in a war with both iran and turkey (as well as iraq and syria) and possibly actually manage to unite the four countries around the euphrates into a common goal of kurdish containment and dismantlement.
it consequently serves kurdish interests to be very cautious and careful about how it seeks autonomy, with a federal arrangement clearly being in it's best interests. likewise, washington cannot allow an independent kurdistan because it would create tremendous frictions amongst it's allies and unite them with it's enemies. nor do the saudis want a partition; it's clear they want the whole thing, and to stamp out the minorities they don't like in the process - not partition, but genocide. the only actor that would want a partition is russia, as it would catalyze the collapse of the existing alignment.
yet, these journalists continue to push the point. it's a non-starter. it's not happening.
i want to be clear that these are ideas to save on heating, not requests for maintenance. i've been here long enough to draw some conclusions.
the way i see it is that the basement is designed in such a way that it doesn't really matter what the source of the heating is, it's going to be high. about 70% of the basement is unheated, and the insulation is incomplete. so, there's going to be tremendous heat loss unless the unit is better insulated. i'm not talking about the windows, i'm just talking about the walls bordering the unheated areas. if it's -10 outside the walls, and there's cracks under the walls, that's just going to leak and leak and leak, whether you put a furnace in here or not.
so, insulating the walls (and the place where the walls hit the floors) would be the first thing i'd do if i wanted to cut heating costs down here.
second, i might want to look at putting stops on the doors, as well. for the back door, it's just constant leakage. again: if it's -10 outside the door, and there's a 2 inch crack under the door, changing the source of the heating isn't really going to be the factor that makes the big difference in costs. it's blocking the drafts. with the front door, there's nothing to separate the cold coming in through the entrance, so it's going to suck the heat out as well. it's not realistic to put an extra door in, but putting a seal on the front door would probably also be huge.
third, it might be worth your while to run a vent from the furnace into the currently unheated part of the basement. that would both reduce costs fighting the draft into here and reduce costs fighting the draft into upstairs, and any stacking moving the air up [which i'm sure must exist].
i've had to turn the heat up a little, as the air in the unfinished part of the basement has plummeted. if the insulation through the walls was better, i'd be able to keep it at a lower level...
the landlord
Thanks, I am concerned as you are....I will considered your suggestions and will act on these as soon as I can with timing and financial recourses. Right now I am not able to act on doors until spring. I want to put new doors. Just keep warm the best you can. I will talk to you when I come by.
jessica
as i'm sure you know, it's going to get freezing this week.
i've crammed some towels in the cracks around the doors. it's obviously not as good as a rubber seal (and that back door is especially, like, *not* meant to keep out drafts), but i think it's at least a good experiment to try to see if it really helps or not. logic suggests that if you can feel a draft through a 2 inch crack up two sides of the door then obstructing it any way at all should make at least some difference. that said, i don't think towels are exactly the best at trapping heat, either. but i'll let you know if it actually keeps the heat in a little better; if it makes no difference, that indicates it's really dominantly a wall issue.
basically, i think this place was constructed with the assumption that the basement would be heated. just consider the walk back to the fuse box. that's a perfect sink for cold air, right. the only way it makes any sense to put a half-insulated wall right there with a bedroom on the other side is if it's taken for granted that the heat is on in the whole complex. otherwise, it's just a structural nightmare: the unit is heating a cold air sink.
so, let's hope the towels make a noticeable difference and the doors can consequently provide a noticeable decrease in cost.
(pause)
hi.
i don't want to bug you about this too much, i just want to update on the effects after blocking the doors and turning the heat up a little.
it seems to hold the heat in pretty well just about everywhere except the second bedroom, so i think putting weather stripping around those doors is a very good idea.
the second room has ceramic baseboards, and the first room has wood baseboards. the walls are about the same temperature in both rooms, so i think the walls are probably ok but that the baseboards in the second room are leaking. now, i don't want to jump to conclusions about conductivity because i think the situation is complicated by various factors, i just want to point out three observations:
1) the wood baseboards are closer to the ground and forming a better seal. so, it seems like they're doing what they're supposed to, while the ceramic ones are not.
2) the ceramic baseboards in that room are much, much colder than they are around the foundation. that is, the ceramic baseboards in the second bedroom are very cold whereas the ceramic baseboards in the kitchen are not so cold. so, there's exposure, there.
3) if you look around the basement, you'll notice that most of the walls have these black, plastic stoppers around them that form a seal to the ground. that black plastic is missing on that wall. it's just paint.
i'd have to *guess* that the cold ceramic is a symptom rather than a cause, and that the causes of the draft are the missing plastic around the outside and the incomplete seal on the inside.
it's of course going to be a lot easier to run some plastic around the wall on the outside than to replace the baseboards, so i'm just pointing that out as a possible approach.
other than that, i think the weatherstripping on the doors is the key good idea, and that the walls themselves are actually not particularly drafty, excepting the cold air moving in under the walls on the far side.
i need a way to get access to the windsor city health center to confirm an appointment on feb 17th. i do not have access to a phone. can you confirm that i can get access through this address, or deny it?
the only other way i could contact the center is to walk, but it is a lengthy walk and it is very cold out.
cmha
You had an appointment Fe b 2nd but it was a snow day centre was closed. No future appointment was made with the nurse. You have an appointment With the doctor on the 17th of Feb.
jessica
thank you, that's what i needed confirmed. i didn't know if the centre was closed (although guessed it was) and didn't want you to think that being unable to make it on the 2nd cancelled the appointment on the 17th.
i don't have a phone number, but i have a voice mail box. i just don't carry the number around with me and never remember it. contacting me can either be done via this email address or via this voice box, which sends a text message to this email address.
Monday, February 9, 2015
as astounded as i am (as a canadian) by the failure of boston's city services to plow the roads, there's actually an opportunity to organize, here. if the city doesn't want to do what the city is getting paid by taxes to do, perhaps the citizens ought to organize their own councils to do so, and then refuse to pay taxes to a council that is clearly not using them properly...
parking places on roads are obviously not personal property, and can't be treated as such without violence erupting. the source of this violence is the idea, and there's no end but violence should the idea not be abandoned.
however, a council of citizens could do things like purchase a small snowblower and decide to take turns in plowing the roads.
i don't get it. doesn't the city of chicago have a tax-funded snow removal service? up in canada, where it snows a lot every year, this isn't an issue because the city has plows that shovel the streets. if somebody tried to "save their spot" with a chair, they'd probably get fined for littering and thoroughly laughed at by all. and this hustler would probably get hit by a minivan....
"There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."
i've really had enough of cherry and his totally left-wing remarks, too. he's just a front for those peta environmentalists. what a socialist.
....and, wow, is it bad. i mean, on the one hand, it's obviously aged terribly. but, it's not the problem. i don't have memories attached to it other than thinking it was boneheaded and noticing that the people that liked it were the kinds of douchey thugs that threatened to hurt me (and tried a few times) and repeated grades because they'd rather do drugs and flail aimlessly against an authority they couldn't define than do homework, so i can't say much about what it was like to be a 14 year-old dealing with puberty by projecting an exaggerated sense of douchey manliness or what it's like to look back and scratch your head about it. i can't talk about that. but the way it's aged really exposes it as remarkably simplistic and just....bad. i mean, it makes skrillex sound like a fucking musical genius in comparison. no wonder all the bullies loved it.
you're better off checking out tool, kids.
i specifically remember this one kid that used to try and throw me into the locker every day between classes. his tshirts included rage, slayer and megadeth - and his walkman (at volumes that people across the room could hear, while the teacher was lecturing) jumped back and forth pretty regularly between the "rap rock" and the "speed metal". i couldn't identify much of it. any of it, really. rumour had it that he was on his third try at grade ten.
so, he'd wait until i left the class, follow me around the hall, take a run at me and knock me into the locker. i was the kind of kid that had a knapsack full of textbooks and binders, so it kind of hurt.
i've long guessed that he probably had a crush on me....
now, i could take a hit or two, so long as it didn't become regular. but it did become regular. so, i waited around the corner for him to take a run at me, tripped him and pushed him head first down about 20 flights of stairs. result: broken arm. he got off easy, really.
now, here's the most remarkable part of the story: rather than explain what actually happened (and i was a punk kid myself, although i focused more on what could have been called 'direct action' - vandalizing mascots, that kind of thing), he told the principal he fell down the stairs. why? well, he came up to me in the quad a few days later and promised he'd leave me alone so long as i never told anybody that i pushed him down the stairs. apparently, the story of me - me, specifically, the skinny little faggy punk kid - managing to break his arm was too embarrassing for him to handle. his ego and ability to project himself as a dominant male was the most important thing.
so, that's what i remember about rage against the machine, going to high school in the 90s.
KGB Ill
rage againt the machine told those kids to bully you
deathtokoalas
of course, it's more that it was the other way around. but, i think the attitudes expressed were reinforcing.
Levi
As an avid Tool fan whom was also one of these generalized youth you seem to have some pent up hostility towards I can say your probably lucky they didn't listen to Tool during that period of their lives. They obviously didn't have the mental fortitude or cognitive grace to understand the messages in their music. Pairing that with Tool would be a deadly combination, considering the anger and sexual violence found throughout Opiate and Undertow.
We all grow up with a different kind of fire. Some of us get forged strong as steel while the rest get caught up in an ego they can't control and burn up into nothing. The thing that binds us together is the rage. We can feel it on the inside that something is wrong and we want to fight it, too correct it. We look inside and see it's us. We are the problem. In our short sighted youthful ignorance we disbelieved the nature of change and became the hate and authority we so passionately fought against. We lashed out at this and hurt people around us. But while we tore down others we were tearing down ourselves, silently screaming for a helping hand. All we ever wanted was to feel like we belonged. RATM showed a generation of youth to take these feelings and try to produce a positive change by giving us a target other than ourselves. We took the weapon of our rage and all together we let the angst rain down against an unjust, hypocritical system. In that glory we found our purpose, our oneness, ourselves.
I can't apologize for the things others have been done to you. But I will spend a lifetime paying penance for my own ignorance. People like you weren't the enemy. It was our own insidious insecurities. But connecting this music to the unbridled actions of teenagers is a bit short sighted. I can only guess to their motives, but I would have to say that probably more than one of those people that hurt you either had a crush on you, or maybe at least one was gay and stuck in the delicate ballet of self loathing and denial. This isn't a justification, merely an explanation. You don't have to forgive them. But it seems your harboring a feeling that is best let go, a feeling that restricts the way you view this music and tints ever so slightly the way you view the world.
deathtokoalas
i want to be clear that i'm not blaming the band, so much as i'm pointing out what i actually saw around me.
see, it's one thing to say what you're saying. but i think a moment's reflection - as adults - should make it clear that nobody is going to attract the kind of fan base they wanted to attract with the music rage was making. i think that refused experienced the same basic point of failure a few years later. i mean, in hindsight, it's not hard to extrapolate the kind of teenager that is going to be attracted to fuck you, i won't do what you tell me - which is a very different teenager than is going to be attracted to learn to swim. you don't get the smart kids with that kind of messaging. they're going to roll their eyes at it.
the tool fans were markedly different. they were a type of hippie, really.
i got into tool a little after aenima, undertow didn't really hook me, and enjoyed both aenima and lateralus but was never really a diehard fan. really, i just respected and enjoyed the songwriting and musicianship. a passive fan. the type of music i really related to and identified with was more along the lines of nine inch nails or the smashing pumpkins. but i had a friend that was a diehard tool fan and did connect to it on an identifying level; in fact, it was largely the basis of the friendship, as i was the only person around that he knew that was into tool, at least a little. the way he explained it to me was that tool was about abolishing aggression, which set it apart from stuff like rage or korn which was about releasing it. rage makes you want to break stuff. tool makes you want to break the cycle that makes you want to break stuff.
based on what i saw around me, i'd say he was on to something.
again: i don't want to finger rage as the cause of anything. but, i think they acted as a catalyst to a set of problems they didn't foresee, and that future political-minded rock bands ought to learn something from it.
Levi
I'm sorry if I indeed came off as shunning you for targeting the band, as this was not my intention. I just feel that your selling their message short due to your experiences with a small demographic of people. Saying RATM was a "lowbrow" instigator of nothing more than anti-authoritarian behavior is like saying Aenima is about the west coast and Hollywood, or Pushit is about an abusive relationship; it's a generalization that harms the inherent message these artists were trying to convey.
Where Tool succeeded and RATM failed was the ability to show growth beyond their original message. Tool started out exactly like RATM, railing against what they perceived as an unjust authority and an over compromising, slowly homogenizing world. But while Tool was tempered through their endeavors, showing personal growth as artists and moving from one experience to the next, RATM embraced the very passionate fire that eventually consumed them. I think its important to remember RATM was about personal strength, and the ability and responsibility to change what may seem like an impossibility. After all "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me..." isn't so different from "Think for yourself, question authority."
In the closing of this I would like to thank you for choosing to have an enlightened, civilized conversation in this bastion of childish name calling and music minded sycophant elitists. I hope you'll remember that you just had this with a RATM fan ;P
RR racer
I'm sorry you had to deal with pieces of shit like that when you were growing up. Those people are pathetic, especially since they would rather fail than succeed just because they have a warped idea of what it means to rage against the machine. It's all about EDUCATING oneself so as to NOT be taken advantage of by the powers that be, and of course... KNOW YOUR ENEMY! This music is especially powerful for those who understand the nuances of government corruption. Put those memories you have of douchebags from your past aside and give this music another chance. If you think that our government has gotten too big, too corrupt and too manipulative, then you will like it!
GANASHER
jesus never have i met someone who has talked down so hard on a band before XD
deathtokoalas
the point i'm trying to make is that this approach was unsuccessful, and people looking to raise awareness in the future should be aware of this and tweak their approach..
funny that embryonic isn't up in full...
i'm not exactly a flaming lips fan. i think the inconsistency of the discography is a pretty widely held view. even the records that are nearly universally acclaimed tend to hit me the wrong way; i'll acknowledge that most of the discs are well produced, even if the writing often veers into bad taste, but even the best of it just doesn't really push my "excite" buttons. embryonic, though, is a different story. i'd argue that it really towers above the rest of the discography, and even that it's one of the best records released so far this century.
i suppose that, musically, it's significantly darker than anything else they've done, which intersects with the often dire subject matter. it really hit me at exactly the right point, as i was coming to a set of conclusions regarding what i now refer to as "the futility of existence". i've more or less been an atheist since i was born, and have never really wavered in it. but it's a step in abstraction and maturity to actually come to terms with it, with the finiteness of existence and what the best way to approach it is.
unfortunately, the dominant philosophical approach to this over the last century or two has been to try and neutralize it. to make up stories in order to find ways to hold to a set of ideals that are more or less delusions. the left and right take different approaches, but they agree on this fundamental point: the masses cannot understand that existence is meaningless. they must be convinced otherwise, or society will collapse.
but, this is not sustainable. the truth cannot be unlearned. we need revolutionary politics that break through this line of abstraction and come out to a maturation point on the other side of it. the world we live in must fall; it's a question of understanding how to get beyond this. the longer we lie to ourselves in pretending that we can uphold the delusions, the more disastrous the fall will be in the end.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
it took something like three months from the launch of the beta of this thing for the future of virtual reality to be reduced to porn.
and it was the most predictable thing possible.
what bugs me about this is how oversimplified it is. i don't like the focus on "accountability", as though it's some kind of virtue. but, that's secondary. it's the oversimplification that's annoying. why? because now people are going to start spreading it around and misapplying it. this happens all the time.
i mean: yeah, sure. sometimes.
...but sometimes somebody else is at fault and deserves to be called out on it. denying that leads to backwards philosophical positions, like objectivism.
you can't take complicated things and condense them into universal statements over the course of three minutes in a youtube video. i really wish people would stop pretending they can and stop doing it...
i think lindsey nailed it. people expect the market relationship to hold, for free to mean worthless and expensive to mean valuable. it's psychological, and bluntly wrong, but it's massively enforced. and it's connected more to the presentation than it is to the content. it's not really new, either - people used to have the same reaction to independent music and independent film (which youtube is in some weird way filling the void on, despite being one of the biggest companies in the world). one of the things that kind of reversed that was for indie labels to pick up major label marketing techniques.
is the content on youtube shit? largely. but, most films are shit, too. and the music industry is just beyond salvation. i don't think the good parts of youtube are proportionately of a lower quality than the good parts of the film industry or the music industry. if anything, youtube is pretty much the sole major tool to get around the idiotification of the entertainment industry, nowadays.
it sounds stupid - and it is - but i think if youtubers were to integrate something goofy like the 20th century fox logo at the front of their videos, just something to make it "seem expensive", it would have a big effect. on the other hand, i'm not sure that's really a goal worth working towards...
i think a more important question moving forwards is how much longer youtube is going to be free and open like it is. how much longer are they going to continue to host trillions of gigabytes of data with no significant advertising stream? how much longer before it is hollywood?
i wanted some orchestral textures in the final mix, so i started playing around with some midi files and decided to do a full blown orchestral version. mix finalized on feb 7, 2015.
--
i just finished this orchestral piece. but it's going to be an even longer wait for the next video, because i've decided i must work this into a zappa/keneally style guitar concerto. i'll then take those guitar parts and put them into the final mix. but it pushes it back at least another week.
i think this is the only coherent tv interview that i've ever seen on this topic.
the context he's missing has to do with the sofa that maliki wouldn't
sign. america is now in the region on the invitation of the iraqi state.
that's what all this is angling for, and what the long term strategy
is: a permanent troop presence. they just need the iraqis to sign the
right papers; papers maliki refused to sign.
honestly? i'd have a hard time giving them immunity after some of the
reports coming out. i really think american soldiers ought to be
accountable under iraqi law.
but, when you're the empire you get to break the rules.
my legal name is jason parent, but i go by jessica parent or jessica murray. i refuse to pay extra for a phone on top of the internet; i consider this to be an unnecessary and frankly obsolete expense in the internet era.
i had an appointment today at 11:00 am with the nurse. i intended to make this appointment, but fell asleep around 8:00 am and have only just woken up now. my normal sleeping pattern is to fall asleep early in the morning; i was trying to pull an all-nighter to make the appointment at 11:00 and unfortunately failed to do so. so, i apologize for not informing you, but it wasn't intended.
now, i suspect that the nurse was unable to appear today due to the weather. that is, i suspect that my appointment was cancelled, anyways.
i have an appointment with a doctor on the 17th. i'd just like to reiterate that i have every intention to get to that appointment. further, if the nurse would like to reschedule the "check-up" that was scheduled for today, my schedule is truly wide open.
i'm not certain that this is going to reach the proper audience and would appreciate some acknowledgement that it has or can not.
jessica
nine of the ten most popular videos on youtube right now are advertisements, and the other one is the katy perry halftime show.
the corporatocracy/idiocracy is not science fiction. it is the existing reality.