(note that the initial post is dated to mar 31 at 0:59. this post is dated to my first response.)

deathtokoalas

arians would refer to arius, the progenitor of the christian "heresy" that taught that jesus was a human being, something that was popular amongst germans and scythians (the goths were mostly arians, after being converted....i guess they could only accept this christian thing to a point, and couldn't swallow the line on immortality) and condemned by multiple church councils. arius was probably greek in origin, and any similarities to the ethnonym of arya - which existed, historically, in the eastern parts of the iranic speaking regions, most prominently in modern day afghanistan, and as we see today primarily through the nation state of iran, and which hitler rather ignorantly used as the name of his imagined nordic race - is strictly coincidental.

he was essentially calling the christians heretics.

but, i think that exchange is seen as mythical by non-muslim historians.

אמת מוחלטת

It means orthodox Christians in Arabic.

deathtokoalas

that's very strange, if it's true, but of little actual relevance in understanding what was being said.

אמת מוחלטת

Nope: Accept Islam or the sin of the orthodox (you know the eastern orthodox church being the Byzantine church) is upon you. Pretty unambiguous to me.

deathtokoalas

to tell the orthodox church that the sin of the orthodox church is upon them would be a pretty devastatingly stupid statement to make, and it cannot be salvaged in any context, whatsoever. so, if you're going to hold by that statement, then you must also deduce that your great islamic leader was a functional buffoon. rather, it is obvious that he was referencing some outside entity, and as it is, we know exactly who the arians were.

"the christians will suffer the fate of the christians". brilliant, really - high level stuff, truly. i guess they didn't call him an illiterate peasant for nothing, huh?

it's incoherent, and if you insist on it then it can only be understand as an expression of truly utter, abject stupidity. it's like something out of a monty python film....

the messenger appears at the court in front of the emperor and is motioned to read the letter out loud. in absolute silence, the letter is read, until the end point is come to:

or you will suffer the fate of the christians!

the emperor then looks at his court staff and looks at the messenger and repeats.

or we will suffer the fate of the christians? you mean, us? ourselves?

the messenger nods.

and, what if we do listen, then? will we suffer the fate of some other people?

the messenger repeats the phrase: or you will suffer the fate of the christians!

(a voice from the back: well, that doesn't make any sense.  what utter rubbish.)

emperor: well, we are christians, are we not? let us suffer our own fate, then. as though we might suffer any other? 

rather, this seems to be an example of the muslims projecting an insult on to the christians that was previously directed at them.  

as mentioned, that exchange was almost certainly mythical, but even that doesn't save the stupidity of telling the christians they will suffer the fate of the christians. rather, there seems to be a lot of ignorance built in to the arabic term for orthodox christians - it's rather baffling that they wouldn't know the difference between an arian and an orthodox christian, unless even the language is rooted in the projection.

if you read real history - rather than these islamic myths and legends that this guy is rather laughably recounting as actual history - they make it clear that the orthodox christians initially interpreted  the muslims as arians, for the reason that they didn't accept the divinity of jesus. to a christian of the period, it would seem reasonable to just write off the muslims as a recurrent arian heresy, and that is no doubt what the muslims heard from the christians for however many years to start. this is referenced in a number of the roman histories of the period.

this story/myth/legend seems to be rooted in the idea of the muslims turning the table on the christians and sayijng "i'm not an arian. you're an arian.". but, that itself makes no sense at all.

and, so it may follow that the word for orthodox christians in arabic is the same as the word for the arian heresy, but that's a sad reflection on the level of understanding that the early muslims had of the world right in front of them.

אמת מוחלטת

I think the only devestatingly stupid thing in this conversation is your insistence on your error and your superimposition of your own ignorance upon the rest of the world. Don't condescend upon me and pretend like you studied anything that I never had access to. You don't even speak Arabic 😂 Nobody ever said that Heraclius is the church and I don't know why it's so hard to understand what a simple letter in simple Arabic entails. The only devestatingly stupid thing, far and wide, is the olympic-level mental gymnastics you're trying to make, in order to force your extremely erroneous view to fit reality somehow.

M writes a letter to H

H is the emperor under whose authority the eastern orthodox church is

Dear H, I am the Messenger of God and I invite you to God's religion (meaning your religion is NOT God's religion), if you refuse to accept God's religion, the sin of the Orthodox church which is under your authority, will be solely upon you. 

Regards, M

Any child which is able to understand simple Arabic would understand this. It doesn't matter what the Christians thought the Muslims were.

deathtokoalas

can you give me an example of a single text written in arabic that is worth reading? i don't speak mycenaean, either. it's hardly relevant.

you've altered the syntax of the statement to make it seem less stupid, which is a typical tactic by religionists when they're called out on their idiocy. please refer to the syntax presented originally, and stop trying to deceive people with your lies.

as it is, this is an issue that's been dealt with ad nauseum, and there's little use in regurgitating decades old arguments - i can't convince people that rely on faith, nobody can, and the issue is considered resolved by secular historians that actually rely on evidence and logic and facts: while the letter was never sent in the first place, the implication was quite clearly that he was threatening the emperor with the fate of a minority he had himself persecuted, in an attempt to turn the tables on him in an ironic fashion.

but, what would you say if some hypothetical indo-european language used the same word for shiite that it does for sunni and then went around using the terms interchangeably? you'd suggest the language was pathetic, and the people responsible for inscribing it were horribly ignorant. i certainly hope that contemporary muslims are not still so ignorant as to be unable to differentiate between nicene and arian christians.

as it is, the scholarship is left to make a choice: if they insist that your warrior king buddy mohammad really meant to say orthodox christians, but said arian instead by mistake, then the translation should be corrected. but, you, in this youtube comment, appear to be the first person in history to do that. are you even allowed to do that? so long as you continue to translate the term as "arian" in english, and insist that that was the intent of the statement, you can't get around the reality of the statement being what it is - for heraclius was not an arian, he was an orthodox christian.

you should also realize that orthodox christianity did not exist until 1054, so your argument is an anachronism, anyways.

you would rather need to argue that early arabic referred to all christians as arians, which cannot possibly be true without requiring massive bouts of laughter and writing the entire thing off as nonsense in the first place - which is the right answer, anyways.

a very quick google search tells me that if your buddy mohammad meant to refer to all christians in his apocryphal letter, which would be necessary because the term "orthodox christian" would be meaningless in the 7th century, he would have used the term "nazarene" or "masihi". but, he didn't. he specified arian, which could have only referred to the heresy in a time before the orthodox church existed, as absurd as the claim that the words for nicene and arian christian are the same may be.

i've got a minute as it is, so let's work this out logically together.

you claim the word used is the same as the word for "orthodox christians", and i laughed at you and your language for it. how can orthodox and arian christians be referred to using the same word? that's laughable. but, i'll take your word for it. now, let's try to figure this out.

as orthodox christians did not exist in the 7th century, we're left with basically two deductions. either the source is later - after 1054 - or the word for orthodox christian sources from the scripture being cited. so, what's the earliest source of this apocryphal claim, anyways?

it seems like the earliest source is one "al-tabari" in the 10th century, which is certainly well after your bud died, but also quite a bit before the split in 1054. if the history was written around the year 900, as seems to be the case, it still doesn't make sense to have words that translate to "orthodox christian", as, even that far along, christianity hadn't schismed yet. so, this nice & easy way to prove it's a forgery (by citing anachronistic language) doesn't seem to work out, although i'll leave it to you to examine the original document and get back to me, given that you can read it and i can't. i'm merely a lowly logician.

so, we're left with the likelihood that the term for "orthodox christian" in arabic developed out of this apocryphal letter writing campaign, rather than the other way around.

but, as i'm a mere logician that does not read arabic, all i can do is point to two facts:

1) everybody translates the word to "arian". there must be a good reason for that.

2) my reading is what they taught me in a university course on byzantine history, and we stopped to talk about it for a minute and came to the conclusions i'm repeating.

so, i'll leave it to you to figure it out - if we accept that there were no orthodox christians in the year 700, what does the word literally translate to, in the context of the time frame it was supposedly written in?

אמת מוחלטת

I have never heard of a logician who makes so many contradictory claims and fallacies as they go. Aside from low belt insults against Muhammad, condescending speech and way too many comments I'm not seeing any logic.

You start your 10 comment rebuttal with an ad hominem Attack, basically asserting that my understanding of the syntax must be flawed because I'm religious. 

(Am I ?) And you do that without even speaking the language yourself so there is no basis at all for you determining that the syntax is to begin with. You make the absence of  (Roman written) evidence fallacy, asserting the old Orientalist trope that everything that isn't attested in European written sources basically didn't happen. Rendering African, South American and Arabic oral history all as invalid and reinforcing the burden of civilisation narrative, by which the only valid system of human existence and history is being a white girl called James Murray. A typical postcolonial victim.

Then you insist that the term means Arian, fine, insist on what you insist, although you have previously admitted that you are unable to read the language.

 And at the end of the day, I have to find out that all this grand "logician" is doing, is regurgitate their knowledge from high school. 

And then you go on citing Al-Tabari as a source for your information, which again shows your miserly level of Islamic education. You're like a blind man with a baseball bat, trying desperately to hit a homerun. 

Since your abilities as a logician are obviously seriously limited, perhaps you can find a translator who is willing to engage with someone as insistent on their own position as yourself:

deathtokoalas

you didn't address a single point i made, you just dismissed my statements because you decided i was white (which, as it happens to be, i am not - i'm of mixed jewish, sicilian and native american background). your inability to see the logic in my deconstruction is a reflection of your own abilities, and not a reflection of my argumentation. i will repeat this point, however: i am not translating the word to "arian", the scholarship translates the word to arian. and, i am not citing al-tabari as the source - i am conducting a google search that indicates that it is understood that al-tabari is the source.

it should be clear that i don't have any interest in studying islam, or any other religion, for that matter. i'm not presenting myself as an islamic scholar, and would plead with you not to label me one - i do not want to be one. my interest is in objective history, and the roman sources are infinitely superior to the muslim ones on that point, regardless of your rather poor understanding of said - who would agree with me here, and not with you.

it's sort of ironic because this podcast/video series is actually just about the best example of orientalism - which is a term that refers to the tendency of westerners to exaggerate the differences between western and middle eastern culture, thereby othering the middle east as something mystical or exotic - and my deconstruction by insisting on objectivity and facts, rather than myths and legends, is just about the diametric opposite of it.

so, i don't want to waste any more time with this, until you can answer the basic question - how do you suppose that your buddy mohammad was referencing a split in the christian church that wouldn't happen for 400 years into the future? given that he clearly wasn't, you have the burden of proof (as an arabic reader) to offer a different interpretation of the term that makes sense in the context of the 7th century. and, if you can't do that, you've lost the debate.

אמת מוחלטת

(edit: note that this post was originally posted in arabic, but has been translated here by google translate for utility)

Different narrations regarding pronouncing the word Arysis:

This word appeared in the book that the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, sent to Hercules, and it did not appear in other books. Imam al-Nawawi said in his commentary on Sahih Muslim: His saying, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him: (And if you depart, then it is against you that the Arrisites are iniquity). the first novel in the Muslim (Alorisien) a month in modern novels and in the books of the language, and this differed set to aspects: one Biaeen after the Seine, and the second Bia one after the Seine, and the two sides Humazah open and Alra broken diluted, and the third:Alarysyn Buxar alhmzh vtshdyd ra'y vbya’ after vahdh Olsen, vvq alrvayh alsanyh no no Muslim, vfy first Sahih Bukhari (sm alyrysyyn) no NW BI mftvhh after vbya’yn Olsen.

If one looks at the books of the Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, to the princes, his warning appears to all kings that failure to follow Islam will be the reason for them to assume responsibility for the infidelity of their followers. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, from Muhammad the Messenger of God to the great Khosra of the Knight, peace be upon those who follow the guidance, and believe in God and His Messenger, and testify that there is no god but God alone and have no partner, and that Muhammad is his servant and his messenger, and I invite you with the propaganda of God, for I am the Messenger of God to people All, let him warn those who are alive and have the right to say to the unbelievers, so he embraced Islam, and if I refuse, the sin of the Magi is upon you. ” And the Magi are followers of the broken messages of the Prophet Muhammad“ In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, from Muhammad, the Messenger of God to the Great Copt: Peace be upon those who follow the guidance, As for after, I invite you with the call of Islam, embrace embrace greeting God, and may God reward you twice.  And the Copts are the followers of Almkot.

===

The reason you feel your comments haven't been addressed because I thought about what I wanted to say before writing it into 10 distinct comments with at least a logical fallacy in every second. You don't need to be white to repeat Orientalists tropes, the fact that you do find truth within Orientalist tropes is your own problem not mine.

You committed an ad hominem fallacy, an absence of evidence fallacy, you cited al-Tabari like that's where anyone gets their information from, you asserted things about the Arabic language which you cannot know without speaking it, thus contradicting your own claim that you do not know Arabic.

Claiming that "the scholarship" translates it that way, doesn't make it right. 

I'm sorry to say but you suck as a logician. There's no need to take you serious as such. 

You should find a translator, since you're not an Islamic scholar, before speaking on matter pertaining to Islamic scholarship.

And look girl, if it makes you feel any better to try and shift the burden of proof and tap your shoulders for "winning" a YouTube debate, then that's fine. It doesn't get you out of the fact that you are indeed the one making claims about a language you do not understand, purely based on a translation that you read and rendered to be true.

deathtokoalas

it's deeply disrespectful to speak to somebody in a language that you know they don't understand.

thankfully, i was able to translate that using google translate and the basic mistake in the analysis is that it's ignoring the fact that the source for these letters is in the tenth century. so, the logic that they all ought to be the same is entirely circular. that's not a good argument. at all.

now, you keep using words like orientalism that you clearly do not understand, so, again, i'm not interested in wasting my time with you. did you actually read the text by said, or did you just take a course in post-structuralism and pick it up from the course notes? that's what you get from reading foucault, i guess. waste of time...

you need to address the point about the anachronism or you've lost, and intelligent people reading this will understand that.

i think what you're trying to do is call me eurocentric, and i'll accept that and wear it with pride, but that's almost the literal opposite of what said was writing about.

אמת מוחלטת

Your ignorant of Christian Theology, Heraclius' religion, Islamic scholarship and simple dates. You're the first person to claim that Tabari was a source for any Islamic belief or truth, and you're the first person to claim the letters first appeared there. You embarassed yourself through logical fallacies, too much unnecessary writing, ignorance on matters of history and contradictory behaviour towards Arabic and sources therein. The live stream offer still stands but I'm happy to upload my analysis of your faulty claims without yourself challenging it. 

You talked and talked but when it came to the hard truth, you went silent. Jessica, perhaps history, theology and the Arabic language, just as logic, should be on your mind after shitblogging because so far that seems the only thing youre good at.

deathtokoalas

you haven't addressed the issue of your analysis being an anachronism and it's fairly obvious why you haven't. but, if you go to the wikipedia page on the topic, it cites al-tabari as the source.

אמת מוחלטת

I cannot address it being an anachronism when it objectively just isn't an anachronism but you have already shown that you are afraid of a real debate. If your source is Wikipedia than you, perhaps, aren't even worth my time.

deathtokoalas

well, you would indeed be arguing with the author of wikipedia and not with myself. i'm just a lowly logician, that's googling easily findable information that is widely available to all, in an attempt to fit objective facts into a secular history. i have no depth of understanding of anything esoteric, or any interest in it at all.

but, tell me a little more about the orthodox christians of the 7th century

(attempts to draw me into a shouting match over a livestream have been removed)

i will reiterate that i am only interested in conversing in a written form, and that this individual has failed to address the chronological concerns in his anachronistic interpretation of the terms. but, this is what you usually get from islamic "scholars" when you push them on their myths - obfuscation, circular logic and what seems to be some kind of request for a pissing match, rather than a debate regarding the evidence.

MjGhost

I just cannot imagine someone wrote what you wrote and could take themselves seriously while they did. I mean who reacts to one comment with 9 comments, filled with unproven assertions and then expects people to just agree with they're diarrhea.

i will reiterate that you've been empirically shown to be a pathetic idiot with neither the grasp of history nor the grasp of logic and you turn around accusing people of the same. 

deathtokolas

the somewhat comical truth here is that you happen to have somebody with a large amount of interdisciplinary formal education in front of you that can help you understand why you're wrong, and can help you work through these logical errors and come to a correct understanding of actual history. i've offered my time and patience in helping you understand and debunk this; unfortunately, you've decided to resort to childish attacks and insisted on upholding your mythology, instead. you can't even recognize intelligence when it's put in front of you. and, it's because you're dumb. to your core.

for the sake of clarity, the repeated posts are separations of thought, and there are algorithmic reasons why i post that way. first, comments with the most amount of responses climb their way up the rankings. second, youtube will periodically remove some of my comments because i have a tendency to be a little too honest for the existing pc crowd; by splitting the posts up, i can avoid losing longer sections of thought. third, it's actually easier to read, that way, i find - so it's a style decision, and i'd invite anybody to compare it to a wall of text. i think it comes off rather favourably.

but, you've done none of the things you claim you have - you've merely managed to make idiots of yourselves over and over again, and the baffling reality of it is that you're too stupid to realize you're stupid.

the basic issue at hand here - how it is that your bud mohummad could be referring to an idea that does not exist - has not been addressed, and you've just insulted me instead of dealing with the debate in front of you.

MjGhost

The basic issue at hand is that you're comfortable telling lies in comments but not comfortable having your pathetic lies exposed :) It's actually cute that your trying to be transgender logician but you literally have admitted thrice that you take your knowledge from google and wikipedia

deathtokoalas

see, this is the funny thing about this - what you're citing is so debunked by secular historians, that it can be easily found using a basic google search, and is all over wikipedia. but, you seem to be suggesting that i should read the koran, or consult "islamic scholarship" instead. no - the point is that wiki is, in context, a better source of information, because it reflects the better sources. so, i'm giving you decent references to agreed upon understandings by secular historians, and you're insisting that i cite myths and legends, instead. then, you're claiming that i'm the one that's being dishonest, and giving me shit for telling you i don't have time for your idiocy. it's perfectly idiotic.

...perfectly backwards. perfectly retarded.

i will state yet again that, for all their deflection and nonsense, these two buffoons have yet to address the point at hand.

now, my blog is just that - it's a blog. it's where i type my thoughts, talk about my day, etc. but, it's also a journal, and it's purpose is for it to be read by future historians that are interested in studying my art. so, if you want to cyberstalk me, please go to my bandcamp site and check out my music. the actual point of all of this is a giant frame around my existence as a composer, and nothing more and nothing less.

אמת מוחלטת

Denial doesn't make you any more intelligent than you are not. The point has been adressed, just because you dont like the way you have been put in your place doesnt mean it didnt happen. You were presented with the chance to debate your fallacious standpoint for hours. You can claim deflection and nonsense but you're the one who is a self professed Google and Wikipedia logician, so how would you know these things anyhow ? The fact hat you cannot refute my video shows that you are the only one deflecting. You don't know the first thing about orthodox Christianity nor about Arabic nor about Heraclius' theology. You actually claimed the letter was first found in Tabari, which is a categorical mistake. You. Are. Literally. Going. OFF. Of. Google. Information. Again, the only thing you're good at sharing is your poop.

 

deathtokoalas

video is not a valid form of discourse. if you had a worthwhile point, you would type it here - i'm not going to your site, and i'm not clicking on your links and i'm not watching your ads. say it here, in writing, in a valid form of discourse, or forfeit the point. 

when a claim is easily googled - and i will state again that the source for these letters is al-tabari and cite wikipedia as a better source than your islamic forgeries - that is not a reason to doubt it's accuracy, but a reason to uphold it as widely understood by everybody except the faithful. and, when a claim is presented on wikipedia, that means it's undergone a concept of peer review that is superior to any sort of theological dogma.

we can have an epistemological debate here,  but i'd consider wikipedia to be a far better source than any imam or theologian, for the reason that it's vetted by the secular community, and the religious sources are not.

heraclius was both an orthodox christian and a roman catholic, because they were one and the same thing, at the time.

but, if you are confident in your claim that you can use a word intended to refer to orthodox christians in the 7th century, then post your sources and your argument here. if you choose not to, it's your choice - but you are forfeiting the debate, whether you accept it or not.

stated tersely: i don't care what your religious documents say, and do not consider them to be valid sources of information. what i care about is what secular historians say, and if the information is easily googled and available at wikipedia then there is little reason to research it further.

the ease of which the information is found by a basic google search is a reason to trust it's authenticity, and not a reason to doubt it.

....and, that should really be a mirror reflection held up - your religion is debunked in 20 seconds by any savvy 12 year-old with a laptop or cell phone. deal with it.

MjGhost

Let's not talk about what you call music. Future historians will be shocked when they hear how you cited al Tabari for the source of the letter and then actually admitted you just read that off of Google. I can see why you are so arrogant now though, to actually think that people who don't care about you now will surely care about you after you are dead must warrant an intense sadness that HAS to be masked by arrogance or else your psychological house of cards would fall apart won't it ? :D

deathtokoalas

that's correct - it's easily googled that the letter is a forgery that dates to the tenth century. deal with it.

MjGhost

its easily googled that the letter dates to the 8th century at the very latest 

deathtokoalas

again - it states very clearly on the wikipedia page that the primary source is al-tabari in the 10th century. i'm sorry, but i find that far more convincing than something an imam might say. you can post something else if you're convinced it's correct, but understand that i'm not likely to give it a second glance unless it's secular in character.

אמת מוחלטת

Secular historians say that your using Wikipedia as a source is a disaster. But why would I expect you to have been to university ?

deathtokoalas

i've already told you that i have a large amount of formal education, which has taught me to be skeptical of religion, rather than held in subservience to it.

i don't actually think that secular historians are going to be particularly harsh on wikipedia in the year 2021. it's had a lot of the bugs worked out, and it's focused strongly on sourcing. like any other source, if you find something hard to believe, you can check the footnote. i consider it a useful tool, and i'm happy to cite it with confidence - especially in the particular context.

and, i'll state this into the void for anybody reading this - don't listen to these guys, google it yourself.

אמת מוחלטת

Premise 1 : Bukhari was written before Tabari

Premise 2: Tabari contains the letter

Premise 3: Bukhari contains the letter

Conclusion: Bukhari is an earlier source than Tabari

deathtokoalas

well, i'd invite you to correct the wiki page and have that discussion with them; i'm not overruling the peer review on your divine authority. that said, it looks like it's a 10-15 year difference, and probably hard to establish with any clarity.

MjGhost

I'd invite you to correct yourself first. 

If Bukhari was completed in 846 and Tabari was born in 839, how can it be a 10-15 year difference ? 

 Do you always shift the blame of your fault ? I mean how many things do you make your dad and mum responsible for, let's be honest ?

deathtokoalas

because i don't have a lot of confidence in the dates you're citing. because we're dealing with largely untrustworthy histories that have large margins of error, we can only really state with confidence that they lived at about the same time. but, if you want me to expand my margin of error from 10-15 to 10-50, that's fine - it matters little.

listen - you're wasting your time. you seem to be trying to prove i'm not an expert in islamic theology, which is something i freely admit, and never claimed for a minute. what i'm telling you is that i don't care about islamic theology, and i'm only interested in approaching this from a secular perspective, which largely discards these sources you're citing as unreliable.

EdSmi Jr.

No I think everybody here wanted to prove that you are anything but a logician. You're an ideologue and a really bad one at that. Of course you're not well versed in Islamic theology, neither are you in Christian theology, nor in the art of making a claim and proving it, and CERTAINLY not in the field of logic.

deathtokoalas

well, i'll let my diploma stand - you can write me an essay, if you want me to respond to it. but, to be clear: the people posting here did not present any valid logical errors, which is why i haven't bothered responding. what they've done is cite some silly colloquialisms that they probably pulled from a ben shapiro video.

i'd request that you make sure to link to my websites in your video, though.

MjGhost

I think it's about time that you stop justifying your error and stop saying things that are unprovable. Suddenly you don't have confidence in the Wikipedia dates that you were just building your false argument on ? 

And just so you know France is the home of secularism and here schools do not teach their children to look at Wikipedia for information. Neither does Germany or the UK. 

You said that the orthodox Church didn't exist until 1054.

Just Google "Council of Calchedon"

You said Heraclius wasn't a heretic.

Just Google "Ecthesis"

Tamir has already proven in the video that you are arguing from a paradigm of white supremacism and with flawed information from Wikipedia.

Jessica, you're an insult to logic and an insult to academia. 

Just stay this poop logging transgender and leave the academics to themselves. You were destroyed in the comments, destroyed on video and you'll be destroyed again in the future. It'll just be someone else who exposes your lack of education.

Have fun pooping, you're the best at doing it with the brain.

deathtokoalas

again - you're wasting my time.

the council of chalcedon has nothing to do with any concept of orthodox christianity, and would not have constructed a separate identity for the byzantines as any kind of ethnic or cultural entity. i'm even being generous in pointing to 1054 - the concept of byzantium and orthodoxy is really a much later concept than even that, that was constructed in a fit of revisionism. 

further, the idea that heraclius was a heretic is something that much, much later writers invented to describe how he interacted with other heresies. nobody at the time would have referred to heraclius as a heretic.

i'm not bothering with this, as it's nonsense, but it's easy enough to piece together where you're going, and it just leads to the same circuitous path of circular logic we were at in the first place, as you're just building up revisionist history on top of itself, and presenting more evidence for a later forgery.

nothing you're talking about makes any sense at all in a 7th century context.

but, like i say - write me an essay.

and, make you sure you link to my sites in your video.

now, regarding the dates, let's read this carefully.

"It was completed around 846 CE / 232 AH."

now, what's the important idea here? is it that we know that the text was written at a specific point in time? or is it that we can only date it roughly to the middle of the 9th century?

there's something instructive here, because religionists are instinctively literalists. so, when they see a date in text, they drop the "circa", the "approximate", the "around" - and they pick a specific, exact date.

but, we don't know exactly when this was written.

and, that is actually what the wikipedia page says, if you have the comprehension to understand it.

EdSmi Jr.

She's probably gonna say that she isnt a supremacist because  she has a black friend or something lol

deathtokoalas

i'll let you think i'm a white supremacist if you want - i don't really care. i know it's not true, and i think you're an idiot, anyways.

just make sure you link to my sites if you're going to make videos about me, whatever they are.

אמת מוחלטת

Lol, when he said "WELL WIKIPEDIA IS WRONG THEN !" without apologizing for his insistance on a wrong information. 

Look Jessica, I think I don't need to say anymore after Video I've made but here's a simple mathematics exercise:

If Bukhari was written 846 CE (not my number, Wikipedia's number) and Tabari deals with history up until 915 CE, how large is the difference in the very least ?

(NON-POOP MATH : 915-846 = 70 years) (10>50>70)

deathtokoalas

i'm just going to focus on observational commentary at this point.

"WELL WIKIPEDIA IS WRONG THEN !"

see, as it turns out the wiki page provides approximate dates. now, like i say - don't argue with me. i'm just citing them - argue with them. but, at the end of the day, i'm going to trust them, and not you, and not your sources. and, i'll state it again - the wiki page cites al-tabari, and there must be reason for that. i believe them - and not you.

but, again we see a window into the mind of the religionist, which needs to have a text as an authority, rather than a suggestion. let  me let you ponder this - what if wiki is right about one thing and wrong about another? i don't think that's the case here, but i can accept that, because i'm not looking towards a text for the literal truth, like you are. that's not a contradiction, for me, like it is for you.

now as stated previously, the wiki site is clear that we're dealing with approximations, here. when i say i trust them and not you, that doesn't necessarily mean they're correct. but, i'll leave this debate to be had between you and them, and i'll let the result of that debate present itself in the text.

for the point that i'm making - that the letter is at least old enough to precede the 1054 schism - it doesn't matter that the forgery stems from al-tabari or this other guy. what matters is that the forgery dates the language to before the schism, suggesting that this term for orthodox christians probably comes from the historiography, and not the other way around.

for now, i will hold to my source and tell you to take it up with them.

(pause)

you know, i'm just copying the important parts of this to my blog (and leaving the nonsense behind) and the obvious question presented itself to me rather bluntly - what if he actually did mean to refer to the ethnonym of arya, and was threatening the fate of the persians? i mean, it's almost too easy.

i don't want to get into this stupid argument again, other than to remind people that the logic presented here by these people nipping at my heels is circular - the letter to heraclius may stem from a pre-existing legend, but the letters-to-world-leaders meme, including the one to heraclius as we know it, stems from al-tabari in the 10th century, so to argue that the term must refer to the byzantines to conform to the meme is circular, logically, and backwards chronologically. rather, if arabs are out there calling orthodox christians "arians" nowadays, or did in an earlier period, it is probably a consequence of this myth, rather than a reason to suggest he meant to refer to the byzantines, themselves. 

but, whether apocryphally or not, the persians had fallen at the time of the letter writing campaign and it was probably a scarier threat than pointing to some visigoths or vandals.

again - i don't speak or read arabic, and don't really care to learn it. i'm just repeating what i learned in a course on byzantine history - the term translates to the heresy. further, a quick google search upholds that interpretation as standard. but, google translate suggests that the transliteration of arian and aryan is fairly similar. so, did some scribe just mess this up at some point? was it even messed up on purpose to align with the narrative in al-tabari? and, is the necessity to take everything the prophet said literally interfering with the observation of an obvious typo?

 

and, of course, the byzantines did not suffer the fate of the persians - at least not by the time of the 10th century, and not at the hands of the caliph. so, what is a copyist to do? mohummad would look like a goof, threatening the romans with the fate of the persians, only to have them outsurvive the caliphate, itself. a minor typo could be a face-saving process. but, i'm just speculating - the standard interpretation is that he was referring to the arian heresy and not the aryan (iranian) people.

see, this is what i was talking about before - when he talks about the myths of the dark age period from a christian perspective, he's rightfully skeptical about the usefulness of the sources. yet, he recounts silly, fanciful stories about swimming the euphrates without the slightest bit of critical analysis. 

to be clear: he should be deconstructing the islamic dark age myths the same way he's deconstructing the christian dark age myths, but he seems to have bought into it to an extent, in addition to making a conscious decision to give it a wide berth. and, maybe there's something to that - maybe, by approaching it with kid's gloves, he's let his guard down and fallen for some of it. 

he might think he's "showing respect" to a "foreign culture", but it just puts islam in a lower level of analysis, at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. if he's willing to do proper analysis for western history, he should be willing to proper analysis for islamic history, as well; that he won't is a lack of respect for their intelligence.

it's a perfect, textbook example of orientalism.

no.

i'm not feeling better.

i need to get to the er. like, now.

aristotle was upheld by the christians & muslims as the greek philosopher that was most similar to their worldview. but, that is why he is not great. on issue after issue, aristotle rejected ideas that we now know are true - evolution, heliocentrism, relativity. the greeks had all of these ideas in front of them, but aristotle rejected all of them - and so did we, as a result of it. he singlehandedly set back progress by 1500 years; no single man is responsible for more stagnation, more backwardsness. the story of the enlightenment is the story of the undoing of aristotle. that said, it was his moral philosophy that the religionists saw the most value in, which has itself also been largely undone by later thinkers. so, call him great if you must, but realize that it's the exaltation of backwardsness, in doing so.

think of it this way: he was the philosopher that all of the ignorant, illiterate barbarians picked out of the pile as the best of the bunch. and, his writings reflect that. coherently.

today's post is inriℵ2. as with the other alephs, the front-end needs to be rebuilt before i can post it to payhip. 

====

purchasing this release comes with the immediate download of the release that you linked to it off of. be sure you make the right choice. 

inri003: created in mid 1997. sequenced and converted to stereo in november, 2013. released on nov 9, 2013. corrected in september, 2014. finalized on july 5, 2016. 

inri008: initially written in 1996. recreated in feb, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015. released on jan 4, 2016. finalized on july 11, 2016. bonus tracks added and re-finalized on july 18, 2016. 

inri010: initially written in 1996. recreated in april, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 12, 2015. vocals added july 15, 2015. sequenced, finalized and released on july 22, 2016. 

inri017: initially written over the course of 1997. recreated and expanded over the course of 1998. lead track first sequenced in this form in feb, 1999. further remixes generated over the course of 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013, and another in late 2015. remastered in november, 2016 from various sources, 1997-2015. finalized & released on nov 17, 2016. 

inri018: initially written in 1997. recreated and reconceptualized in late 1998. salvaged somewhat at the end of 1999. remastered in 2013. compiled & released on nov 13, 2016. finalized on nov 19, 2016. final album version added as a bonus track and refinalized on dec 15, 2016. 

inri019: written and demoed from 1996-1999. initially constructed in this form in january, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. sequenced on nov 22-24, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. released on nov 24, 2016. release finalized on nov 27, 2016. symph002.. 

inri020: initially written in 1993. first full recording in 1996. recreated in dec, 1997 and again in jan, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed on july 2, 2015. remixed on july 15, 2015. reconceptualized & remixed repeatedly over november & december, 2016. released & finalized on dec 13, 2016. 

inri021: written and demoed in multiple stages from 1993-1999. initially constructed in this form in feb, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced over november and december, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. finalized & re-released on dec 15, 2016. lp002. 

inri023: constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. the first two tracks were corrected to stereo in sept, 2014. the last two tracks were added for re-release as a remix lp in dec, 2016. re-released & finalized as lp003 on dec 17, 2016. 

inri026: initially written in the fall of 1997. recorded in the winter of 1999. remixed in late 2013 and again in early 2014. this track was separated from my second record in january, 2016 but the single was not completed until it was remixed one last time in sept, 2017. released & finalized on sept 10, 2017. 

originally created from 1996-1999. this compilation is dated to jan 26, 1999. slowly remastered, reconstituted, compiled, reconstructed, released and finalized from 2013-2017. compilation finalized on dec 16, 2016; inri026 added on sept 11, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

released january 26, 1999 

j - guitar, effects, bass, bass synth, synthesizers, piano, vocoders, octavers, drum programming, drum kit, sequencing, found sounds, noise generators, sound design, cool edit synthesis, light-wave synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, sampling, vocals, mic noises & vocal relics, pick scrapes, tapes, digital wave editing, digital effects processing, loops, noise reduction, a broken tape deck, chance, production.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-box-set

all i'm really going to have time to do tonight is clean.

how am i feeling?

i slept a lot today, but i'm feeling more awake than i was yesterday, at least.

i didn't get a reaction from the doctor's office, and they're closed on the weekend. i'm rather frustrated by this.

the clinic somewhat hilariously suggested i contact my doctor. no, you idiots...i need this done now...

so, i'm going to have to get to the clinic in the morning and ask for a hepcidin test. if they can't or won't give me one, i'll need to go to the hospital.

and, that's my weekend, unfortunately. again: not what i wanted to do, but i need to figure this out.

just a bit of an update on the flashpoint runthrough...

as mentioned, he's entering real history now, and he's just very quickly summarizing the outcome of a series of physical battles. he both seems like he's more in his element and like he wants to get it over with.

i don't have any particular comment, other than that i'll let him finish.

just sorting through the timeframes in the list suggests he may get more substantive in the next section.

i have a pet theory that the pope essentially used the crusades as an excuse to rid himself of the barbarians that had settled in the empire, making it a kind of population control.

the underlying problem is probably genetic, but estrogen supplementation is probably the best way to treat it.

it would follow that the best way to increase my ferritin is to get the orchidectomy, asap.

i have a first appointment on april 27th.

i'll need to test my hepcidin. but, this is my theory right now:

- my testosterone suppressors have been slowly wearing off over the last few years, and i doubled them over the summer last year, only to have to retreat because the doctors wouldn't overprescribe.

- my estradiol source switched to generic a few months ago.

together, these two changes have led to decreases in serum estrogen, which have increased my hepcidin levels. as such, i'm experiencing rapid depletion of my iron stores as my estrogen levels decrease.

ok, i think i'm feeling a little better....

i sent a lengthy email to a walk-in clinic, and let's see how they respond.

in theory, it's actually useful to have some places closed on fridays if it means they're open on sundays. everybody deserves a day off, and staggering them is useful. as a secularist, i'd actually advocate that the day of rest (which i can support as a labour activist, rather than as a religiously mandated thing) be rotated rather than mandated. i mean, something should be open on sundays, something should be open on saturdays and something should be open on fridays; having a multiculturalism that allows the different religions to pick what day they want to be closed on is a sort of brute force application of a rotating day-off, and it's useful for that reason, if not the ideal way to do it.

but, it means you need to actually have some kind of diversity.

and, the problem in this city is that that isn't happening - islam is developing a monopoly, and what's happening is that everything is closing on fridays, which is just as annoying as everything closing on sundays.

ok, i think i found something, i'm just going to send them an email to double check.

the other thing is that everything is closed on fridays in this city because it's been taken over by muslims.

i mean, it's one of the dumb parts of the lockdown, and i'm not even really blaming this on the government - walk-in clinics could stay open, but none of them actually are open.

if i have to call head to get an appointment at a clinic some time next week, i'm essentially converting the clinic into a general practice, and i already have a gp. but, a lot of people don't.

it eliminates the clinic part of the clinic and reduces my choices to er or gp.

ok.

so, as i've essentially ruled out dietary factors, i've decided that the next thing i should do is ask for a urine test for hepcidin.

and, i still don't know if i should be in emergency or not. i don't think any clinics are open for walk-in, right now, so it's either that i go to the hospital or i wait until the 21st.

google is being very frustrating tonight, in that it is giving me exactly the opposite of what i want. 

every search for iron & b12 shows up with studies about elevated b12, not low b12.

and the only hits regarding b12 storage are affirmations that the liver can indeed store b12.

what that suggests, at the least, is that if i'm having some kind of regulation issue then it's extremely obscure and it could take some time to convince a doctor that i even have it.

can i at least figure out which hormone regulates b12 storage and release?

i mean, if i can absorb iron and can absorb b12, but can't store iron and can't store b12, that ultimately points towards some kind of liver disease. right?

is there a hormone to test for?

did we already do that?

i mean, i didn't even know you could store b12 until a few months ago.

but, you can.

and, i get tons of it - i should be higher. i'll grant that.

that said - and i've pointed this out a few times - my mcv is not that high.

from what i can see, a lot of labs wouldn't say it's high at all.

but, it's certainly on the higher end - and my b12 is certainly on the lower end.

what i will say is this - i may also be having difficulty storing b12, rather than digesting it. i mean, that's what the data seems to ultimately suggest, i think - i'm getting just enough in my diet, but i'm not storing it anywhere, so it comes up and down with my diet.

let me look into that because it might help me understand what's causing the low iron stores, as well.

and, the coffee worked, but it's a gloss - i'm still not feeling so well.

see, this is the weird thing...

if i was suffering from sort of normal iron deficiency - which is what it looks like, granted - then i should also be generating small blood cells. but, i'm not - my blood cells are unusually large and it seems like they get bigger and bigger as i eat less and less.

this combination - low ferritin and large rbcs - is weird.

now, i only have three data points and they're bunched up in time. but, it seems like the size of my red blood cells increases as i eat less, and decreases as i eat more. so, is it possible that my iron is low because i'm producing extra large rbcs, which kicks in when i don't eat enough?

whatever it is is weird, but that's just pointing more and more towards the marrow.

so, for example, this is certainly possible and not entirely ruled out from what i can see:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4565132/

but, shouldn't this bacteria mess with my other vitamins and minerals, as well?

H. pylori infection can cause a deficiency of vitamins (such as vitamin C, vitamin A, α-tocopherol, vitamin B12 and folic acid) and essential minerals. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4177464/

if i'm ruling out celiac and b12/b9 deficiency, i'm going to need to get all these other things tested, too.

how many can i test with urine instead of blood?

if i really want to test for parasites or bacteria - including h. pylori - it seems like i'm going to need to provide a stool sample, and i'll either need to do it at the er or wait for direction from the stomach specialist.

again - i think i'd be dealing with general malabsorption, though, and not merely an iron deficiency.

and i seem to be absorbing the caffeine in the coffee just fine, which is welcome.

when they did the last test, it tested for igG and it came up in the normal range. 

while i'm ruling out intestinal bleeding, i have noticed some white specs in my stool. i can't tell if it's parasites, their eggs or sunflower seeds.

if i understand correctly, the igG test does not rule out parasites as a cause, entirely, although it minimizes the likelihood of it. but, as with celiac and ibd, you'd think that i'd be experiencing general malabsorption, and not an iron-specific problem, and that's not the case.

my post for april 8th is my second record, inri021. 

there will be some compilation records to follow, but this is the last entry in period 1.2. 

as with the first record, the reconstruction of the second record is fully instrumental.

=====

the second record was always a...second record. see, the phenomenon of the underperforming second record is actually well-established. i just think it's worth thinking about what a second record actually is, in order to understand this. 

a second record is necessarily the tracks that did not make it on to the first record. 

i actually tried to resist this, but i was swayed by the argument (with myself) that the tracks would otherwise be lost because i was shifting in a direction away from the electro-grunge sound, and i would eventually go back and compile them anyways. i had enough raw sound for a full record, so i released a full record. 

something that is common of second records is that they are uneven because the tracks are recorded at differing levels of attention. demos that were forgotten tend to get promoted without cause, while the tracks that show evidence of attention tend to seem overproduced, in comparison. in recompleting this record, i've paid attention to the uneven nature that the tracks initially existed in and taken an effort to close the gap where it was needed. 

i've also removed two tracks from the initial recording due to a combination of technical and artistic incompatibilities. 

while most of these songs have defined concepts underlying them, i have ejected these concepts from the final recording and left them in a series of singles, or behind altogether. i would prefer that this album be understood solely as the instrumental recording of electronic music that i am presenting it as. 

written and demoed in multiple stages from 1993-1999. initially constructed in this form in feb, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced over november and december, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. re-released & finalized on dec 15, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 9, 2020 to also include the deleted masters from 1999 and 2013 in 192 kbps mp3 only. this is my second official record; as always, please use headphones. 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996-1999, 2013-2020). as of feb 9, 2020, the release includes a 126 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013, as well as the deleted masters from 1999 and 2013 in 192 kbps mp3 only. 

released january 25, 1999 

j - guitar, effects, bass, bass synth, synthesizers, piano, octavers, drum programming, sequencing, found sound (paper crumpling), noise generators, sound design, cool edit synthesis, light-wave synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, sampling, mic noises, digital wave editing, loops, a broken tape deck, chance, production.

my iron's so low that i can't stay awake long enough to determine if my iron's so low that i need to go to the hospital.

i was actually feeling relatively good before i left, leading me to believe that the six vials they took was far too much for me to deal with.

if i go to the hospital, what are they going to do? they're going to take another blood test, first. of course. maybe give me pills...

i get paid on saturday morning, i think. i'm going to want to do some groceries on saturday morning, if so. so, if i'm going to go, i should go early on saturday morning to try to catch them when they've got a few minutes.

so, what have i learned?

the basic problem is that i'm using more iron than i'm able to process. as a basic accounting process, as a conservation problem, i'm either losing too much too fast or not taking in enough, fast enough. and, i don't know which, yet.

have i always had iron this low or is this a new thing? see, i don't know. i'm sort of "cherry-picking" data. i wish i had information going back many years, so i could see if this is unusual or not.

the fact that i'm tired and have a headache is suggesting i've lost some blood, but i don't normally get my blood taken on regular intervals, either. i could very well be sick from the blood test, itself.

but, what can i conclude from what i've done so far?

- i do not appear to be eliminating blood in my stool. i may still be bleeding (perhaps in my brain), but i don't appear to be bleeding from my gut.

- if i'm not bleeding, either i can't absorb iron or i can't process it.

so, the first thing to test for is absorption. assuming absorption...

- i learned that eating meals with large amounts of elemental iron that are also high in calcium & phytates is not allowing me to increase my iron stores.

- i also learned that supplementing with small amounts of heme iron, regularly, and with vitamin c, on an empty stomach, is not enough to increase my iron stores.

- therefore, altering my diet on it's own cannot solve this problem - i need deeper medical intervention.

i'm absorbing everything else, including b9, calcium and d. i haven't been tested for a or e or k. that makes something like celiac unlikely, as the only thing i can't absorb is iron - i don't have a general absorption problem, i have a specific iron absorption problem.

and, if it was due to blocking from calcium or the phytates or the oxalates then the meat should have helped. it has not - the decrease is continuing.

so, if it's not my diet, i'm left with:

a) i have a genetic condition that is doing something like overproducing hepcidin.

b) i have something more serious like leukemia, and i'm not able to produce enough red blood cells due to that

i don't actually menstruate, though.

at least as far as i know.

so, yes - high estrogen may be correlated with low ferritin, but that's because women menstruate, not because estrogen reduces iron storage.

rather, it seems to increase absorption, leading to what i have - relatively normal circulating iron, with critically low iron stores.

and, if i was a menstruating woman, these numbers wouldn't be a cause for concern.

just to close the thought on that, if you google the terms you'll see people try to build a correlation between estrogen decreases in menopause and ferritin increases about the same time.

while it is obvious that iron stores should increase once the post-menopausal woman stops bleeding, there's no causal relationship or known mechanism tying these things together (besides the obvious trigger mechanism). that is, ignoring the triggering process, the increase in iron doesn't seem to have anything to do with the decrease in estrogen (nor do low iron stores seem to have much to do with high estrogen levels). that's an example of an easily intuited and absolutely valid correlation, without any concept of causality underlying it.

rather, the link i posted discussed the actual chemistry, the actual mechanism, how it actually works, and what their conclusion is is actually the opposite of that - because women that produce estrogen also menstruate, high estrogen levels are both associated with increases in bleeding and with increases in iron absorption. so, if you take away the bleeding, what's left is the absorption.

of course, i might be bleeding somewhere else, after all....in which case, the fact that my blood work actually looks a whole lot like i'me menstruating would be borne out in parallel.

on top of that, if it's genetic, as i suspect it is at this point, then it probably has to do with the same hormone.  estrogen suppresses this hormone, which causes increases in absorption; if i'm overproducing it due to genetics, it could be the cause of the problem.

....in which case, i need to find a way to suppress it more, and that could very well be by taking more estrogen.

i already posted about how low testosterone should increase ferritin, and this study suggests that high estrogen should also do the same thing.

and, if you think about that, it makes sense - women need more iron then men because they bleed more often. on a regular schedule, in fact. so, when i point to studies suggesting that hormone therapy should increase rather than decrease iron stores, there's some good, clear thinking, there.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3380311/

listen - if i came in with a specific problem, and somebody could tie it to the hormones, i'd think it through and react and adjust.

but, the science around iron and female hormones suggests the opposite concern - that estrogen supplementation & testosterone suppression should make my body more efficient with iron, and not less so.

in fact, women will often be asked to go off the pill when testing for iron, because it may interfere with the results by boosting it.

so, let's rule this out, immediately. it doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. in fact, it's the opposite of what you'd expect - both via the existing science and via common sense.

i'm going to send my doctor a fax and ask him to mail it to me or print it for me for pick up...

if i end up going to the er, they should have access to the system, right?

maybe i can get them to print the results.

celiac is a bullshit, hipster non-disease that bourgeois liberals invented to sell gluten-free bread.

i don't have it because it doesn't exist.

and, the bottom line is this: i didn't consent to having my results withheld.

that's the sole, important concern here: my consent. my choice. what i want. 

and, nobody even asked.

it's pathetic.

i'm not going to consent to any sort of treatment unless i research it first. i've seen how these doctors work - they just google everything. i can do that myself, and i trust my own judgement better than theirs.

what i''m going to do if i show up at the doctor's office without getting the chance to review the results myself is ask the doctor to print the results off, rebook and come back once i have.

i'm more frustrated by the stupidity of the system than angry at the lack of access, but i can get very annoying if they're going to force me to be.

let's try to understand what i have directly in front of me, first. my next follow-up isn't until the 21st so i have time to figure it out. or, at least i think i do...so long as i don't run out of iron...

so, i just slept for 15 hours and i'm still feeling exhausted. i guess i know why, now.

if i thought that checking my iron with blood tests every few weeks was a good idea, maybe it isn't.

i need to eat and figure out what these results mean, but i'm finding the fact that they're incomplete to be rather enraging. it's my blood, my results. what kind of an idiot would decide that i don't have the right to see my own blood results? what kind of backwards society would argue for such stupidity?

so, i'd like to call the lab and yell at them, but google canceled the outbound calling feature, and i'll have to either figure that out or use a pay phone to call them. ugh.

so, this week is not going to be what i wanted it to be.

first, i need to eat.

i think this result qualifies as weird.

there's some tests missing for my liver function, but those come back fine before. maybe i'll check again in a bit.

so, my ferritin has decreased from 12 to 9 to 6 over the last few weeks, indicating i am rapidly losing iron stores.

eating meat has not reversed the decline.

for now, my circulating iron is ok, but for how much longer? it seems like i'm running out. is that possible?

i may need to get to the er.

i think i should still be getting more than i need, even factoring in the walking. 

ugh.

i'm just sitting and waiting, i can't plan the rest of the week until i know the outcome.

dammit, i should have got him to check for a reticulocyte count. next time.

i talked to my doctor today and his best guess was celiac, but it doesn't really add up. 

as i await my blood test results, i'm left with another question - am i walking and biking my iron out? it's a real thing, apparently - you lose it in the balls of your feet, so cyclists and runners need even more iron than normal.

i got the test right away and should get the email any minute.

deathtokoalas

what he said ending about 24:00 was that he's trying to undo the divide and conquer of the ruling class in favour of building a class consciousness.

i consider glenn a right libertarian with leftist characteristics. and, this will come out over and over again when you prod him - he'll use lefty sort of language, but always ends up as a market libertarian in the end. it's maybe something akin to a moderate proudhonianism.

but he's right to point out that he sees himself as post-ideology, and that he's not going to hold himself to any particular theoretical framework.

===

deathtokoalas

i don't know anything about the trans person being referenced, but, as a trans person, i think it would be disingenuous to suggest there was anything disrespectful in this particular exchange. i get misgendered  all of the time, and it's generally not difficult to figure out whether it's being done with malice or not. conversely, you can often hear the dripping sarcasm underlying what i would consider to be a correct gendering. i'm going to run into a lot of pushback when is say this, but it really is all about context. on top of that, i would even refer to myself as a male in the timeframe that existed before i went on hormones, so referring to this person using female pronouns when discussing her existence as a female is not just fine but technically correct, imo. for all of these reasons, the existing social convention is to ask rather than to make assumptions. and, we're going to react on a spectrum that reflects our personalities - personally, unless i think you're intentionally doing it to get under my skin and piss me off, i'm likely to ignore it as inconsequential. because i don't give a fuck what you think, anyways...

====

deathtokoalas

i just want to put the chomsky thing into that little extra context though, because chomsky was, of course, at one time known for advancing the exact opposite argument - that we have a one-party system of corporate domination and it doesn't matter who wins. i'm not sure exactly when he switched that argument, but it seems to have been at some point during the (second) bush administration, and he cites some study that is a literature review (you can look it up) to back up the point. so, we're actually in the awkward position of citing chomsky for both sides of this debate. i'm going to actually flip the argument over on him and suggest that his study is dated. maybe there was some difference in the 80s and even the 90s, but there doesn't seem to even be a small difference anymore. and, it's even worth wondering if jill stein was right when she suggested that clinton might have even been worse than trump on a number of things, even as she might have been better on others. either way, it might be useful to ask for an update on that study whenever you see it cited.

al

Chomsky did that Mondale and Dukakis also. According to Arron Matte.

deathtokoalas

this is a direct quote from chomsky in 1988, and you can see that he doesn't think it matters much:

Sometimes. I tend to vote more at lower levels: school councils and so on. The reason is that there, you find some real choices. Quite often, it's going to make a difference to the schools whether X or Y gets in. As one goes up the ladder I tend, by and large, to vote less. At the presidential level, things rarely matter much. Sometimes I do vote in presidential elections - albeit holding my nose. For example, I think voting for Reagan made things somewhat worse than voting for, say, Carter or Mondale. Voting for Bush makes things slightly worse than voting for Dukakis.

These decisions are often extremely difficult to make. To tell you the truth, the first time I ever voted in a presidential election was 1964, and then I voted against Goldwater, because I thought a vote for Goldwater would mean a vote for escalating the war in Vietnam. I learned later that while the election was going on, Lyndon Johnson was sending emissaries to his friends like Lester Pearson, explaining to them how he was going to escalate the war in Vietnam in precisely the way he was denouncing Goldwater for talking about doing. Pearson approved, incidentally. He told Johnson he shouldn't use nuclear weapons; conventional bombing would suffice. That's the sort of thing you get the Nobel Peace Prize for.

In 1968, I just couldn't figure it out. I mean, the marginal difference between Nixon and Humphrey - I couldn't make a decision. The major issue, on which virtually everything else turned, was terminating the war in Indochina. My own guess was that Nixon would probably do it a bit faster than Humphrey, which in retrospect is probably correct. But I couldn't make a choice, so I didn't vote. And so it goes.

====

and, you can find myriad quotes from him where he describes the parties as interchangeable.

so, perhaps his thinking only evolved slightly from the 70s to the 00s, but it wasn't until kerry that he started actively backing democrats, using this lesser evils argument and citing this study that you can look up yourself.

i guess maybe his intuition that the democrats were a little bit better was always there, but he didn't actively make the point until he was armed with that study to do it with. and, if you pushed him in the 70s or 80s or 90s, he would have always ultimately pointed out that the differences are negligible.

the better the case i'm able to build, the more corrupt the reaction - that's what i'm realizing.

it actually seems like somebody came in here and tried to delete some files off some of my external drives. it's weird the way they did it, but they left this directory skeleton...

i back everything up. in multiple places. i don't think i'm missing anything.

regardless, it's unsettling to realize that the police are sneaking into your apartment and deleting your court documents, in an apparent attempt to eliminate evidence of their own corruption.

this appears to be a force that is going to go down shooting - they'll never admit anything, they'll take the lies and corruption to their graves.

my best suggestion with the stream is to get the volume on playback as high as you can get it, which may mean feeding into an amp at a middle volume. 

i'm listening to the stream from a chromebook feeding into a stereo receiver, and i'm having difficulties with it, myself. the frequencies i'm expecting just aren't there.

that track - boogeyman - is overwhelmingly harmonically complicated, and the mp3 will ruin it.

i don't want to upload high quality mixes to youtube. so, you'll have to take my word for it - the flacs are an entirely different piece of music.

as before, i have to save the blogs on the 90s laptop, which just can't deal with javascript. so it is slooooooow.

now that that's done, though, i need to reorganize my recording pc in a way that files the items. i largely didn't do that before, because i didn't have it set up. but, i do now.

today's post is inri020, and the last single from period 1.2.

=====

i intended this release to be a short single to house a vocal mix of this track, the reconstructed album mix and all of the historical versions. but, it really came back to life on me when i started mixing it. as i was mixing the track, i was cognizant of the fact that it is both the last release in this string of reconstructed singles and the oldest song that i have a recording of. i felt myself coming full circle. 

something that i think is actually unique to this track is that i wrote it while i was still living with my mom. that dates the track to when i was in grade 7, that is to 1993 or 1994. i was twelve or thirteen years old at the time and the lyrics very much reflect it. above all else, i felt it imperative that i maintain the innocence of the track. 

the track documents a routine that was actually very formative on how i perceive the world around me. when i was even younger, around ten or so, there was a nightly routine around sunset where my mom would yell at me to go lock the door before the boogeyman came in to get us. but, she'd be a little dramatic about it. kind of a... 

mom: shhh. do you hear that? 

me: it's getting dark, maybe it's... 

mom: it's the boogeyman! go run and lock the door before he comes in and gets us! 

so, i'd get up and run to the front door and lock it, peering out to make sure there was nobody there. 

i don't think i ever thought a boogeyman existed, but i didn't grow up in an affluent neighbourhood and i was well aware of the dangers of straying too far from home after night. i didn't understand much about drugs or gangs at the time, i just knew that sometimes people died of gunshot wounds outside and didn't want to be stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. it was legitimately important to block off entrance points. 

the run had a bit of a rush of adrenaline-based fear to it, because the hallway was dark. getting to the door and back could at times be a little scary. 

the fear was very real; i can still feel it, if i remember back to it. it would not begin to rise until i exited the living room, but would then escalate slowly until i got to the door - at which point it would suddenly spike. this would give me an extra boost of adrenaline to get back into the living room with. it was *always* the run back into the living room that was the scariest, because you never knew if they beat you to the door, and were just waiting for you to lock yourself in and then jump on you when you're cornered. 

i think that this daily experience probably underlies my heightened level of caution towards risk. i don't reject risk; i've taken a lot of risks over my life. but, i assess it pretty brutally. i seek out worst case scenarios; i plan around assumptions of failure, to ensure necessities are never interrupted for. what it taught me is that risk must be a consequence of security, and not in antagonism with it. 

the original demo version, recorded in 1996, is really the only track from the first cassette that can be salvaged without alteration, however accidentally. i was trying to create an eerie lullabye, a kind of banshee song. through the cumulative process of endless modifications over many months, it ended up sounding like an unfinished progressive rock song - or perhaps a campfire song for existential nihilists. but, what i captured without realizing it at the time was that i sound like the child that i was. for that reason, i consider this version of the track to capture it's essence more accurately than the 1998 or 1999 versions did. i wanted to recapture that essence and re-apply it to the final version. 

perhaps what happened with the initial recreation is understandable, in the context of what i've discovered about the track, in hindsight. at the end of 1997, i got a new four-track recorder for christmas. i had spent the entire fall programming on an ry30 that i was given to compensate for the loss of the drum kit. when you get new gear, it's first use is always experimental; i used this track as my training wheels in breaking in the new setup, and largely discarded the outcome. 

the track got dropped because i'd come to hate it because i thought of it as cutesy and childish. isn't that what happens when we enter our late teens? if i look back on the initial recording and claim it's essence is intrinsically connected with my age at the time of it's recording, does it not follow that i must have despised it as i sought to define myself in opposition to my child-self? 

indeed, it specifically was the vocals that i hated. so, i resolved to ruin them through deadpan and atonality and guitar effects. but, once i had done so, i did not like the outcome and rejected the track for the first record. when i recorded the vocals a second time in early 1999 to complete it for my second record, i merely toned down the concept of annihilating the cutesiness in the vocal delivery, leaving a result that is no more engaged and only arguably preferable. 

i may have been experimenting with the gear when i recorded the parts, but the tapes digitized very well for the reconstruction project in 2015. there's enough space in the track to allow the modern guitar & bass & synth plugins to function almost on a clean recording. the remix process allowed me to rediscover the eerie, psychedelic nature of the track and take it closer to it's intended conclusion of constructing a feeling of empty dread and uncertainty. 

on sequencing the instrumental remaster of the second record in late 2016, i decided that there was an excess of silence at the beginning of the track that needed to be cut off in order to place it into the proper flow of the record. so, i opened it up in cubase and cut the appropriate section of silence out. i was then distracted by something, and returned to the project unable to remember if i had actually cut the silence or not. in order to check, i re-imported the file. the logic is that if they are out of phase then the cut was made. this was the case, but i immediately made the connection, on playback, to the echo being representative of coming footsteps and sought to expand the idea further. 

this resulted in a series of remixes that take the track increasingly out of phase, along with increasing adornments, and then climax in manipulating the speed of the tape as a supplementary effect to increase the disorientation. these were arranged into a sequence of increasing, and then decreasing, complexity. 

before i went off on this tangent, i was planning on reconstructing a vocal mix with the reconstruction from tape as the base soundscape. but, all of a sudden, i now had a dozen versions to pick from. i decided that the best thing to do was to experiment. this led to me mixing several of the remixes together, which is the final instrumental out for the record. 

the vocal recordings i had from 1997 were unusable, so i had to redo them. but, this was an opportunity to regain the essence of the track by reintroducing a sense of innocence to the oppressive electronics and elusive guitars. my initial plan was to use a solitary voice, but i found that it did not mix well into the same frequency range as the interlock of stereo-spectrum guitars, so i instead recorded the track multiple times and set each recording to a different space in the spectrum. this creates a natural "chorus" effect on playback that blurs the frequency and better allows the vocals to compete with the guitars. i then thickened the chorus further by pitch-shifting it up an octave, which brought in the child-like innocence that i sought for the vocals. 

as i was redoing the vocal part, i rejected the track a final time. at 35, why was i singing vocals i wrote when i was 12? is this clinical? but, i followed through with it to close the circle. inri is forever done. 

initially written in 1993. first full recording in 1996. recreated in dec, 1997 and again in jan, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed on july 2, 2015. remixed on july 15, 2015. reconceptualized & remixed repeatedly over november & december, 2016. released & finalized on dec 13, 2016. as always, please use headphones. 

the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2015, 2016). 

released january 15, 1999 

j - guitars, effects, bass, pick scrapes, drum kit, drum programming, digital wave editing, vocals, vocal relics, production

so, this is beginning to exit the realm of islamic mythology and beginning to enter the realm of western history. there's still some funny shit, but it's fading out; i'm going to wait to comment.

the one thing i want to say as i finish my eggs and leading into the next period is this - karma's a bitch, isn't it?

this is also where the islamic mythology stops being silly and starts interfering with real history, which is partly what it's engineered to do. the almoravids would actually agree with me, in suggesting that islamic spain wasn't that different than the rest of europe, in a lot of ways. but, when you approach the situation with this near-myth of islamic tolerance, these punitive taxes don't come off as retribution but as aggression. it's only in recognizing the nature of the caste system (with it's punitive taxes) put in place by the muslims that the punitive taxes enacted by the christians in response, once they took over, can be seen as retribution; if you weren't presented with it that way, you might almost even see it as a reason to take the side of the almoravids, who were there to liberate the muslims from these barbarians and their vicious taxes.

cheek-turning aside, he gets the point across that there was still substantive resistance to islamic rule in the 11th century, even if he skips the opportunity to point out that the heavy taxes were a little bit of their own medicine. 

the reconquista gets a lot of shit from the contemporary fake-left, and it's partly in not understanding the context, due to having the issue framed in a biased manner. oppressive taxation is one thing, but i can tell you that i wouldn't have any problem standing in solidarity with anybody fighting against these almoravids - for as long as it took to drive them back into the sea.

if you want objectivity and facts, then asking a culture to narrate it's own past is the worst way to arrive at the truth.

if you look at central germany or the areas up along the russian rivers like the dnieper and don in the year 300 and compare it the year 1300, they made major progress. kiev hit it's high point in that period; berlin wasn't founded until around the year 1300. the same is true in france and england, even if the difference is a little less.

but, that was not true in spain, which at best underwent stagnation through the period. it's not true in the arab heartland, either, which limps to the mongol destruction event having barely managed to convert all of the greek literature to arabic, while adding little to nothing of it's own.

it's important to compare apples to apples, here - and not confuse stagnation from a very high point of civilization as a superior level of development over rapid generation from a point of almost nothingness.

a good way to understand this is to look at china vs the united states, today. yes, america is still ahead by a good horse-length. but, look at the progress made in china....

in absolute terms, what comes out of northern europe in this period is admittedly pretty weak, but it's also leaps and bounds over what existed there a millennia previously. and, that rapid growth would continue throughout the dark ages, as the south continued to stagnate and decline - until it was eclipsed altogether.

so, who writes these histories that frame the narrative in this arab-good, german-bad sort of way? the answer is musiims. and, that's what you get for letting people tell their own history, rather than allowing scholarship to take over.

let's hope he learned his lesson and things are better from here.

so, here's some critical thinking. nice to hear...

my take on this is that it is somewhere between a myth & an exaggeration - more than exaggeration, but not quite ungrounded enough to be myth. the problem is less about when people point to spain as a somewhat more literate society than existed around them, and more about when they try to give them credit for it, as the latter is mostly unjustified.

the video at least points out the importance of the byzantine influence, which is the missing ingredient in many of the narratives, which may credit the jews somewhat, but go something along the lines of "advanced arabs conquer primitive savages and protect spain from dark age, thereby creating renaissance". that sort of thinking is largely myth, but it's caricatured for a reason - you only really hear it from religious clerics and arab nationalists, whose voices are amplified by the contemporary culture, which trains us to defer to them rather than challenge then.

as mentioned previously, spain was a developed part of the empire, so anybody that took it over by force was given a pretty good head start in terms of building something new. it's consequently rather disingenuous to try to compare spain to france or britain, which spent the roman occupation period trying to overthrow imperialist rule. rather, you want to compare spain to other parts of the ancient world - italy, greece, egypt, the levant. and, how does spain fare when compared against it's contemporaries in alexandaria, or baghdad, or constantinople? not terribly, but not spectacularly. in that context, spain becomes it's name in arabic - the ass end of the earth. somewhat of a backwater, really...

i mean, one of the stories he mentions here is that the byzantines had to send monks to teach them to read greek - which is exactly the same problem that happened in italy, and exactly the thing that needed to be reversed to bring on the renaissance.

inventions like paper (which came from china) and base-10 numerals (which are indian in origin) may have come to europe through spain, but they may just as well have come through constantinople or even across the steppes. that spain was at the end of the trade routes shouldn't assign them any special status. and, al-khwarizmi was a persian in baghdad who was mostly reinterpreting existing greek science, rather than coming up with anything of his own - although he is one of a small number of persian and kurdish mathematicians that can be credited with original ideas (most of them, in truth, can actually not be - they were translators, rather than innovators).

on that note, it's worth pointing out why all these greek texts ended up in arabic in the first place.

when the muslims took over, they inherited a greek world - and inherit, they did. the arabs got all of the big libraries of the ancient world almost instantly, and nearly by chance.  everything was written in greek. they seemed to realize that they'd just get conquered by the culture in the end, if they didn't uproot it. on top of that, they found a lot of disagreements in the existing greek literature, in terms of how it related to their new religion. they wanted a book burning, but they wanted to keep the good stuff, too.

so, what they actually did - and they did do this, as crazy as it sounds - is go through these huge libraries book-by-book and either burn the parts they didn't like or translate the parts they liked to arabic. once the texts by the authors they liked - which included aristotle, quite predominantly - were translated, the original greek was then burned.

so, we give the muslims credit for saving the books? no, they burnt the damned books! and, what was left had to be translated back from arabic, because they burned all the greek.

so, it's within that context that you have greek monks being sent to spain to teach the people there greek, after the culture had done everything they could to destroy it. did you think they just forgot because they were barbarians? no - the arabs burnt all the greek books, except the ones in the empire; there was no longer any utility in learning greek, unless you lived in greece. oops.

the fact that he has to bring in persian mathematicians and inventions from china and india, rather than point to the original work of intellectuals in islamic spain itself, should amplify the point - spain may have been doing fairly well when compared to the undeveloped areas outside of the empire, but it was actually largely a laggard within the remnants of the empire itself. 

he hasn't brought up the renaissance myth yet...so i'll beat him to it...

while spain may have held some books, the event that really set off the renaissance was actually back-migration from constantinople to italy, which set in after 1204. the city was toast well before 1452, and people started leaving it, as refugees, in streams. some went north to russia, others in fact went to spain and the bulk of them went back to rome - because they were romans, in identity. they brought the more advanced culture of the late empire back to italy with them, and it mostly went from there. to the extent that anything found itself back to italy via spain in the arabic language, it would have been supplementary - and i don't want to downplay it, because that means it was probably the last chance to save it. but, it was the last chance, and not the driving influence. and, who created the problem in the first place?

what the arabs did leave spain was the culture of barbarism that developed in the region during and after the reconquista. the exaggerated almost-myth of islamic tolerance is really a reaction to the inquisition; it's a compare and contrast essay, but it misses the point - it was the arabs that laid the basis for the inquisition in their caste system of religious hierarchy, their extortion schemes and their punitive taxation. they seemed to have a thing for crucifying christians, they seemed to like the irony. worse, the extortion scheme is not "like organized crime"; this is the actual, historical origin of organized crime! it is the muslims that built the slave trade in africa that the spaniards would inherit and use to export africans to america - and they did it not based on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their religious observation. none of this would have happened if not for the arab presence, and their insistence on treating people differently based on their faith.

but, did some last gasp of empire, however perverted, hold out in the south of spain, no doubt in hopes of an eventual reunification with the fatherland? sure. for a while. just don't give it more credit than it earned - ground the analysis in actual fact, and realize that the similarities between spain and the rest of europe are pretty powerful as well, and that, while the peninsula may have experienced a less brutal dark age, it didn't escape it altogether. islamic spain was also a dark age society and should ultimately be treated like one.

so, this is better, but it's like he had a eureka moment when it clicked in that wait-a-minute, this is all bullshit. and, i wonder if he regrets publishing the first part of the series, if my analysis actually hits harder than i realized....

so, i got my fans in and it's not a moment too late - i woke up feeling groggy and coughing from the stale air. the halted one has loosened up substantially, but isn't spinning yet.

i now have backups for the fans in the two main spaces and will need to stay on it if any of them break.

that means i can do a serious clean tonight, after 19:00.

it's absolutely beautiful out, but there's nothing to do, nowhere to go. i'm not a beach or park person, i need a concert to get to or would rather sit inside. but, it's very sad - like something out of a zappa record. but, all i can do is sit inside and cry.

i'm not going to start on august until after my appointment. 

see, there's a point around 10:00 where he suddenly gets extremely skeptical, in an almost sarcastic kind of manner, and there's two things about this i want to take note of:

1) it really does demonstrate a suspension of disbelief

2) it indicates an exceedingly strong bias

this guy is a nihilist, in the classic nietzschean sense. well, i don't want to call him a fascist - that's a little too much. but, he glorifies dominance and submission; he's adhering to a master morality, and that was common in the ancient world. he identifies with these muslim conquerors, and their spencerian vanquishing of the weak. so, when somebody gets in the way of his social darwinist fantasies, they get showered with scorn and derision.

if i were to act the part of the professor, i'd have to tell him he's a bad historian - he's not even trying to be objective. but, these are designed for entertainment, rather than scholarship, and that's not useful - what's useful is to point that fact out.

i wish he had applied this glimpse of skepticism more rigorously throughout  the series. alas...

...for, it is now almost done, and i'd might as well follow through with it.

so, i have reuploaded the files for doc201307-2 - which is the july, 2013 music journal (part 2). i started in mid-july...

however, i'm not going to post a re-release because, while the travel blog is now 142 pages and the dtk blog had some minor additions (albeit with a page decrease due to the reformatting), there is no substantive addition here to the music journal; it's fifty pages shorter, but essentially the same document. i've simply noted that i've reuploaded to fix the formatting....

======

i first decided to remove myself from facebook some time around the end of 2013, not due to any kind of security concern but due to being fed up by the terrible interface and incredibly slow servers. a few years later, i found myself with a similar desire to extricate myself from the youtube comments section, as the interface changes made it almost impossible to actually use. but, old habits die hard, and it took several attempts before i could really pry myself off, not having any kind of permanent success until i designated the migration as a time-wasting tactic while i successfully kicked the tobacco addiction, in the first half of 2016. this left me with thousands of pages of writing that i was going to need to eventually repost to a more user-friendly platform, which ended up being the blogger interface on google. faced with the need to build liner notes for my very first recording at the end of 1996, it was at the beginning of 2017 that i first sat down with the intent to rebuild my music journal as a singular whole, with the eventual plan of cutting it up and appending it in instalments within the discography. 

my life hit a roadblock in the middle of 2017 as a consequence of a shift in ownership of the building i was living in, which led to multiple legal battles (still ongoing) and two separate moves. the situation eventually worked itself out for the better, but it slowed me down dramatically and left me with a very large back log in working through the loose ends around closing my first two period discs that i am only finally beginning to clear in the spring of 2019. this added period of reflection has allowed me to think this through over and over, and add increasing levels of detail to the journal, and subsequent pending liner notes. while not every month is going to be equally exciting, the level of detail in what was initially a journal is now more like a series of novellas. the first entry, which is only the second half of july, is 176 pages long. 

i am not going to summarize the story, but it is available on the web over here: musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/07/. 

this is a compilation of written correspondences that includes facebook posts, messenger chats and emails with friends and family members, in an attempt to build the context around my move from ottawa to windsor in early august, 2013. this was a pretty heavy two weeks, and the narrative consequently has an arc of it's own, but the story being told here is how i rebuilt my studio over the second half of 2013. the contents of this download are the dummy track, a word doc file and a pdf file, both written in a more readable, chronological ordering. i've also added the respective files for my other three blogs, for general interest. 

the events documented in this journal occurred in july, 2013 and were compiled into a narrative in several stages over the years 2014-2019. journal completed on mar 31, 2019. released and finalized in doc and pdf format on april 14, 2019. re-uploaded in reformatted version on april 6, 2021. doc201307. 

released august 1, 2013 

j - editing, participant 

esa - participant 

illuminous - participant 

mom - participant 

sister - participant 

nana - participant 

step-mother - participant 

the youngest aunt - participant 

jeff - participant 

dad - participant

======

the item is available for free on smashwords, but the formatting is somewhat busted:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026388

or you can just view the embed here:

if you find this compelling, consider throwing me a few dollars via whatever method you'd like on the sidebar, including potentially by wiring some cash directly to death.to.koalas@gmail.com.

the body of water behind me in the shot would be the ottawa river; the picture was taken in the britannia bay area of ottawa.

this picture got lost in the posting frenzy and didn't end up in the july, 2013 archive because it was posted in 2011.

but i'm going to post it here for now:

i'm about 6, maybe 7.

always loved the bicycles.

you'd never see me wear a leather jacket past the age of about 10.

ok, so this will be done by sunrise.

today's post is a big one - inri019, my second symphony.

note that this flips over into 1999, now.

===

this is the final section of the last proper inri demo, which was written as somewhat of a suite, but only in a fleeting moment, and then forgotten. it's a sort of sardonic take on the jesus story, in that it follows a persecuted person through a suicide and a resurrection, with tongue in cheek commentary. 

initially, it was a song suite about being young and not listened to, culminating in a rather dramatic overreaction - that i ridiculed as counter-productive, partly by reference to kurt cobain, whose suicide is an event that hangs over the childhood of my generation. people that were adults at the time might want to think of it in the same way that they interpreted watching kennedy get his brains blown out on live tv. as i grew up (stated loosely - i was still 17/18, here), i realized this is a general condition of society that is not limited to young people. so, i generalized it to reflect the illusion of what we call "democracy", and gave it an exaggerated persecution complex. the cynicism was targeted at the clinton administration, but in a broader sense i'm sort of ridiculing the rather cartoonish perception of generation x as this kind of raelian mass of fatalist children.... 

my final vocal edit for viewless focuses on a small part of the verse and cuts the chorus out altogether. i then distribute that small part into the rest of the song by cutting it up into parts and pasting those parts in where i want. this drops the more general commentary, which seems like an anachronism, in favour of refocusing the listener on the direct storyline of individual persecution and self-inflicted martyrdom. for suicide, i left the vocal track largely in tact, except to remove the suicide note, which in hindsight also seems like a giant distraction from the satirical storyline. what's left is more direct. 

i also want to note that there was a conscious decision to move to a more recited vocal style on the 1999 rerecording (and subsequent 2016 reconstruction), rather than the screamy style that dominates the initial 1996 demo. at the time, i considered screaming to be sort of contrived and passe. the recitation is actually a very considered reaction to something i interpreted as largely cartoonish. i was certainly still heavily influenced by the screamy stuff i grew up with, but it wasn't a characteristic of much of anything i was attracted to after about '97 or so and actually something that i really wanted to distance myself from. 

i've pulled back from insisting on recited vocals in order to minimize that contrivedness, but the truth is that the vast majority of music released after about '97 that has screamed vocals very much *is* contrived. time has only cemented my rejection of falsely emotionalized vocals in punk-derived genres. 

written and demoed from 1996-1999. initially constructed in this form in january, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. sequenced on nov 22-24, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. released on nov 24, 2016. release finalized on nov 27, 2016. this is my second symphony; as always, please use headphones. 

section one ("epilag"): initially created in early 1999. remastered on nov 23, 2016. 

section two ("viewless"): initially written in 1996. recreated over 1998 and finalized in dec, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 19, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on dec 29, 2015. sequenced nov 22, 2016. vocals added on nov 23, 2016. corrected to remove an errand click on nov 24, 2016. 

section three ("anticipation"): background noise built in 1996. rebuilt in late 1998. edited in late 2013. remastered on nov 24, 2016. 

section four ("suicide"): initially written in 1996. recreated over 1998 and finalized in dec, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 20, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on dec 27, 2015. sequenced nov 22, 2016. vocals added on nov 23, 2016. 

section five ("resurrection"): initially written and recorded on january 4, 1999. 

the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016).

released january 13, 1999 

j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, electric piano, vocals, drum kit, drum programming, sequencing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, light-wave synthesis, noise generators, sound design, loops, tapes, digital wave editing, production

let me do one last read through before i try to convert it at the word site and put it away...

so, i diffed the music journal with one dated to april, 2019 and all i found was a handful of corrected typos.

it is, however, 50 pages shorter due to a correction in the formatting method.

a part of the reason this is so challenging is that i left so many files half done - and i really, really didn't want to do that, but with my laptop dying on me every other day, and my brain just turning off about midway through last summer...

i'm sure that the file i just cleaned up is the same file as is on the blog spot site and i'm sure it's comprehensive relative to the master document. but, did i actually change it at all? or did i just reformat it? i don't know.

so, i think the best thing i can do is run what i've got through a compare in notepad++ with these various other files i've got and see what it comes up with, then make sure it;s complete and put all of the other versions away.

again - i wish i did this last year. but i didn't. it's the last step; it has to be.

ok, so july is done - and that should be the longest one. i filled the travel blog out a little further, added a few things to the dtk section and fixed a large amount of typesetting issues. this is done done done done. final. permanent. kaput...

i just want to run through to check for typos before i reupload it everywhere.

but, i was thinking a little about what this flashpoint guy (i don't see his name anywhere, although he seems to live in san francisco) is doing, and it's tying back into the said. in truth, this is the perfect example of orientalism.

i previously accused him of not being an expert, but he seems to have some historical training; what i meant is that he's not an expert in that time frame. rather, his expertise appears to be connected more to american and european military history, and specifically in the post-enlightenment period. so, he's approaching this as an amateur, but he seems like he should know what he's doing.

that comes out in how he approaches islamic vs western history, the latter in it's fullest generality. when he talks about western history, he has a critical mindset and a skeptical approach - as he was no doubt trained to have. but, when he approaches islamic history, he takes it nearly on face value, with only the slightest bit of critical thought. i mean, he mentions a few times that it sounds hard to believe, but then he just goes with it anyways...

so, i'm not accusing him of naivete. he doesn't seem to believe anything he's narrating.

rather, he's approaching this with kid gloves, and it's not helpful. instead, it's exposing a level of benevolent racism, in it's application of different standards of analysis. in the west, we can have critical thinking and skepticism and scientific methods, but those backwards arabs can just hold to their mythology and shouldn't be challenged on it. so, it's a hierarchy of analysis that places islam at the bottom of the academy, in terms of methodology, and it's based on othering the orient as different and exotic - and therefore not subject to western critiques.

it's for that reason that i'm trying to point out over and over again that the muslims really have never been this exotic thing. yes, they came from the outskirs of western culture, but so did the germans and the russians. their religion is not this weird foreign thing at all; they adopted a greco-semitic syncretism that was so similar to contemporary christianity that it was readily adopted by romans across wide swaths of territory, at least at first. he uncritically recounts a story where the caliph threatens heraclius with the fate of arians without realizing that the early christian sources essentially saw islam as a heretical form of christianity, and that accusations of arianism were actually fairly widespread - and reasonably grounded. that story is probably projection. so, it took some time for divisions to develop, and a bird's eye survey of the history in a broad sense should really fold islam into the history of the west, not as this distant other from the east. islam is not the east; hinduism and offshoots of it are the actual, real east.

and, if islam is a part of western culture then western methods should be used to deconstruct their histories as the myths and legends that they are.

as mentioned previously, it doesn't help that islamic histories consistently try to argue that the dark age didn't apply to them, that they existed outside of it in some kind of special status. it's obvious why they do this - this is where their civilization started, and writing it off as a dark age mythology means writing off the religion, itself. but, i mean, who cares? if it's wrong, it's wrong; if it's myth, it's myth. what do i care if it destroys their religion or not? i don't. what it masks is that their own histories are in many cases a better example of dark age ignorance than anything that happened in western europe. and, the kid gloves just reinforce the nonsense.

so, he may think he's doing them a favour, but he isn't - these different standards of analysis are racist, and we should be applying the same methods to all aspects of the dark ages, not giving the islamic side of it some kind of pass because they're different.

if i was hoping for a secular history grounded in skepticism, this isn't it. but, it's not his point of focus, and we'll have to see if he gets better or not.

i should point out that, for all my red shit, which is something that i've tested enough for that i've decided is beeturia rather than bleeding, my urine is constantly a very endearing shade of yellow - and that's supposed to indicate proper absorption. that is, if i'm having difficulty with iron absorption, it's supposed to come out in the urine, not the stool. but it isn't....

this is all just very weird.

i got almost nothing done yesterday - i just slept all day :(.

if i have to, i'll start eating fish, not red meat.

but, i don't want to increase my stored mercury with my stored iron. is enough circulating? storage shouldn't be the primary metric, circulating iron should be. this test strikes me as being of limited value. that doesn't mean that my circulating iron is sufficient, but i want to test it and base my further actions on it.

i don't need stored iron if my circulating iron is fine.

and, i'll need to do the research and figure it out - can i find fish that are produced in an isolated enclave to minimize mercury pollution that have sufficient levels of iron to make it worthwhile?

you'd have to pay me to eat that shit...

it's terrible for you.

but, i'm awake now. i'm going to get some coffee and do some work before i make breakfast.

steak is the single most disgusting meal that exists.

 i'd rather be a little iron deficient than eat steak

if anything, the meat is making me more tired.

this isn't intended to be permanent, so if there's an adjustment period, it's going to flip over as it's soon as it clicks in.

i don't think it's working, but we'll see. what's more important is a circulating iron test.

and, no i'm not going to start eating red meat. yuck.

today's post is inr018.

===

this track represents my first serious attempt to break out of the synth-pop sound i'd been developing over the first half of 1998 and into the more epic electro-noise-rock that defines the next period. while i'd been careening in this direction the whole time, and the track is ultimately a failed experiment, this is really the portal i go through that ultimately opens the way for what follows. 

conceptually, the track was initially meant to mock the news cycle; the circus riff was tongue-in-cheek. you can imagine wolf blitzer and judy woodruff getting out of their clown cars and reading their teleprompter, type of thing. while i've eliminated the vocals from the official release, and there were never any produced for the re-recording, the bonus tracks are both early vocal mixes. it's admittedly hard to ignore the conceptual history of the track in explaining why i have a punk song built around the circus theme, but by the time i got to re-recording the track in late 1998 i'd truly moved past the concept. 

yet, i wanted to retain the musical ideas in the track and even take it to a different level. the way the track is sequenced here retains a memory of how i wanted the track to unfold into a lengthy, multi-part epic separated by long sections of guitar-effects generated and digitally shaped ambience. this is not just an idea that would resurface in my next piece, my second symphony, but also something that would follow me for my entire musical career. these collages are crude, but this is where the idea first developed. 

conceptual issues aside, i also had a lot of difficulty getting the guitar tone i wanted for the track - a problem i really hadn't previously had. in hindsight, i think i'd just become a little more aware of the tonal options in front of me. up to this point, when i ran into the problem of the evasive tone, putting it down for a few days and approaching it fresh had always solved it, but that wasn't working this time.

then, out of the blue, there was a power outage that knocked my computer out as i was running a part of the track through an ambient transform. the track - and all the digital additions i had added to it - were largely destroyed. what was left was this completely corrupted wave file of disjointed guitar fragments. i've never been a religious person (obviously), and i don't want to say i took at as a sign or something. yet, i let chance assert itself; the corrupted wave file became the final version of the track, and i moved on to the next thing. 

the actual, proper track was then forgotten about for years. i'm only finally dusting it off now, in 2016, and releasing it here as a single, along with a collection of experimental collages that approximate what the track was meant to sound like. this ep should really be thought of as consisting of two versions of the song, separated by the two minutes of silence after the fifth track. the track was abandoned for good reason; the motif is silly. so, my frustrations with the composition shall have to be recorded in the annals of time. 

initially written in 1997. recreated and reconceptualized in late 1998. salvaged somewhat at the end of 1999. remastered in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. finalized on nov 19, 2016. final album version added as a bonus track and refinalized on dec 15, 2016. as always, please use headphones. 

the album version of this track appears on my second record, inriched (inri021): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched 

the inridiculous version of the track appears on my third record, inridiculous (inri033): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inridiculous 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1997, 1998, 2013, 2016). 

released december 1, 1998 

j - guitars, effects, bass, drum kit, synthesizers, sequencers, drum programming, noise generators, sound design, sampling, found sounds, tapes, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, loops, vocals, chance, production

so, for part four he seems to have collapsed into fluff and nonsense, and i'm not going to bother - but i'm going to give him one more chance before i move on to something more scholarly.

the source of pollution and filth was gone for the weekend but appears to be back.

i can only hope the fans get here soon.

in fact, he was almost certainly a berber pretender who's descendants concocted a fictional lineage after the fact in order to justify their dynasty. such a thing is quite common in medieval europe.

i mean, they claim he was born of a berber mother.....in damascus. right.

so, again - it's a nice story. but that's all it is.

the battles happened, but they appear to have been a part of the berber civil war that was taking place, and this guy isn't doing anybody any favours in broadcasting 1300 year old myths and propaganda.