listen, i don't doubt that masks, if worn sensibly by a substantive amount of the population, would reduce the spread of the disease. i would argue that, unless we want to commit to wearing masks all of the time, it's just a stop-gap measure. but, i don't doubt the abstract premise.

like it was with social distancing, though, the way we're doing the mask thing actually has the potential to make it worse.

i was handed masks by two different store attendants on friday, a gift i refused on both occasions. i'm asthmatic, you see. but, the way the masks were handed out seemed to me more likely to spread the disease than prevent it's spread, given that these attendants were in high traffic areas and the masks were just handed to me loosely, after the actual masks had been pawed all over by these employees. so, i'm in essence being asked to put this device on my face that's been grab-handed all over by somebody at a heightened risk. no thank you.

i'm seeing reports about handing out masks at drive thrus. well, the whole fucking point of the drive thru is that people are isolated in their cars; if you send a guy around with masks, you're just creating a transmission vector.

and, of course, people are going to, in truth, do things like reuse masks and put them in their pockets and stuff, which is just going to make things worse, as their masks act like a wet mop in pulling virus particles out of the air.

i don't really see the utility of mask-wearing at this time. transmission rates in this community seem to be low to non-existent, and i've been self-isolating for months. i would consider that to be a drastic step, and i'm not nearly concerned enough to take it.

but, is a push to use masks in this way likely to be effective? i worry that the pro-active approach mandated in the public health law may have the effect of increasing spread, even if the voluntary recommendation, itself, is reasonable for those that are responsible about it.

so, here are the not-so-final, but final for a long time, updates for august, 2014.

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/08/
2) https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/08/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/08/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/

that's done now, for a long time.

i hope that september is a little faster.

susan rice is getting close to screwing it up.

ugh.

who biden picks for vp is going to be substantive, because the ominous reality underlying a second trump presidency is that he, himself, is likely to succumb to some form of mental decline, if he hasn't already. so, it seems likely that a vice president is going to end up president within the next four years or so. all bets are off as soon as pence assumes power - he is not likely to carry through with any of the foreign policy shifts that have been defined by this administration, and that i'm not that critical of, except the ones in israel, which i am critical of. pence is going to line up unfavourably against just about any vp candidate.

that is another possible developing ballot question - which vp is preferable? is the democratic vp substantively preferable, enough to generate a vote over pence for? this is a lower bar, but it does still have to be demonstrated. it is possible that biden could screw that up, but i couldn't imagine how.

again: we'll see how my thinking develops on the topic.

but, even if i decide that i must vote green to stop biden from letting the neo-cons takeover, if the vp looks decisively not neo-con, then i may prioritize voting for the vp to stop pence as being a goal of greater value.

i may, in the end, decide that voting for the greens is the best passive way to try to keep the neo-cons out of the white house. i may decide that this is the most pressing concern at hand, out of all of the pressing concerns. it may be the ballot question for me.

i wish there was a better climate option, but i have to be realistic, and i have absolutely no faith in biden advancing any kind of serious climate legislation. that is going to have to come from congress.

as it is, that is one major upside to trump - he's not listening to the neo-cons.

there's going to be all kinds of other narratives, and i may explain why i don't find them compelling, as they present themselves. i'm going to be more interested in the nature of the commander in chief for the course of this election.

the united states may be at a critical juncture, in it's ability to project it's power. a trump presidency would likely continue to erode that ability, something that is not so terrible, whereas a biden presidency may feel the need to take drastic steps to reassert it, if it is helmed by neo-cons. i'm not convinced i want to see the latter happen, even if the alternative leads to a less policed and more unstable world.

these regions are fracturing around fracture points that were designed to fracture; the maps were all drawn to throw the people into disarray, so they couldn't organize against an empire that's long withdrawn, leaving it's system of control in place over a populace that is now hamstrung by it. so, in order to have stability in the long run, the maps need to be redrawn, and all over asia, to eliminate these designed fracture points. stepping back and letting the people redraw these borders as they see fit on their own is necessary, even if it gets messy. the best we can do is help try to talk them down, and figure out ways to share and shit.

so, yes - the empire is collapsing under trump. do you really want to watch biden try to bring it back? what's that going to require?

if that is the serious choice at hand, i'll gladly advocate voting green to keep the neo-cons out.

we'll see how things unfold.

so, the neo-con intelligentsia behind the bush presidency is endorsing joe biden over donald trump.

that's reassuring.

i will never advocate voting for donald trump. but, i may make a principled point about supporting the greens (have they got their shit worked out yet?) in the face of such a terrible choice. which is truly worse here?

on issues of militarism, trump may be terrible. but, biden seems to actually be even worse. so, do you vote for biden, hoping he'll be better for the climate? well, according to what evidence? i don't see any. his eventually no doubt heavily promoted, but in effect piddling, changes are unlikely to even slow it down, at this point. it's the difference between somebody that does nothing and is honest about it, and somebody that pays lip service to the dangers surrounding the upcoming changes, without doing anything substantive about it.

i want to hear somebody articulate plans for adaptation. we have to face the facts, here. and, industry will be more likely to respond to a request to build shit than to a demand to shut down - there's big contracts involved with adaptation measures, which are inevitable. it's time to get a handle on what needs to be done.

so, if there's no substantive difference on climate change, and biden is the more militaristic of the two, which is the lesser evil?

i know that there are domestic issues surrounding trump, but i need you to cautiously weigh the evidence around biden's past support for various things and do a stark comparison between where the two stand on a host of issues. you may find yourself severely disappointed by the amount of actual change you can expect from a biden presidency.

he's said it himself, to specific wall street audiences.

"if i'm elected president, nothing will change." - joe biden

that is a very close paraphrase; you'll excuse me for not looking it up, exactly.

so, you will tell me that if i advocate voting green then i'm just helping trump win. that may not land as hard with me as you're expecting; i may see the upside to it.

it's a terrible set of options, and i'm just trying to give it a fair analysis. i've still got time to come to a firm decision on my advocacy, this time around. but, expect passivity - expect me to go at this one from afar.

it's absolutely surreal how american political strategy is developing around this nexus of black identity politics.

while the death of george floyd was clearly unnecessary, and outrage about it is justified, it's not hard to see the hand of the democratic party machinery in the unfolding of the narrative around the events. the party has fully embraced a strategy that is heavily reliant on high levels of african-american turnout in key urban areas, to offset an increasingly wandering union vote. so, it wants the election to have a specifically black narrative, to maximize black voter turnout. it's clearly taken advantage of the opportunity to do this, and no doubt intends to ride support for that specifically black narrative to the high levels of turnout it wants to drive in the black community in november.

so, if you want to try to mute or overturn that momentum, you throw a wrench in it by introducing a third candidate to entice those black identity politics voters. in a crazy scenario, that third party candidate could even capture that building momentum, and go on to win a surprise upset.

is kanye west signing up for this type of stalking horse candidacy?

but, seriously.

is this kanye west thing a stalking horse campaign to bleed black support from biden? is that it?

you know that if he wins, they're going to have to run taylor swift against him.

this was supposed to be a joke, dammit.

*sigh*

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/kanye-west-twitter-us-president-trump-1.5638157

so, i got the first pass for august done and it's time to stop to eat and clean.

so, here are the last updates for the july, 2014 blogs for a long time.

july was just a lot of data, with over 150 posts at the music blog, 130 at the politics blog and nearly 90 at the media blog. it slows down, soon. for a bit.

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/07/
2) https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/07/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/07/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/

on to august...

tearing down mt. rushmore, huh?

i guess we've run out of bamiyan statues to destroy?

i'm never going to stand with anybody that wants to destroy any kind of art. it may be true that there are statues of people all over the world that upset or offend some people, sometimes for better reasons than others, and i'll accept any democratic decisions about removing or replacing those statues if it comes to that point, but i would generally advocate that they be moved to museums or private collections if it is decided that they are not fit for public monuments, or otherwise don't represent current social norms or values. if a community wants to remove a statue, that's entirely their prerogative. however, the historical and cultural significance of the work needs to be respected, in moving the statues elsewhere, rather than destroying them.

so, move the jefferson davis statue to a civil war museum, then. i agree that this is long overdue; i have no argument. just don't break it, like a bunch of puritanical hooligans smashing up some graven images, or something. in that sense, i guess i'm just being an old pagan, in reacting against a typical, if particularly vile, form of judaic zealotry; this is an old argument.

but, what do you do with mt rushmore if you find that the statues are too offensive to too many people, just right now? you can't move them to a museum. so, do you cover them with a tarp?

there's going to be lines, of course. if there was a similar monument on mt. asshole in dumbfuckistan with hitler, stalin, napoleon and genghis khan on it, or something, then some more serious thought would have to be put into removing the monument from public view. but, as it is, i will argue that you surely can't destroy them. this is a major work of art; it must be preserved. like, forever.

i'll state up front that teddy roosevelt does not belong there and should be replaced. full stop.

but, who are the other three presidents? while two of them supported slavery, one of them is responsible for legally abolishing it. however, jefferson's support for slavery is a nuanced and complicated topic of study that i'm not going to delve too far into right now. it's technically true, but slightly unfair, to suggest that jefferson was an advocate of slavery, and it's certainly not fair to trivialize his role in history as a symbol for white supremacy. while washington was far worse than jefferson, especially when he was younger, it is thought that his thinking on the topic evolved greatly as he aged - which is about all you can ask for from an 18th century colonial landlord running an economy that is reliant on forced labour.

so, if these are your symbols of white supremacism and colonial dominance, they are not particularly vile ones, with the exception of roosevelt (who really was a vicious monster, and in fact actually proud of it). now, what if it was teddy roosevelt, andrew jackson, james monroe and andrew johnson? well, those are more substantive symbols of white supremacism and vicious colonialism, none of whom really have any other substantive accomplishments to their names. again: i think some more serious discussion about what to do with the mountain might be more justified, in that case. but, that's not the case...

of washington? & jefferson? & lincoln? there couldn't have been a serious abolition movement without the revolution, of which the civil war was kind of part two of. it's been remarked that the revolutionary war was more of an actual civil war, and the civil war was more of an actual revolution. so, by comparison, and in context, these are, together, the presidents most responsible for ending slavery. following that thinking, perhaps roosevelt could be replaced by madison (although i'd argue they actually just got the wrong roosevelt).

it's not that i'm trying to warp around the history, so much as i'm trying to draw attention to the reality that these were actually the good ones, the ones who pushed back against the system and ultimately succeeded in eroding it. jefferson, especially, wrote widely on a great deal many topics, and was widely influential. reducing his life to an unfair caricature on his ownership of slaves is exactly that, unfair. it's a skewed concept of history, arrived at via tunnel vision.

so, i might ask people to rethink this a little; i wouldn't be very upset if they chiseled out the roosevelt statue, granted, but is targeting mt rushmore really an appropriate outlet of anger? there's lots of statues of actual confederates to make museum pieces out of. maybe you ought to leave mt rushmore alone.

the fact that the statues are on indigenous territory is another question entirely, but i would actually call on the lakota to recognize the historical value of the monument and maintain it for the sake of history. and, i'd suspect a majority would see the sense in that. they're not who i'm worried about.

it seems like too absurd a topic to take seriously, but it is actually recurrent. you hear about this every few years. might the zealots finally get their way, and smash the statues, for being false idols? you'll know that america has truly collapsed into backwardsness, if they ever do.

i would support a government jobs program for students in these times or any other, but a basic pre-requisite of any program of this sort really needs to be compensation at at least the provincial minimum wage.

the truth is that this was likely a hare-brained scheme, designed by a pmo trying to multitask in a foolish way, and that it reflects a lot on the prime minister's warped religious value system. the underlying premise is that young people should be obligated to serve their elders, an idea that is both primitive and outdated and should be left in the trashbin of history. young people are autonomous individuals that should be encouraged to look forwards in life, not be harangued to take care of their grandparents. they owe nothing to their ancestors. that's what these social systems exist for - to emancipate us from our families. but, it's also reflective of the kind of old tory, aristocratic value system that trudeau was raised into and no doubt had enforced on him going through these elite schools for kids. you actually see this kind of do-gooder nonsense really saturating government policy. it is true that liberals are supposed to believe in self-enlightened self-interest, and consequently act more altruistically than their opponents, but the way trudeau and his government breathes this is through a concept of noblesse oblige, and he seems to actually believe it - so long as the benefactors of the charity are considered sufficiently worthy. concepts of rights are being submerged into deprecated concepts coming from puritanical type thinking, where the poor are rewarded for their good behaviour. trudeau's operating principle seems to be that he has some kind of obligation to oversee this charity work, as a duty to his destiny and as a member of some kind of class vanguard.

it's weird stuff that most people will only ever be able to understand abstractly. but, this guy sees himself as some kind of enlightened despot. and, as hackneyed as this scheme may have been, it's perhaps a window into the kind of giant leap backwards into more entrenched conservative values that trudeau really imagines when he sits down at night.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/we-charity-student-grant-program-1.5636332

july took a long time to post because there were a lot of things to post.

let's hope i can get the finalization done, soon.

again: none of these are final updates, and they will all be expanded greatly when i get around to finishing these journals up, one day.

but, these blogs for june, 2014 will not be touched again for some time:

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/06/

2) https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/06/

3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/06/

4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/

posting has been heavy the last few months. iirc, that flips over soon.

june is updated...

so, that's it.

may, 2014 is done, too.

for a long time.

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/05/
2) http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/05/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/05/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/

the posting for may, 2014 is done.

let's hope i can finalize it tonight, too.

so, this is the end of april, 2014 for a long while, now.

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/04/
2) http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/04/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/04/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/

fell asleep this morning. april should be done shortly.

see, this kind of behaviour shouldn't make anybody want to cooperate too closely with beijing; it's very much a precautionary tale, this sort of random act of pointless retribution, as though this woman has anything to do with this. it's not an adult way for a major power to act; the interpretation, once again, is that china really has to grow up, and fast. the reality is that they are a developing major power; the reality is also that they act like petty tyrants, and frequently.

am i asking for a wise chinese emperor? no, i think what i'm asking for is the chinese to take control of their own society. this layer of vulgar marxists has done wonders for the economy, but there needs to be some kind of constitution that refrains the rulers from just doing whatever the fuck they want. the unfortunate likelihood is that china is going to remain impossible to deal with until that materializes, in some way, and it's not clear exactly what the best thing to do about it is.

so, is there a travel warning for canadians seeking to go to china?

https://nationalpost.com/news/canadian-citizen-sentenced-to-eight-years-by-china-is-latest-victim-of-huawei-feud-beijing-lawyer-says

april first pass done.

finalization coming soon.

yup.

march is now closed. for a long time....

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/03/
2) http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/03/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/03/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/

i got march input quickly. it'll update soon.

so, here we have it - 02/2014 done for the near future:

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/02/
2) http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/02/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/02/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/

don't expect me to touch that again for years.

so, i've got the posting for 02/2014 done and am about to finish a final read through the blogs. and that will be it, for a while.

this is a sudden shift and something i wanted to avoid, but i have to put this aside for a while.

so, that means that each of the four february blogs is in a state of stasis that could last years. i'll post when i'm finished, but almost. i haven't added extra photos, email communications, discussions with family or landlord or etc and a lot of the other stuff i was putting into the blogs when i was preparing them for journal downloads, and i'm not going to for a long time. but i do have all of the posts in my master document reposted, for that month, and that's all you're getting for the foreseeable future.

when i eventually pick back up at this, the rebuild portion should at least be minimal and that might speed me up (given the work already done).

so, that's what i'm doing, and it's going to pick up, soon.

so, now ford is launching a war against covid in migrant workers, to prove he's not ignoring the problem. "look", he's saying, "we've found a problem and we're addressing it.'. well, bravo.

but, the reality is that if you pulled out just about any random subdivision of people in most places south of sudbury, you'd be likely to find rates just as high. this is really the only place they've gone looking for it like this (besides the geriatric facilities).

so, will he launch mandatory testing in, say, subsidized housing in toronto? in off-campus student residences in windsor?

not unless there's a problem to dramatically stamp out. and, nobody wants that.

just keep it away from the old people and we'll probably be fine. that's what the focus should have been from the start. if we've learned anything, right? surely? let's not get our hopes up...

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/premier-pledges-full-out-onslaught-in-response-to-surge-in-local-covid-19-farm-cases

i have now thoroughly sorted through the 2014 archives of this blog to reuse segments for the deathtokoalas and travel blog, but as i was finishing it up i realized that it wouldn't be fair to just leave that sitting for who knows how long, maybe even forever. if i'm going to fill in the deathtokoalas blog, i need to include the comments on music videos, which i was saving until i did the formal write-up.

i'm not doing those formal write-ups. i do have several liner notes for january, 2014 to finish, but i'm stopping there. so, when i get through this posting blitz that will mostly affect the deathtokoalas blog, these will not be final journals for this period. they will not include personal life correspondences, or any of the nerdier stuff related to filekeeping, on my end. they will just be the sum totals of the blogs, as they were.

i hope that straight posting out of a file can be done fairly efficiently, but i expect google to accuse me of being a robot and force me to slow down a bit.

i'm starting soon with feb, 2014. let's hope i can get through this quickly.

these are the other five candidates, and what a lark. it's not clear whether that guy with the top hat intends to be taken seriously or not.

i know dimitri lascaris from his work with the real news, and have a rough understanding of where he's coming from as a result of it. he's a bit of a hard-ass, actually; he does not like corruption. i have to say that he performed well here, even if his opponents were weak.

the fact that there's ten candidates is reflective of the place where the green party is, right now. if they make the right choice here, they could give the ndp (who continue to be uninspiring) a serious run for third party in the next election.

there's only five in the first part of this discussion, which could hardly be called a debate of any sort, and which mostly featured softball questions. it's kind of a shame that they didn't talk much about anything substantive...

i am not familiar with any of the three women on the council. the two males are both former liberals, and i am familiar with both of them. david merner is the kind of liberal i'd prefer to tend to avoid, but glen murray is actually the kind of liberal that i wish there were more of.

on paper, glen murray ought to be the front-runner here, by a good margin. as useful or knowledgeable as the other people may be, none of them has run a major ministry before. when or if these debates get going, he could potentially outwonk these people rather terribly.

but, the greens are a protest party, and glen's experience may actually be seen as baggage by a lot of voters that want to vote against the establishment, whether that's fair to glen or not.

for right now, all i can say is that this discussion didn't help much and i hope that the next round is more enlightening.

regarding the question about when you end the lesser evilism...

the interviewer seemed kind of frustrated by paul's insistence on the binary nature of the choice, which he seemed to write off as defeatism, but is in truth a realistic assessment of the political system in the united states, at the presidential level. the interviewer's frustration is as a result of seeing the decision through the prism of his own voting choices in germany, which is a multiparty parliamentary system with proportional representation, where the parliament elects the head of state without a popular plebiscite. one can indeed vote for smaller parties in germany, because the system allows for it. however, the election for the presidency is nothing like the bundestag elections, at all.

nor is it imaginable how it could be. how do you elect a president by proportional representation? can the president be 13% green? it's a run-off vote. these are your candidates...

see, i'm not actually convinced that the premise that trump is worse than biden is actually true. i line them up and i can't tell the difference between them. i actually worry that biden's hawks may end up more efficient than trump's hawks; that is, the difference in hawkishness may ultimately boil down to the greater competence of the democrats, to potentially disastrous consequences. trump has actually been quite reluctant to use force, and i appreciate that. i worry that we all may regret seeing biden as a more stable applicant.

there is a body in the united states that is a little bit like the bundestag, and it is the house of representatives, which does not assign seating via proportional representation, but does offer some possibility for third party resistance, perhaps more like you see in canada or britain. i don't think the rules currently call for it, but i would support a rule change to bring up a run-off vote in a scenario where there are initially three strong challengers; a president is an executive, and the nature of the position is such that a binary choice, in the end, seems proper. but, the dearth of third parties in the united states at the parliamentary level is an anomaly, and focus on third-party organizing should be directed at that level.

so, that's the answer to the question - the focus on third party organizing is overdue but it does not make sense at the presidential level, where a lesser evil choice is always inevitable, and should be rather directed at the parliamentary level, where third parties could conceivably pass laws. sanders lost. deal with it. further, recognizing that focusing third party energy at the appropriate parliamentary level is more efficient doesn't negate the necessity to make a sober contribution to determining the nature of the figurehead commander-in-chief. you still have to vote for one of the shitty choices, dammit.

so, it seems like paul quietly relaunched on vimeo when i wasn't paying attention.

it seems like you have to go to his site to watch the video, which is not a surprising development, as he often complained about people watching therealnews on youtube. but, it's catch-grabby web design. i just want a simple list of videos to click on, in order, to make sure i didn't miss one.

so, this may be the more ordered way to go at this.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/TheAnalysisnews-111882350255869/posts/?ref=page_internal

i'm going to finish that classical mechanics lecture series first, and i'll have a few things to say about it when i do. introduction to classical mechanics? ha! that's a trick, this is a meta grad course.

so, it sounds like one thing that could be done to increase the power of migrant workers without granting them permanent status would be to make deportation orders subject to judicial review - that is to put the issue before an immigration judge. if a worker feels like he's being deported due to standing up for his rights, he should have access to due process to determine if that is true or not, and be awarded damages if it is found out to be true.

ultimately, these issues are going to end up in the courts, anyways. so, granting permanent residence is really the same thing as providing for due process, in the end, in context. why not just give them due process, instead?

the hope of course is that the farmers address the issue in good faith, in the presence of a formal rights framework, in either way.

it's just that if we respond to every refugee & worker issue by granting permanent status, we'll be undoing a lot of our targeted immigration policy, which exists as it does for good reasons. my concern is really in ensuring that employers, in general, aren't able to use these programs as a way to avoid implementing labour codes, which appears to be exactly what the reality is. that should be the focus at hand...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-sees-jump-in-migrant-farm-workers-with-covid-19/

this is still the first wave, though.

i don't think it was preventable, and we're just going to see a time lag before it happens in ontario, although montreal may have already experienced the brunt of it. this is just the rest of the united states going through the phase of the process that europe and new york went through a few months ago.

it's an open question as to whether the steps taken to reduce the spread of the virus did so, temporarily, or if it just took a little longer for the virus to take hold in these areas. i'd lean towards the dominant factor being the latter, even if you can manage to barely measure a signal from the former.

i don't think we've seen a first wave crest yet in toronto. at least not according to the numbers. but i've been clear that i don't think the numbers released in ontario are very useful in understanding reality.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/only-two-u-s-states-are-reporting-a-decline-in-new-coronavirus-cases-1.5003399

i agree that the neo-liberal appropriation of identity politics for it's own purposes of socially engineering a more racially diverse elite is not a revolutionary politics, but i also have little opposition to it, and while i will sign off on any petitions arguing that it is ultimately a distraction for the left, i wonder if it isn't better to stand back and let it happen.

i understand that a component of the neo-liberal appropriation of identity politics is the expectation that minorities within the elite will act with influence in the communities they "represent" for the ultimate benefit of the elite, which is sort of feudal in character; i wonder if expanding access to the elite might rather aid in building the kind of cross-community solidarity that the working class, itself, needs to develop to better organize. what i'm saying is that there might be greater revolutionary potential in organizing in the future if we allow for this neo-liberal identity project to work itself out. after all, they've been using identity politics to rip us apart for ages, and it's actually kind of worked pretty well; having them undo their own control system, which has harmed us so greatly, may have beneficial outcomes, in the end.

or, maybe i'm being naive - maybe we're just being set up for the next round of divide and conquer.

so, i'm waiting this out, is what i'm doing, and i'm hoping it works itself out into something more revolutionary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/bernie-sanders-protesters-democrats.html

i'm still building boundaries, abstractly, but some rules of thumb surrounding the differences between this blog and the deathtokoalas blog are developing as follows:

- the deathtokoalas blog will avoid direct news coverage altogether, with the exception of smart-ass remarks. note, however, that some institutions (like vice news) are not treated as news coverage, but as an entertainment broadcast about news, and that some hand-picked discussions from these sites are included.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not feature commentary or discussions around lectures, speeches or other lengthy interviews.
- the deathtokoalas blog will otherwise make an attempt to document all commentary and discussions around videos that are not posted to official news sites.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not include personal commentary, insofsar as it is separate from other comments and discussions.
- this blog will avoid commentary around music videos, unless there is a political component to it.

after some very careful thought, i'm hoping i can pick this up a bit.

it's interesting to see that kind of retraction in and of itself, though.

we're all taught this model in grade school about the planets rotating around the central fire, and we're told it's newtonian, the grand achievement of the copernican revolution, without spending much time contemplating the fact that the newtonian-copernican system is actually a revised ptolemaic system, with the gravitational center of the system corrected. worse, ptolemy himself was actually reversing existing greek systems (coming from aristarchus, with origins in pythagoreanism) that at least actually got the idea of heliocentrism correct. so, we may discuss how the understanding that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa, was a revolutionary achievement in the history of science, but we fail to recognize that, through all of these changes, we've held to the concept of a system orbiting a center of some sort, without really challenging the premise. and, it's something that is taught to us over and over, no doubt as a consequence of the christian appropriation of newtonianism, something the english-speaking world needs to be more forthright and open about. so, we don't challenge our conception of the solar system as being this ordered, mechanical thing, despite the utter ancientness of the assumption - and the fact that it's totally wrong.

a much more substantive scientific revolution took place at the beginning of the last century, which finally broke the old pythagorean model. all of the ideas are developed in the system that was devised by newton, but they weren't properly understood until einstein. we realize today that the solar system is really not a set of well behaved planets orbiting the sun in this polite manner, but rather a system of masses that is suspended in it's own forces, engaging in a constant tug-of-war that no side can ever win. and, if we are to calculate their orbits, we must do so in such a way that takes into account the effects of all of the participants in this gravitational soup, which means constructing difficult n-body problems, rather than ignoring them as too distant or irrelevant. that simplifying newtonian assumption, that goes back to the pythagoreans, can no longer be tolerated.

but, what are the results? don't just tell me you've "lost confidence" in the outcome. do the actual work, and tell me what happens.

this retraction is curious to me. it seems to retract the article based on some inaccurate modelling of the planetary gravitational system (they seem to have ignored the gravitational effects of the planets), and then claims a lack of confidence in the results due to that error.

but, they don't mention whether they tried to correct the results of the paper based on that better modelling decision and what would happen if they did. generally, when a paper makes an error, it can be corrected.

so, has anybody attempted to make the proper adjustments and see what the effects on the results are?

i know that this paper was keyed in on by certain denialist groups as evidence of onsetting cooling rather than the reality of warming, but what i'm more interested in is the predictive modelling of solar sunspot activity. i think that the scientific consensus is that an extended solar minimum would not prevent warming due to increased greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere altogether, but that it will slow it down a little, with exaggerated regional consequences, particularly in terrestrial regions of the northern hemisphere. 

so, i understand that the publisher and one of the authors have "lost confidence" in the correctness of the outcome due to some poor modelling decisions. but, i'd kind of like to see it actually worked out, to see if those adjustments actually affect the outcome or not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61020-3

i do hope that the ambassador bridge is eventually expropriated and turned into a pedestrian walkway. the bridge may be of questionable use for heavy loads in the near future, but it could very well remain maintained for lighter foot traffic for quite some time.

i'm going to have to move, eventually, and i'm wondering if i don't want to focus my attention in regions around the new bridge, rather than regions around the tunnel.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/michigan-court-rules-against-morouns-bid-to-stop-gordie-howe-bridge/wcm/f8408edc-1b38-425f-8563-f74307f49511/

so, it seems to be that the developing strategy in ontario is to delay the reporting, and tell everybody to wear a mask. that way, we can continue to try to ignore it, on purpose.

my position from the start is that these measures are useless in the long run, and there's essentially nothing a city like toronto can do about it. toronto is in a weird point, where the poor quality of the statistics that are available make it hard to measure whether it's reached a peak, like detroit or montreal. it could be that the delaying tactics were actually marginally effective, but in that case, that's all they were - delaying tactics. so, toronto is either unusually vulnerable to a late first wave attack, or it's got a lot of delayed reporting to do. either way, let's hope that the extended delay, reporting deficit or not, was enough that the system doesn't reach capacity along with whatever bump is inevitable on reopening.

and, let's hope that lessons have been learned about isolating the elderly properly. it should be a long time before normal social behaviour can resume again.

so, the mask thing is....it's a hope. really, the system is just giving up, realizing it can't wait this out, it can't delay and smother forever. so, go back to work. even if you're sick. just wear a mask.

my personal aversion to mask-wearing of any sort seems like somewhat of a marginal concern, in context. but, you still won't see me wearing one, in a city where there is actually no evidence of recent community transmission.

and, i'm curious how people react, in the long run.

i've got enough supplies, including some more marijuana, to last me another two weeks or so. let's see what happens.

workers tend to be far more naive about this than managers are, but don't you confuse yourself for a minute - the class war is perpetual. and, they'll strike whenever it's opportune.

if capital can find a way to use this as an excuse to decrease wages, it will.

i've made my aversion to the red cross, specifically, very clear - in addendum to my general aversion to the concept of private sector charity, which i'd argue should be outright abolished, and folded into government run services, instead.

but, they're really doing everything they can to avoid the obvious necessity, which is that they need to hire full-time, properly trained workers at living wages. they're going to bring in students, red cross workers...what's next, pilgrims? isis "refugees"?

until they get the basic fact through their head that they have to pay fair wages for labour if they want workers to give a fuck, our geriatric care sector will continue to lag others in the developed world. that's what we're doing wrong, and it's not just in this sector, it's across the board - we're not paying workers enough.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/coronavirus-live-updates-montreal-bar-owners-grapple-with-sudden-reopening/wcm/2622ef59-66ea-4707-be63-26239641522c/

no, listen.

china really, honestly needs to start behaving more responsibly. this is a growing major world power that appears to be trying to negotiate a hostage exchange with a mid-level economy, to evade the legal outcome of an ongoing extradition request. that any of this should for a moment be even given the slightest level of seriousness is preposterous.

so, you've got people like allan rock out there musing about how we're antagonizing the chinese, afraid that they might upset this country that continually acts like a rotten teenager. no. it's imperative that china be helped to grow up and behave more responsibly, and very quickly. otherwise, we're going to have a very strange world on our hands in a few decades.

so, the media has just fastforwarded this case through all kinds of stuff...

first of all, would intervening in the case be consistent with upholding the rule of law? there's a simplistic narrative in the media that just because the law allows for a specific power abstractly, that it can therefore be used in any way desirable, without following certain customs and regulations placed down by existing precedent, which is, in fact, actually a key component of analyzing whether a specific behaviour upholds the rule of law or not, in the specific anglo-canadian legal context. i guess that, in the chinese context, power is expected to be used; in the british context, power is expected to be restrained. so, any foreign reading of our law that deduces that the presence of a power allows for it's arbitrary use on command by some type of sovereign is reading it out without the context of our legal traditions, and is consequently doing so incorrectly.

there was recently a court decision in this case that the issue should proceed. so, for the minister to intervene would be to overturn the court - explicitly, directly. in canada, we have judicial independence, and intervening it is also a disastrous breach in the rule of law; that would be overturning a set of precedents that underlies our legal traditions.

it is unclear exactly when it would be appropriate for a minister to intervene, but it would likely be at the beginning of a trial, or perhaps at the end of one. the minister may, for example, deduce that the outcome of a trial is illegitimate, for some very clear and well argued reason. or, the minister may decide, at the outset, that a trial should not take place for some also very clearly and well argued reasons. these occurrences would need to be exceedingly rare for the minister to withstand accusations of abuse, and the system to withstand reform and reversal.

what is crystal clear is that the minister cannot flagrantly intervene in the middle of proceedings because it doesn't like a specific outcome, or due to political pressure of any sort. for, that is the rule of law, in context - judicial independence, as a central component of our legal tradition.

now, what about this idea of a hostage release?

well, first, we're talking about this like the prime minister can order this woman released for that reason, which is absurd. the prime minister is not holding this woman hostage, she's being held under house arrest by an independent judicial process.

ignoring the inappropriateness of the premise, do i think that actually carrying through with a trade is going to endanger canadians? this is rooted in the premise that terrorist groups may get a greenlight to hold people hostage under the expectation of payment, but that's kind of a weird argument. first, we're talking about an exchange of humans, not a ransom payment. second, china isn't a terrorist group.

well, wait a second - i just said china isn't a terrorist group. why is it acting like one, then?

and, this is my actual reaction to the scenario - what? we're talking about a hostage exchange with china, in 2020?

china needs to be told that it needs to discard all discussion of exchanging hostages as a pre-requisite for further constructive dialogue.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7105816/china-kovrig-spavor-wanzhou-intervention/

when they found cases in the meat plants, they didn't send the workers back to the factories, so long as they promise to self-isolate.

they shut the fucking factories down.

so, umm...

wash your leamington produce extra good, i guess?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-eases-isolation-rules-to-boost-covid-19-testing-for-migrant/

apparently, the federal government thinks it's not bound by provincial minimum wage laws, and that offering work below the minimum wage to students is some kind of act of generosity.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/feds-offering-students-1k-for-every-100-hours-of-covid-19-volunteer-work-1.4999165

$1000 for 100 hours of work is $10/hr, which is considerably below the minimum wage in all of the large provinces.

ontario - $14/hr

alberta - $15/hr

bc - $14.60/hr

quebec - $12.50/hr

so, if your kid signs up for this, s/he's essentially subsidizing the executives at some corporate charity, who get to siphon wages from the workers out of the "donations" to the organization. 

i understand that employment opportunities for students may be slim this summer, and this may have longterm implications on their finances, but that's not some kind of excuse for the federal government, of all institutions, to trample all over minimum wage legislation. 

so, somebody should launch legal action to ensure that these workers are being paid a legal wage, if they choose to take this labour on.

i've really had some difficulty slimming down the deathtokoalas moniker to just media related posts. i got loose with my definitions, for a bit....

so, i've been going over the blog repeatedly trying top make sure i understand what makes sense and what doesn't.

i hope to get a substantive amount done today.

what do i think about them reopening in windsor?

well, i never supported them closing in the first place, remember.

what do the facts say about this?

1) the border isn't closed, there's still people transporting goods back and forth, and there's even still health care workers moving back and forth from what was, at one time, a fairly hard hit region (although they seem to have recovered well, in the long run). so, the premise that the city is under a level of restricted movement in and out of it is a fantasy. i really maintain that there is little point in locking down a city that is on an open international border.

2) that said, there aren't a lot of cases here. the cases that are showing up are in the farm sector in the southeastern tip of the county. i bicycled there last week; it's about 55 km up county road 34, although you may be able to reduce the total travel distanced by taking the freeways in a car. leamington is not exactly far from here. but, that sector is relatively isolated from the city of windsor. i agree that pairing policy together with this region is of questionable utility to the city, and some form of separation or mutual autonomy may be beneficial to both of us.

3) the data in ontario is of limited help in determining policy, to say the least. everything is lagged by weeks or months. when they set up a testing centre in leamington, they shut it down after they started finding a lot of cases; it was easier to cover the problem up than to deal with it. if you're paying close attention to the way that data is being released, you can see fingerprints of this kind of thing everywhere. so, we don't actually know what the rates of transmission or even what the death rates actually are in toronto right now, because the data is being suppressed. it follows that trying to compare an obvious pr disaster for the province to information that we know is incomplete is kind of absurd.

4) you're left to conclude that windsor has gone from being perpetually ignored to being punished for fucking up the province's reopening. and, we're kind of stuck; because we've exposed a problem, we have to deal with it.

i don't see a lot to get excited about regarding stage 2, frankly. the things that would be opening would not be the things i'd see myself going to, and certainly not in the way they'd exist. i'm probably not going to actually go anywhere until they get to stage 4 or stage 5.

i don't think it's fair to pin the whole problem on this guy, or really much of the problem on him at all. he has little control over the situation, which as it's root cause is unregulated globalization.

see, and this is why this is so frustrating for so many people - they want somebody to blame. they want to look at what went wrong, fire the idiots responsible, fix the problem and everything's great forever. but, that's old economy thinking. nothing works like that anymore...

there is no single person to blame, nobody to take the fall, nobody's head to chop off. it's the system that's at fault, and the system that needs to adjust.

that said, if there is widespread protest against the mask laws in the upcoming days or weeks, i would call on his resignation at that time. and, i do believe that this abuse of power is indeed grave enough to warrant legitimate calls for his removal.

so, i would like to see him resign.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/online-petition-calls-for-removal-of-windsor-essex-medical-officer

i'm stopping to eat, and will run over this a second time afterwards, but i've got up to the end of aug, 2016 rebuilt for the two smaller blogs. that was just the first run from the music blog, but i did it like this because i thought it would be quicker to get the big stuff out first, and leave more subtle questions of inclusion for later. that more ponderous second run is going to start next, after i double check 2016, after i eat.

so, i'll be running back over 2014-2016 a second time, adding segments that are currently only published on this specific blog over that period.

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2016/
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2016/

i think this is an abuse of power, legally speaking.

the legislation that they are citing to enact this order is intended for small scale quarantines of the population, not to bring in sweeping rules and restrictions. the legislation allows for quarantine rules to apply to a "class" of the population; what the health unit is doing is labeling the entire population a class of itself, which may work in an introductory algebra course, but is an abuse of the concept when applied to applying abstract legislation to real-life use. this legislation was never meant for this purpose.

further, the grounds of applying this kind of legislation at all are at best questionable. while the virus does clearly pose heightened risks for understood segments of the population, the question of proportionality, here, is very relevant. is this a reasonable step to take given the actual risk that exists?

i think i have enough supplies to last me a week or two, i just need to double check my meds in the morning.

as noted previously, i am not expecting this to be adhered to or enforced. but, i want to understand what reality actually is before i dive into it.

https://www.wechu.org/sites/default/files/create-resource/class-action-order-face-coverings-wec-june-2020.pdf?mc_cid=99ac203490&mc_eid=97a466ded0

i've been vocal about my support for regulatory overhaul in the foreign workers sector, in fact i've called to abolish it and mechanize instead, but there is perhaps a better approach than offering these people permanent resident status. surely the law can find a way to invest people with social rights in this country, without making permanent residents out of them. i would be more likely to support a more thorough safety net and more detailed social rights for temporary workers as it's own thing, and please understand that there'd need to be some tax involved in that, than jump all the way to permanent residence. that should be something that has a higher level of value attached to it. and we do want it to be valuable, right?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-vows-crackdown-on-employers-violating-health-protection-rules/

i finished this on saturday night, but i didn't get a chance to give it a second gloss over until this afternoon.

i may make different decisions when i finalize these documents in the next journal release cycle, however far into the future.

for now, these are half skeletons of 2015, based solely on the music journal.

https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2015/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2015/

i hope to get most of the way through 2016 tonight, but i may get slowed down if google decides i'm secretly a robot and makes me click captchas between posts (or even shuts me right down).

so, i decided on saturday night that i'd do a grocery run yesterday, so that i don't need to be in the stores during the initial rollout of what appears to be substantive mask-wearing regulations. i overheard several people claiming they were in the store on sunday for that reason, and it in truth may have stimulated a mild grocery run. but, the evidence of that was mixed; there were long line-ups in some stores, and nobody at all in other stores. this would have been limited to windsor-essex.

so, that's what i did yesterday, and it took all day. i have some cleaning to do today, and should be back to what i was doing tonight or tomorrow.

i'm not sure what to expect. while i would, overall, expect minimal adoption and lax enforcement, at least to start, it's unclear what kind of force the county health authority is intending to use, or what authority it even has to use it. further, the wildcard in the mess is businesses that try to enforce it on unwilling customers, and any conflict that results from that.

i do not intend to follow any laws regarding mask use. but, i decided it was a good idea to let it play out a little before i decided how to react, if at all.

i more or less expect the law to be widely ignored and the potential for conflict to be low, but we'll see what happens.

stupid old man should have known better than to bring a knife to a gunfight, huh?

listen; severe mental illness can trigger some very erratic and irrational behaviour, and it's not beyond the pale for the officers to treat the situation very seriously. i want to be empathetic to the man's conditions, but not at the expense of public safety.

however, using guns to take down a crippled old man with a knife is excessive force, clearly.

a happy ending to that story would have probably ended with the man transferred to a psychiatric hospital. the presence of a negotiator aside, the police should have known to restrain themselves long enough to bring the situation to that specific endpoint. i mean, i think there's something wrong with telling me that the failure was that the police didn't wait for a negotiator; that is setting an incredibly low bar for the behaviour of the actual officers, who must surely be expected to have better judgement than this.

are they trained to behave like this? was it that specific unit brought in, that is trained to identify and eliminate threats? i can't take that as an excuse; that's a failure in training, at least for police use at the civilian level, as it did not take into account real world scenarios, such as this one. so, it goes back to the first point, actually; if you're going to tell me that the cops are just trained to react to situations and need to be directed by a negotiator, then i need to protest to the low bar set by expectations in police behaviour, which should at least include training in judgement on the use of excessive force. otherwise, these police officers should be deployed strictly for military use, and a separate force for civilians should be designed, with these concerns in mind.

so, telling me that they're doing what they're told is not an excuse, it's a description of the problem.

the thing is that this is actually the one situation where something like a civilian force is going to remain necessary to maintain. yes, he was a crippled old man with a knife, and excessive force in this situation was not necessary. but, he was also a crazy old man with a knife, that may have tried to use it. there's no social program to get rid of crazy, and we need to collectively be prepared to protect ourselves against it. so, i'm not particularly critical of the premise, and recognize that this is a situation where some kind of support personnel that could protect itself would need to be present on the ground.

the issue is the excessive use of force.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/siu-police-shooting-mississauga-1.5621243

there's no possibility that i'm being forced to wear a mask in public. do with me what you will.

https://windsorite.ca/2020/06/wearing-a-mask-at-commercial-establishments-will-soon-be-mandatory-in-windsor-essex/

the average trump ralley-goer is what, exactly? a middle aged male, likely of poor cardiovascular health, and potentially diabetic.

drink your kool-aid. drink it right up.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7089102/trump-campaign-staffers-coronavirus/

so, i finally cleared out the overposting at the deathtokoalas blog, which i'm posting a skeleton of for 2014 as a clean-up and put-aside step. i decided to just rip out the commentary altogether.

i had decided a few days ago that maybe the deathtokoalas blog could have this existentialist narrative attached to it, but what ended up happening is that following that existentialist narrative opened up into too much of a personal story, which is not the intent of that blog. that blog is intended to focus on media criticism. so, i just cut the commentary out altogether.

that side of the narrative is explored in the other three blogs, with varying levels of continuity.

so, i'm done with this now and am ready to move on to 2015.

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/

this was the elevation going from windsor to leamington yesterday, which is maybe why the wind felt so brisk.

and, that might explain why it felt faster on the way home, as well.

it seemed flat, but i guess there was a steady incline. i guessed as much moving home, on the other side of it.

interesting.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/canadians-support-universal-basic-income

i strongly recall there being a lengthy writeup about my day biking to leamington posted at roughly this time, but it appears to have disappeared. while i have toyed with writing a review now, which would be far more comprehensive than this playlist, i'm ultimately not confident that i would recreate the feeling i had over this day in the same way that i did then, and any writeup at this time would consequently necessarily be lacking. so, i would prefer to leave a post here calling out the barbarism of censorship, so that google can experience the shame of facilitating the silencing of a harmless person telling a harmless story about biking to the store to locate estrogen.

it was a good day, and i'm glad i at least filmed it.

but, shame on the entity, organization and individual that deleted this post, and then didn't even have the decency and courage to tell me it was deleted. and, shame on google for allowing them to do it.

how far did i bike today?

i went there and i went back. so, that's 54.5*2 = 109 km. that's about 68 miles.

google says three hours, and maybe that might be true if literally biking at a constant rate, but i stopped repeatedly for hydration, which is a real-life adjustment. it took me about four hours in either direction.

i don't feel that this is the limit of what i could do on a bike over a day. rather, i'm sure i could do more. but, i worry about the safety of the roads. much further than leamington, and i'm going to have to take a freeway, and i don't want to.

i'm also rather sun burnt, and won't know the extent of it until tomorrow.

i got enough for 25 days. let's just hope there's a better answer in 25 days....

how do i feel after that? i think it'll hit me tomorrow...

so, what's going on with me?

yesterday, i got a little bit upset about the border being closed for another month and went to get something to eat to kind of let me head settle before i started strategizing, and i decided that i couldn't waste the solstice sitting inside complaining. so, i went and bought a quarter of what so far seems to be better quality marijuana, at a reasonable price. it worked out to $65 for the quarter after taxes, which is in line with expected costs. we'll see how i feel as the solstice contains to carry on, but i'm feeling alright for just right now.

i didn't get a thing done last night at all, i just got lost reading articles, and made a comment or two on them. but, i was more just baked and wanting to passively read. it happens, sometimes.

this afternoon, i finally started calling around about the estrace and found 100 pills in an undisclosed location that is going to require some travelling to get to tomorrow. google wants to either send me up this gravel dirt path (which is going to be awful bicycling through) or down this abandoned rural, forested road, presumably because it's the shortest path. but, i'd like to travel mostly through civilization of some sort, even if that civilization is just farmland. i'm not keen about getting eaten while bicycling to get estrace. so, i've been charting my own path through the essex back roads, to try to maximize human contact while travelling. i'm realizing that this region is far more populated than i imagined it was. i think i can do this fairly reasonably.

so, i'm off for an adventure tomorrow.

the good news is that that's another 25 days, so if i can get all of the running around i need done, hopefully i can finish that thought process i started the other day relatively quickly. i never got around to cleaning up the overposting on the deathtokoalas blog, and should get to doing that tonight, maybe.

you can put me in the category of people that think this is for the best.

i've read a few articles lamenting the turn that canada has taken since the paul martin years, in truth, which were carried through with by stephen harper, and then picked back up again by the liberals. see, i think this is the kind of major error that defines confusion over canada's failure to return to it's very liberal 20th century foreign policy after the return of the "liberals"; the truth is that it was the martin purges that initially set this forward in the first place.

there was a distinct move towards aligning canada more directly with the united states during the mulroney administration, but it was kind of wobbled against by the chretien government, without stepping too far out of line. canada made kind of a bold stand against the united states at the united nations over iraq, refusing to take part in it because it was, in fact, illegal. but, it contributed to the invasion in other ways that it didn't feel technically contravened international law. as correct a stand as that was, it created a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and his poor relationship with the bush administration is actually a key part of the reason he was asked to step down midway through a strong third mandate. when martin came in, mending things up with the americans was a top priority. this reached a peak under harper, perhaps, but only because the existing president is so unpredictably hostile to a country that spent a lot of time trying to build very close ties. the model for this government was very close collaboration with a clinton administration, remember.

under chrystia freeland, this has taken a turn towards the absurd, with canada's aggressive involvement in venezuela being particularly disappointing. this is all being done, remember, to curry american favour, as this was seen as the best way to ensure access to their markets. we've demonstrated how far we are willing to go, and it is directly into the abyss.

now, nobody wants us making security decisions, and perhaps for good reason - right at the time when our codependent relationship with the united states is meeting up with a point of self-realization, and the failure of this policy is becoming apparent.

canada needs some time to reflect on what it actually is, and where it's going in the future. and, it should take the loss as the rebuke that it is.

i don't know if a return to a 20th century model is a salvageable or desirable proposal at this point, or if canada is even important enough to save, in the grander scheme of the board. but, we're clearly stuck, and need to find ourselves, somehow - either in the form of a renaissance of canadian liberalism, or as a colony of the united states. we can't have it both ways, clearly - the rest of the world isn't buying it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7070563/canada-united-nations-security-council-seat/

you know, dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine are used for many of the same purposes, and the success of the former appears to be that it is succeeding in reducing those cytokine storms that identified hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment, for extremely ill patients.

it does sometimes happen that a specific formulation of a class of drugs may be more effective in a certain scenario, but if it is the case that dexamethasone is succeeding and hydroxycholoroquine is failing then some kind of reasoning as to why that is would be useful in demonstrating the point.

as it is, i'm not sure that small scale trials for the success of this new drug should be treated much differently than small scale trials for the success of the previous one were, and i'd not be at all surprised if clinical trials for dexamethasone end rather similarly to ones for hydroxycholoroquine.

there might be some specific difference in delivery or something; i'm not discounting it. i'm just a little skeptical, given that they appear to be prescribed interchangeably for most if not all of their clinical uses.

well, we know the virus travels in sewage. and, we know that lots of countries dump their sewage into the water. if the salmon was caught not far from a dumping site, including perhaps in british columbia, then it's not entirely insane to think the virus may have entered the salmon's gills, or otherwise been stored in it's bodies, even just via osmosis, as a consequence of living near a dumping site; it's another question to speculate as to whether the salmon may have been actively infected by the virus.

however, it's easy enough to argue that somebody may have sneezed over the cutting board, as well.

so, i would hope that other possible explanations are being explored.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-outbreak-china-who-1.5612838

there's a dog across the street, and the first couple of times it saw me walk by, it modulated between incessant yelping and curious distance. but, as it has seen me walk by a few times, it's grown accustomed to me, and is now approaching me with wagging tail and sagging tongue.

see, i think it's figured out what i'm doing when i go out. i don't want to say the magic w-word, it might know and get excited, and think....but alas, no. i will walk...shit...right by every time.

central to this change in reaction, i think, is the recognition that i live across the street. the dog seems to have noticed that, specifically, and been able to abstract close living conditions with pack membership. i live in this dog's hood, so i'm therefore cool to walk with.

it remains to be seen how the dog reacts to repeated rejection, as i continue to saunter by and leave it behind. in it's dog's mind, it no doubt believes it has an equal opportunity to walking, and it damned well knows i'm going for a walk - without him. behavioural tests on dogs have shown that they understand preferential treatment, and have an intuitive concept of justice around sharing, up to the point that they are, of course, immensely competitive for resources. it's the same contradictions we have, just in a more primal and less restrained form. so, the dog is going to no doubt feel left out, at some point.

the real revolution, of course, will come when the dog takes the initiative to walk itself. only then can there be true opportunity for all to engage in equal walking; for the dog to gain the freedom of a human to walk at will, it must seize it for itself. but, there is such a high level of responsibility to self-walking, including the need to regulate defecation, to avoid biting and to just plum out not run away, that it seems questionable whether self-walking is a realistic goal for the dog population at this point. there would really need to be a social revolution in doggy behaviour, and it would no doubt need to be expressed genotypically before it could be established with any force or regularity.

but, i wonder if the friendly dog again turns vicious in the end, due to dejection.

'cause i'm goin' for a walk. that's right. a walk. see ya doggy....

see, this is how we deal with the problem here in ontario - we pretend it doesn't exist.

windsor is one of three regions of ontario still in lockdown, because there's been a spike in cases around migrant workers. the city has called on the province to do mandatory testing, and is getting push back from the business owners, presumably because they know there's a problem. so, they're going to stop testing the migrants altogether; that way, they can get the numbers they need to open the city.

it's just the most local example of what has been clear for weeks - the numbers in ontario are useless.

but, this is what we're doing - we're pretending this doesn't exist.

https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/testing-centre-for-assessing-migrant-workers-in-windsor-area-to-shut-down-thursday-1.4987597

see, to me this brings up concerns about the virus mutating here in canada, because this hasn't happened elsewhere, and draws attention to the lack of meaningful surveillance here in ontario, due to an apparent attempt to smudge it out through delayed reporting of the data. what we don't know is the depth of it.

if we were more rigorous about collecting and analyzing samples, then we might have a better understanding of what is happening and how to stop it. as it is, it's going to be exceedingly difficult to stop an influenza-like virus from spreading amongst children, if it's been established as already having started. that was one of the major differences in the early stages of the pandemic - this didn't visibly affect children much.

if that fact has changed, then children should be added to the list of vulnerable populations, and action should of course be immediately taken to do so. we don't need this to hit daycares the way it hit the old folks homes.

listen, following the science means adjusting to the evidence. the evidence initially said it didn't hit or spread amongst kids. it's perfectly plausible that some mutation spread amongst adults quite a while before it started to spread amongst children. so, suggesting children should have been separated would be the wrong deduction, as the failure in policy came in respects to the adult population. but, now, apparently that has changed, and the policy should change along with it.

we really don't want this to hit daycares the same way it hit the longterm care facilities. let's learn something quickly. k?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/increase-new-covid-19-cases-under-20s-ontario-toronto-peel-1.5612526

this is what the region needs, and the government should be aggressively pushing for it.

imagine it...

you could manufacture the machines in abandoned factories, then deploy them to all night warehouses. you'd generate good jobs creating, upgrading and maintaining the machines, which would produce produce essentially at cost. and, given that ontario's grid is able to produce so much clean energy for almost no cost, we could potentially become a major export market for things we don't already export.

but, the market won't do it on it's own, it needs help from government to do it.

get these ones out into the niagara region.

this one does tomatoes, which is key regionally.

perfect.

let's see some major government grants for this kind of shit, to turn the industry over, and pronto.

with the proper move to indoor growing, we can have year-round produce without having to import slaves to do it - and at lower overheads, and therefore cheaper prices.

on top of that, if we can get the industry building the robots in ontario, on top of the dwindled manufacturing capacity, we can restart some meaningful industry, and create a slew of spinoff jobs with multiplier effects in the mean time.

i'm sick of nineteenth century thinking. let's get beyond this. let's move forwards...

good.

cancel this, forever - it's irreformable. it's legalized slavery, and we're actually worse than the americans in how we do it.

if we're going to bring people in on temporary work visas, we should be ensuring that they get the same wages, rights and benefits as native-born workers, and we should enforce the law by inspecting the areas frequently - and sending employers that break the rules repeatedly to jail.

but, we're not going to do that. and, if we did, we would defeat the point - we bring them in so we don't have to pay them the same wages or give them the same rights and benefits of native-born workers, because it's so much more profitable to hire a slave.

do i think that canadians should do this work instead? we're often told that canadians don't want to do this, which i think is a misrepresentation of the facts - canadians may not want to work at below minimum wage in an industry with no collective bargaining, but what's the actual problem here, insofar as that's true?

but, this is the wrong question to ask at this stage in history.

the right question to ask is if we can automate this, thereby emancipating the labour involved. and, the answer is surely that we're pretty close to it.

let's hope this is the push required to finally mechanize this, and end this barbarity once and for all.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/mexico-pauses-tfw-to-canada-covid-1.5613518

click here: 1:13:40 to watch leonard susskind use abstract theoretical physics to demonstrate conservation of momentum, under the assumption that the earth is flat.

listen....

it'd be fine if this was an introduction to newtonian mechanics in a grade 12 class. but, he just spent three hours building up an extremely abstract meta theory,  to throw it all away in a bunch of backwards assumptions that should not be made in the context of doing this in such an abstract way.

the earth is not flat, and dU/dx is consequently not zero.

yes, this is a course in classical mechanics. and, yes, that's a simplifying assumption that is just fine in the context of classical mechanics. but, wasn't the point of building up the theory he just built up to work through those assumptions more rigorously? why bother if you're just going to make naive newtonian errors?

there should be a limiting process, there - and, yes, you're going to end up with zero in the limit in the end. but i came here to see that done.

for now, i'm just going to ignore this catastrophe and otherwise let him finish.

if you're keeping track, though, we've learned watching these lectures that susskind is both a conspiracy theorist and a flat-earther.

so, that's two of the last three summers that have been wasted, now.

i didn't move down here to waste my life away.

this sucks :(

this government is a nightmare.

i'm almost willing to vote conservative to get rid of them. which is saying a lot...

first things first, that means i need to figure out where i'm getting my estrogen from this month.

i was hoping i could buy it in detroit.

i'm going to have to call around. i might have to find a way to get to leamington, or something.

i mean, what do you think i'm going to do?

go drink in somebody's back yard and talk about nothing?

go have sex?

that's boring...

the upside is that if i'm not doing anything then i should be able to save $200-300/month for later.

so, when they do re-open the border, i should have a nice sum put aside to spend.

even if they re-open here in windsor, there's nothing to do in this boring city, so expect me to sit inside on the computer all summer and complaint about the air conditioner upstairs making me tired and my disgusting neighbours smoking drugs.

worst summer ever :(.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/border-covid-extension-july-1.5613854

so, why don't i go out on the streets, then?

because i can't support a movement based on identity, under any scenario. in a real sense, this frightens me. and, i'm sure i'm going to just end up in a debate with liberals or centrists on the ground.

i'll stay out of their way and let them finish, but i'm just simply not interested in participating in anything that's not explicitly rooted in class politics.

and, i realize i have to let them make that choice without cooption or coercion - or it won't work.

windsor has somewhat of a vibrant bro-rock scene, but i'm not remotely interested in it. that's one of the more disappointing things about moving down here; the house shows lean firmly on the side of metal, which is a genre that i simply don't like.

as a small, half-rural area, it also has folk & country scenes, but i don't care about those.

there's just nothing here that's of any interest to me. i moved to detroit, not to windsor....

if this is permanent, i'm going to end up moving to toronto.

so, i've got the travel side done for 2014.

https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/

i think i overposted to the dtk side, and am going to go through carefully and double check. but, it should be done within a few hours, as well.

so, i'd like to call on the leaders of the united states and canada to put aside their petty, childish egotistical squabbling over stupid bullshit that nobody cares about and open the border, already.

this isn't about stopping the spread of a virus. there's no science, whatsoever, to back up the efficacy of border closures in stopping pandemics - it's just base fallacy. what it is is trumpian logic. and, no - our collective governments haven't lost their minds, and caved into the stupidity.

this might have initially been political in nature, but it's not anymore. now, it's about bruised egos.

and, it's stupid. it needs to stop.

there are cities on both sides of the border with large tourism sectors that are going to suffer dramatically over this, and that is not fair. small businesses in windsor should not be forced to suffer because the prime minister feels that the president insulted him. nor should small businesses in the united states be forced to suffer to uphold the president's ego.

as a border citizen, let me be clear: i don't fucking care about any of that bullshit. ok? what i care about is the fact that detroit is on the verge of reopening, and the fact that my summer is going to be ruined if i'm stuck here in boringtown shitsville, instead.

open the border, already....

there's a lot of strawmen of me out there. i don't fully know where they're coming from, or where they're propagating through, but i know they're there.

it's hard to react to something that you're not really fully aware of.

so, i'll make the request i've made before - my email address is on the side. you know i like a good debate. so, let me know what's going on.

so long as i'm not fully aware of what's being said about me, all i can do is ask you to come here to the source, rather than rely on these strawmen perceptions of me - or people trying to score points by knocking those strawmen over.

i crashed early yesterday and slept long. it's the weather, and the air conditioner isn't helping. i seem to just shut down and stop working in the cold. one more cold day and then it's set to turn for the better with some humidity building up tomorrow...

i got october done, which is not enough work. at this rate, it will take months to get through this. i need longer days than this...and less sleep.....

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/10/
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/

yesterday was kind of a weird day, in the end. i didn't push forward much...

i'm now up to the end of sept, 2014 (just the music journal) and am going to stop to eat.

1) deathtokoalas:
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/02/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/03/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/04/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/05/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/06/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/07/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/08/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/09/

2) travel blog:
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/02
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/03
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/04
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/05
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/06
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/07
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/08
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/09

"so, wait. you would only support the blacks if they have politics you agree with? where's your solidarity?"

listen.

if you think i should support a movement based on identity politics, then i think you're what's wrong with the world.

yes, i will support you based on whether i like your politics or not, and if you think that's disagreeable, then i'll have to disagree with you.

as an anarchist of the left, i support police & prison abolition in it's most extreme and literal sense. however, i don't support "retributive justice" in any context, whatsoever; i think it's barbaric, and i think people arguing for it are barbarians.

and, i don't care about your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender or any other sort of identity you'd like to claim for yourself.

see, like i say - i support this. sort of. what i support is pretty much the most radical version of the abolition movement, and i'm fully cognizant that any movement to actually do this is going to probably end up working against my actual interests, for the simple reason that there's so little support for it. when you get people together in a city like minneapolis, the actual proposals are going to end up disappointingly conservative.

we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, on this. the social conditions for this kind of a change are not yet in place. and, you can call me a technological determinist if you'd like (i don't consider that to be an insult. i'd rather be a technological determinist than a historical materialist.), but it's not clear that we've made the final push past post-industrialization to eliminate the ruling class' system of worker control yet, either. but, as mentioned, this is likely imminent; if active policing is a function of industrialization, it's not clear that it ought to survive deindustrialization, or alter-industrialization, as it may actually be.

but, how much popular support is there for the retribution-first police reform movement that i admittedly initially kneejerked against, apparently partly due to bad reporting? i suspect you'd find that more people support sending the "bad apple" cops to jail, because that's how they're trained to see the issue. people, bizarrely, still seem to think the cops are there to help; they never have been, that's never been their role or function. they've always been there to protect property...

so, i know that the general reading of this is to yell that all of these white people must be racists for standing up for the cops, but i really think the truth is closer to the reality that they're brainwashed by the capitalist press into accepting the benevolence of the police state, just as 40+% of blacks seem to be.

i also need to interject a polling analysis. a poll like this is going to overweight urban & northern blacks, because they're easier to reach. they're actually not the majority of blacks, though. i would suspect that if you were more careful about sampling to ensure proper representation by rural, southern blacks, who are more conservative, then you'd mostly erase the difference, and get more or less the same result.

remember: the capitalist press will attempt to divide us by race at every possible opportunity. that is, to a major extent, it's actual function. and, it's no coincidence that the divide and conquer picks up in times of crisis.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-police-movement-key-goals/story?id=71202300