i have no idea what strain i was buying on the black market. i know that i've been consistently disappointed by the reality that the focus on legal pot is as a pain reliever or sleep aid, and i was rarely disappointed by black market pot, which was always intended to be used recreationally.

i guess if i could figure out what the most common strains on the black market are, that would be a start to finding the combination i'm looking for.

right now, i'm enjoying a nice coffee, and hoping it wakes me up.

how was the pot, anyways?

my experience is that the quality of legal marijuana in canada has consistently been exceedingly poor due to the mass industrialization and shrink-wrapping of a product that should be available for fresh purchase. if you're happy with the marijuana industry in canada, you're probably the kind of person that buys your vegetables in plastic shrink-wrap; if you like to pick out your own tomatoes at the store, you're never going to really accept how this works, and you're just waiting for an eventual liberalization of the market.

i don't actually think that there is much of a presence of organized crime in the marijuana industry at all, actually - the illegal growing industry is largely local, and, broadly, very small scale. the primary reason that marijuana is unattractive to organized crime is that it's not addictive. it's less addictive than alcohol, even. so, it's useless to them.

i'm not fucking around - go downtown and find some pushers on the street. it's not hard to find them; you probably already know where they are, in your town. you ask them for pot, and they'll try to sell you coke or meth or e instead. they don't even carry pot, anymore.

it's not because the mark-up is too low, although i've remarked repeatedly about the lack of inflation in the cost of marijuana (it's been the same price for decades.). it's because they can't get you on it. these people don't want to sell you a five piece once a month, they want to get you addicted to a substance that is going to lead to you signing over your inheritance within a few months, or otherwise turn you into cheap labour for them. this is a business, a big business. meth will do that. coke will do that. smack will do it, too. pot is useless to them...

in however many years of buying pot on the black market, i believe i ran into a total of one baggie with a confederate flag on it as really my most difficult encounter. and, i had to go upstairs to buy it, too, before realizing what i was buying. 99% of the transactions that i carried through with were kids selling produce from somebody's basement; small-scale grow-ups, essentially. while the number of scenarios over the years has been diverse, i would hazard a guess, based on what i've experienced directly, that a numerical majority of the growers i've bought from over the years actually mostly had middle class jobs, and were trying to put away money for retirement. that's your archetypal pot dealer, in real life - it's not a 20 year old black kid in a gang, it's a middle-aged hippie trying to find some way to beat the banks and retire before he dies of lung cancer.

so, i think the justification of fighting marijuana gangs on the black market is essentially a hollywood fantasy; these don't actually exist, in real life. you're actually fighting against a bunch of 60 year old accountants that are trying to pay their over-priced mortgages down.

i have, however, stuck with the legal product for now, because i'm aware that i'm under surveillance. it hasn't been worth the risk, and it probably won't be for quite a while into the future.

but, the quality of the legal pot here is flat out awful, and if you're coming here to explicitly purchase it then you should be embarrassed by yourself. sales have crashed. the accountants are winning.

how was it, though?

i got something called unplug by soleil, as it was advertised in the upper thc range and the lower price range at the same time. the advertising was about relaxing after work, but i didn't really take it very seriously; it was just advertising, whatever, show me the actual data, that's what matters. however, in the end, what i experienced was a lot of "chill" and a lot of "relaxation", which is really not what i'm looking for in marijuana - i want a heavier buzz, and a more aggressive high that is closer, in feeling, to being drunk. i want the marijuana to make me want to get up and dance. so, i think i ultimately found the strain to be too relaxing, for my tastes. i didn't have any of the giggling attacks or moments of deeper reflection that i've associated with previous head caves; i was mostly just unusually relaxed for the last week, which is not at all what i want, and not a drug i'd have much attraction to, in the long run. above all else, i want to strenuously avoid a "couch lock" effect; i want more energy, not less.

in that sense, the last week was largely a waste of time because the pot kind of sucked.

i don't have any intention of delving into the pseudo-science of terpenes any time soon. i did what i was supposed to do, i sought out a high thc and low cbd strain, and it was too much of a relaxing or "pleasant" buzz for my tastes, regardless. what i actually need is a higher thc strain. but, i'm going to figure that out via trial and error, not by wasting time with pseudo-science.

i want to be clear: the pot was not good. too chill, too pleasant; no racing high, no buzz. no laughing or giggling, just a boring and draining "i'm tired" sort of stone. no introspection. and, it made me sleep, which is bad - good pot should actually keep you awake.

i'm hoping the pot is better in michigan, once i'm allowed to go back over again.

so, where'd the day go?

i finished up the last bit of that quarter this morning, and have been sort of vegging ever since - eating a few times, and kind of nodding off beside the laptop, as it's streaming cbc newsworld.

i was also waiting for my batteries to charge before i did a vlog catch-up.

the sleepiness-at-the-end-of-the-quarter is a known phenomenon; it takes a day or two to snap out of it, but the end result is actually an experience of clarity, as you kind of clear the clutter out and start over again. mushrooms are better at this, but i call the biyearly quarter a headcave for a reason; it's a blitz that you wake up from feeling refreshed by. eventually....

i made some coffee around 21:00 and might be able to get through the vlogging catch-up by the morning, when i need to make a lot of calls.

i'm also overdue on a long shower.

so, it might be quiet here for a while longer still, but i'm starting to wake up.

i mentioned a few weeks ago that i intended to go through the lockdown straight-edge, and i do think that that is a reasonable expectation for the rest of this. there were a few things that came together and had me make an unplanned decision for an unplanned headcave. i'm on the other side of it now, hope it helps and want to move on. soon...

right now, i want to stare at the ceiling for a while longer.

so, i'm trying to get a handle on where i need to pick up for the vlogging, and it's going all the way back to february 5th. lol. that's going to take the day, probably.

today's actually a government holiday, right?

i guess all of these calls will need to wait until tomorrow.

hey, this could have been bse, and then we'd all be talking about the insanity of factory farming.

i think that focusing on one specific species, or one culture's utilization of that species, is maybe missing the broader point, which is that the mass industrialization of meat for food produces certain challenges in terms of disease containment. it may be true that regulations around the use of certain animals for food are lacking in china, at this time, and that this is an issue that the rest of the world might want to put some pressure on the chinese to seriously remedy. but, to reduce the issue to a specific practice or a specific species would be to miss the real lesson, here.

in the end, it may be that putting proper controls on the population of bats may be the most efficient way to deal with an illegal harvesting trade that would otherwise have to be stopped with violence; that may be the choice, in the end - to forcibly stop the trade, or to accept defeat before trying, and deal with the source of the disease, instead.

for some animals, it might make sense to introduce domesticated breeding programs under controlled and vaccinated conditions.

but, don't confuse yourself - we'd have the same problems with our high concentrations of farm animals here, if we didn't regulate their care.

so, i've worked my way through enough of april to put it aside and get to the next thing in the list, which is recalibrating the vlogging.

the shows i would have likely made some attempt to go to over the first half of april are:

3rd - dana 
10th - bent knee (in ann arbor, though. maybe not.)
15th - bad religion (but pricey, so probably not.)
16th - squarepusher (for sure. moved to december.)
17th - rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto (for sure. cancelled, for now.)
18th - liturgy (probably not actually)
19th - glitch mob (strongly weather-dependant).

now that i'm caught up, i can multitask. so we're on to the next thing....

i understand that the government created a plan with the intent to sort of put the economy on pause, so that it could just roll over and start back up where it left off; however naively, that was the clear intent, and there were clearly measures introduced to implement that agenda.

but, does the government think it can pay out salaries for the next two years, while it takes in almost no revenue, itself?

i'm reading these reports of businesses that aren't eligible freaking out, and i'm just wondering how the thing is going to maintain itself, let alone how the people that don't qualify are going to fare.

that idea of a pause and restart had to be designed with the assumption that disruption would be short, which contradicts the messaging coming from the government to expect a lengthy disruption, with a staggered return to normalcy.

is the government sure that it wants to insist on trying to freeze the economy, given the expected timeframes?

so, i've built my concert list for april - a little late, but so be it. i'm going to need to sort through that this evening, hopefully enough to mostly catch up.

i've logged into my beyond-repair install one more time, to take a note of installed software and put aside any other user configuration files, as i'm going to be formatting and reinstalling to the laptop's drive, which i'm going to boot into from the pc. so, that's how we'll finish this up.

i need to recalibrate where i am in the vlogging, which could take a night or two.

and, i need to make some calls on monday and get my head around what's actually happening with these court cases.

i'm going to have to then stop for a few days to build a new windows 7 image, which i may also use as the base image for my new computer, which i'm finally nearing a build on. i've had these parts sitting for months...

hopefully, easy access to a fresh image will help in the struggle against whatever force is messing with me.

but, i'm also going to actually physically clean in here. it seems like the effects of the sewer gas have finally mostly faded away, so i'm ready to clean up each of the rooms in here one by one, starting with the room i sleep and type in.

so, there's a list of things to do. step one is sorting through the list of concerts that were cancelled in april, while reimaging my windows 7 laptop, via my now aging 32-bit pc.

so, it seems like i'm caught up, now. thankfully.

i should stay caught up; no more of that.

what's next?

i have some local filing to do, before finally moving to the master document for january.

"did she say that medical care for the coronavirus is creating an observer effect on the measurement of the dead?"

it is the case that a lot of people that get hooked up to these systems are not getting off of them alive.

somebody do a telephone poll. one question, super quick; good agents can get 200 completions an hour for something like this, when everybody is at home bored.

q: do you think you have contracted the coronavirus that causes covid-19?
a: yes or no

get thousands of responses and work it out through brute sampling.

are they peaking or plateauing in new york? well, it depends on the metric.

new cases and new hospitalizations both peaked and dropped quickly. deaths are lagging, and one wonders if it's because the system is able to prolong life in a way that skews the data. if you want some human impact, even if it's just a crude observer effect, then there's something that's potentially real - while a sustained plateau in the death rate would be the expected and intended outcome of social distancing measures in a serious pandemic, it may be that a short plateau, or unclear peak, is the expected result of human health care systems interfering with a natural peak and decline in a relatively weak virus, such as this one.

social distancing isn't supposed to be about a short plateau, it's supposed to be about maintaining a long and rigid plateau, in an attempt to stretch out resources. remember? that was the point - that healthcare systems would be overwhelmed if forced to deal with everything at once, and would be better able to handle the demand if it could be slowed down. but, that implies a sustained level of moderately high demand, for a long period.

given that the other metrics peaked and dropped quickly, it would not appear to be likely that mortality is headed for a sustained plateau in new york, but will rather see an extended peak, followed by a sharp decline.

i could be wrong. we'll see. but, it looks to me like we saw this thing ramp up very quickly to protective immunity in new york and in the process burned itself out, and that what you're going to find when you do testing is that a majority of people already have antibodies.

i'm done with march, now. i'm getting there....soon.....

it looks like i'm going to need to deal with this in the near future.

i'm going to need to schedule a new hearing date by teleconference, it would seem - that is, if the previous date is firmly canceled. i'm hoping that this is not yet the case.

if they are processing motions, then i can file them electronically, it would seem.

it's too late in the day to call, now. let's hope that somebody can answer these questions on monday morning.

https://www.ontariocourts.ca/scj/notice-to-profession-to/#D_Divisional_Court_Matters

so, they made a deal with god, that it would not harm the village in return for a tribute of a fixed number of plays, performed at decadal intervals. how very german.

however amusing this is, i hope that they don't prioritize this bargain with god, or the gods, as being of greater importance than the value of science.

but, it's a reminder that, even in germany, christianity has adopted a great deal of regional traditions. one wonders what pagan ritual this practice ultimately sources from.

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/news/world/bavarian-towns-17th-century-vow-has-spared-it-from-coronavirus-pastor-says-436244/

press: you're going to have to use the emergency measures act, eventually.
trudeau: we're not doing that.
press: you can't just let this crisis go on without using it.
trudeau: just watch me.

so, is the data in italy beginning to plateau, indicating a so-called flattening of the curve? it's a bit choppy, on first glance, but given the inevitability of deficits in reporting accuracy, it's plateau-y enough, it would appear.

i have two reasons for you to read that data skeptically.

the first is that there are reports of a large amount of uncounted deaths, particularly at nursing homes, during the peak of the crisis a few weeks ago. the delay in counting these deaths might have muted an actual peak. the second is that the actual situation on the ground may be a series of localized peaks, which may appear as a plateau if plotted on top of each other in a way that obscures the overlapping peaks. that might actually explain the choppiness of the data - it's a series of maxima, not just one.

it would be useful to see a couple of different test cases in order to help work through some of these ambiguities in how to interpret the data from italy. i believe that the same concerns exist for spanish data, as well.

i think that the data from north america is likely to continue to be presented in very regionalized contexts, mostly by states and provinces, but also by mayors of large or important jurisdictions. hopefully, the more regionalized presentation of the data will help clarify the second point - it should make it easier to identify whether we're seeing spikes or plateaus, which is a marker to determine if we're suppressing the virus or if it's burning out.

as to the first, it is possible that delays in counting the dead might be better separated from the curve, if it is more localized, as well. but, north american jurisdictions seem to be more aware now, eventually, of the virus' particularly deadly potential inside of these care facilities, and are finally moving to take serious steps to protect these people from this. so, there is also a better likelihood that we'll actually get correct statistics from these homes, when the peak or plateau actually arrives - we might succeed in eliminating this bias by being prepared for it.

i've been distracted by the bad media coverage, again.

there's some upheaval happening, obviously.

i want to try to focus again, now.

i think that health policies that are specifically designed to protect aging professors, many of whom will likely live into their 90s if they can get through this, are justified, actually. that's one of the things that mortifies me most about these stalinists; they're almost eager to wipe out the smart people, they just get in the way. no - we need to protect the brains, we might need them, later.

it may turn out to be more practical in some contexts to introduce more flexible rules around sabbaticals, temporarily.

but, the point is that getting the health response right means understanding the different demographic footprints of covid-19 and influenza, which means letting go of some of the assumptions we have about influenza-like illnesses.

this disease is really a disease of the elderly, and the public health response should be designed to reflect that.

regarding this lancet article, i will acknowledge that the findings are preliminary, and also maybe wonder if they're asking the right research question.

when i suggested that closing schools might be a good idea, what i was mostly concerned about was transmission to older teachers, and, in the post-secondary context, to aging professors. what these preliminary studies seem to be concerned about is the prevalence of the spread amongst the children, rather than the impact that such spread might have on faculty, which is the real concern with this actual virus due to it's different demographic footprint.

see, they based all their studies around influenza, apparently, which has a relatively high mortality rate in very young people, that levels off in early adulthood and kicks back in again with the elderly. especially virulent flu viruses can also target young, healthy people. so, you definitely want to limit the spread of influenza in children, because they're vulnerable to it. this coronavirus that is causing covid-19 appears to have a very low mortality rate in almost everybody under 60; it is really almost exclusively targeting the elderly, although i need to warn that this might drastically change as it sweeps through the midwest. so, if you're looking specifically for the signals associated with influenza in young people, and you conclude that they aren't well-reflected in covid-19 data, you can kind of trick yourself into missing the point, which is that you want to conduct your studies around covid-19 assumptions rather than influenza ones.

so, i'd like to see some more studies done on this, but my immediate reaction is that it is probably right to conclude that shutting down public elementary schools likely did little to prevent spread in the under-60 demographic, even if it hasn't paid enough attention to the more pressing question as to whether opening certain types of schools (like universities, and high schools) may substantively increase the likelihood of older faculty and staff getting infected.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2352-4642(20)30095-X

there were a few years in the middle of the 90s where i found myself with this absolutely pointless holiday in the middle of the spring (the most nefarious thing about easter is that you never know exactly when it is.) that i barely understood. was jesus a man or a god, and do you dumbasses believe in reincarnation or not...?

i mean, of all the dumb holidays. he died for my sins? really? what an arrogant fucking prick.

i developed a sort of tradition of blaring this through speakers around noon on good friday, because i was bored at home. the tradition is that you take the corpse of your god-man down around 13:00. so, i made sure that it was loud enough that any religious minded person in earshot could hear it, at that time.

i guess that, during the late 90s, i would often disappear on the thursday night to some basement or garage somewhere, to light blunts and play songs, and maybe i'd be back that weekend, and maybe i wouldn't. so, this pointless holiday that i barely understood all of a sudden became an excuse to get stoned for days at a time.

but, when the social media era clicked in, i moved the ritual online and started posting this on facebook every year.

i would encourage you to post this song somewhere today, and across the internet on all days where fictional religious characters of all faiths are said to have died, to the maximum annoyance of all religionists that continue to insist on the inherently sophomoric juvenility and childishness of faith.

today your god is dead,
and noone cares.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2352-4642(20)30095-X

it appears that dominic raab will become the prime minister on the event of boris johnson dying. they'll need to prorogue parliament, if it isn't already suspended, but the party has been clear on who it is deputizing, and who it will present to the queen, when she calls on the tories to form the next government.

but, how permanent that position is would up to the tories, themselves. they may choose to have a leadership process immediately after the pandemic is over, or might push it for a bit. but, dominic raab will need to win an election for party leader to remain prime minister, and will be expected by everybody to do so as quickly as is feasible.

this is complete nonsense.

the prime minister is not a separate executive office in canada the way that it is in the united states, so the question of "who becomes prime minister if trudeau dies?" is largely incoherent, in form. the prime minister is really just exactly that - the lead minister in the government, which means the leader of the sitting ruling party.

so, there would not be a process to find a new prime minister, there would be a process to find a new leader of the liberal party. this would be a temporary, interim position, due to the inability to launch a leadership process on short notice.

the governor-general would be then called on to invite the leader of the ruling party to form a new government, if there is confidence that they can pass a budget. but, the governor general does not make the choice as to who the leader of the party is, the party does.

so, the first thing that would need to be done would be for the party to name an interim leader, and the second thing that would need to be done would be for the governor-general to invite that interim leader to form a government, if there is confidence that they can pass a budget.

so, would this be a temporary or interim position, then? well, it would be relative to an upcoming leadership process. it's not the unwritten constitutional principles that determine the longevity of the position, it's the internal political processes within the parties, themselves. i suppose that the party might choose to forego a leadership process, or that the elevated candidate may run opposed, but a cabinet member cannot somehow inherit or be donned with party leadership, there needs to be an actual vote.

and, i will repeat that it would be widely expected that anybody that is intending to run for the leadership after the interim period would step down during the selection process, so as to not exert undue influence over it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6790626/coronavirus-trudeau-prime-minister-sick/

so, i'm not going to spend much time on this, it's the same propaganda we've seen elsewhere, but i just want to make some brief comments about the modelling, which is presented in a little more detail than elsewhere.

first, it should be pointed out that there's a large testing deficit in ontario, and any flattening effects seen on the curve are likely a relic of the fragmented data. if ontario was testing at the rates that quebec is, it would probably have actually found even more cases than quebec, and as ontario is such a large proportion of canada's population, testing lags in ontario will decisively effect the overall numbers. this is data that is known to be suspect, and canada's curve on that graph should be far more linear than is being presented.

second, i want to make a conceptual critique of the modelling in terms of how it understands the way the curves adjust to the different scenarios, or at least suggests that it does via it's use of pictorial aids. maybe i'm just correcting the props; i'd have to look deeper into it to know. the first option, where nothing is done at all, should indeed lead to a ramp up to a 70% infection rate fairly quickly, and then see a rapid drop in cases as the virus is unable to spread further in immune hosts - that's the benefit of herd immunity, and the graphic representation does capture that. however, the pictorial representations of the second and third options, where increasing amount of restrictions are applied, suggest the strict trail off achieved with herd immunity, while attempting to explicitly prevent it. again: i can't be sure what the formulas actually were. but, the pictorial representations of the graph should have had a plateau for the second graph, rather than a peak, and the third option should have had a long and sustained plateau, followed by an eventual trail-off, many months into the future. the reason these plateaus will kick in is that immunity will continue to be rare, and they will essentially stay in place for as long as it takes to actually get to 70%, meaning the number of actual cases is not lower, due to the onset of the sustained plateau.

see, and now we're getting some confusing messaging, then, because the graphical presentation of the data suggests that we can expect this to be over in the same time frame as though we'd done nothing, despite intentionally trying to slow down immunity, thereby stretching out the process.

....except that i actually don't think we're on the third curve. i think we're actually on the first one.

so, this is actually going to be a good signal to determine which model is more reflective of reality. if we see a sustained plateau in the number of deaths, we will know that it's because the effects are slowing the spread - and that it's going to take months to ease up. if we see a continual rise, a peak and sharp drop, we'll know that we had no effect on this thing at all, as it ripped through us at will, and burned itself out.

https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/documents/services/diseases/2019-novel-coronavirus-infection/using-data-modelling-inform-eng.pdf

it may be useful to control the number of bats, actually.

that's probably something the chinese should seriously look into.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/opinions/pangolin-coronavirus-pandemic-breiman/

so, what's my take on this?

living on the boundary of the empire may make us sometimes forget what the drawbacks of being behind the limes actually are, and perhaps lull us into a false sense of equivalency with conditions within the empire itself. we are so close to the heart of the empire, and we enjoy so many privileges as a result of it, but we are not within it's borders and there are ramifications of this.

the united states is not historically unique in it's ability to create money at will, this privilege has been enjoyed by other hegemonic states, but it is a rare and powerful privilege that satellite states like canada do not have, in the current financial system. nobody can or will tell the united states how much money to create, or what to do with it. canada, however, is subject to severe levels of discipline through the ratings agency system if it creates money at too great a rate, and these levels of discipline can be quite degrading - we're talking about forced market liberalization of government services, in order to raise equity for the interest payments.

i am an advocate of canadian sovereignty, and because of that, i need to clearly state that canada would be wise to avoid giving these international (but american dominated) bodies like the imf too much of an excuse to involve themselves in our public financing. we want these people to stay far away.

so, i realize that the question of correctly balancing the federal canadian debt load with our ability to generate revenue and our ability to pay down interest, both of which are suffering very badly right now, is in truth of great importance in maintaining our public infrastructure, in the long run.

stated simply: if we fuck up our debt-to-gdp ratio too badly on this, the imf is going to swoop in and privatize everything, which is game over for the country.

this doesn't mean i'm not an advocate of mmt, or that i think deficits actually matter in any serious macroeconomic way. i'm not buying into any of the neo-liberal arguments around this. at all. i'm just pointing out the severity of the disciplinary process. you can disagree with your master intellectually, while realizing the severity of the consequences for disobeying orders.

further, i don't want to make it seem like we should be pushing austerity at this point. being aware of where the limits are means realizing that the country does have a lot of space to play with, and isn't in risk of going bankrupt any time soon.

the reality is that the idea of sending large monthly checks to everybody in a time when revenue is low to non-existent is one that needs to be very carefully analyzed in terms of where it would leave our debt-to-gdp ratio, and because we are a satellite of the empire, we need to abide by the rules in place for satellite states, rather than the rules in place for the empire itself.

for that reason, i would support an immediate ubi in the united states, even as i call for careful budgeting in canada.

i'm not discounting the possibility that the ubi may emerge as the most effective method. one argument that i've seen david graeber promote repeatedly is that the government will actually save money by getting rid of the costly bureaucracy around needs-testing; i don't want to make guesses or reason through this, i want to see somebody actually do the math, and i don't have access to the stats, myself. this is a claim, and it may be true in specific contexts, but i'll let the experts tell me - how much is it costing to administer the program, and are there cost savings attached to administering the program, rather than handing out universal checks?

one of the arguments i've heard directly from the government is that some workers could be getting closer to $4,000/month under the emergency benefit, so moving to a flat benefit would lead to them getting less money, which could be catastrophic if they, for example, have children, or rent that is close to or higher than $2,000/month. the marxist in me wants to ensure that these people get what they need, and, in this case, it would be more than the amount being floated around; a ubi, in context, would have to be closer to $5,000/month to be implementable, and then there's little question that there are cost-savings in running the bureaucracy.

a more pertinent question may be whether a ubi-like payment may be the more efficient way to reach people that don't qualify, in addition to the programs that have been set up. if they just gave everybody below some poverty line ($20,000?) a $2000/month monthly check for however long this lasts, that may be more cost-effective than setting up additional programs, and the total payout may be manageable in the broader context. some people might get a little more than they need, but these will be people with very little, to begin with.

what i want them to do is actually find the right numbers and do the right calculations and see what the correct deductions are.

but, if they do this, please realize that the most likely outcome is an additional bursary program in addition to the existing payout schemes, and not something to replace it - it's not just the poor that are getting hit, it's also people with mortgages and salaried jobs, and they can't pay their bills on $2000.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-what-if-cras-emergency-response-benefit-amid-pandemic-is-a-mistake/

so, it looks like some places are actually going to peak this week, which is more in line with my own projections.

we have an open question in front of us - has the transmission rate reduced because we've successfully reduced the spread during lockdown, or is the virus in truth running completely rampant and beyond our control, and actually burning out due to running up against herd immunity? we will need to see which hypothesis better fits the data, now. the health services aren't going to do that, but i will.

the various governments have given you their projections, in order to back up their argument for social distancing. this is generally done by fitting the curve to data in various existing jurisdictions, which introduces all of the specific bias in the various individual systems. this isn't an approach to determine the actual mortality rate via analysis and separation of the data, but rather an attempt to gather as many possible outcomes as possible, in order to create a set of bounds. in this thinking, the best case scenario is the best dataset we have, and the worst case scenario is the worst dataset we have - and careful analyses of biases in each of these specific data sets can happen later.

i think it's fair to state that everybody realizes that all of the data undercounts the number of mild cases, and consequently exaggerates the mortality rate. "canada's data will show those same biases", you say - and you're clearly correct, but that bias will appear in undocumented cases, not in exaggerated deaths.

i am going to rather construct a range of data by performing three simple calculations. this is my very basic model:

1) min range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.001]

2) average range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.003]

3) maximum range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.005]

you can do these calculations yourself, they're easy enough.

herd immunity levels should be empirically determined, not assumed, but the situation is not ideal. so, that's a source of error. some areas that lack resources and get overwhelmed may see numbers closer to the maximum range, which in north america would probably be a statement that relates better to the obese midwestern united states than the relatively healthy coasts, and the comparably fit & athletic canada.

if the data is better fit by my model than the official models, we should conclude that we are not experiencing disruptions in transmission at all, but have pretty much already all got it; that the reason hospitalization rates are going down is that we actually achieved herd immunity exceedingly quickly, despite our best efforts to prevent it. such a realization should have drastic implications for future public health policy.

what are my number of projected deaths in....

1) new york city: (5799, 17398, 28997)  [projection: low end]

2) gta:  (4133, 12399, 20665)   [projection: low end]

3) montreal: (2800, 8399, 13999) [projection: low end]

4) detroit (metro area): (2866, 8599, 14332) [projection: expect something more like the middle number, due to higher comorbidity]

as you know, i've been leaning towards the low side of the calculation, but let's be rigorous here.

and, lets see where the numbers fall.

they should have a database set up where people can register existing underlying conditions, so that they might qualify for the emergency financial measures past a point where people are being phased back into society.

the government would no doubt need to implement some kind of verification process, so this would no doubt mean the requirement of some kind of documentation from your doctor. this would be a necessary tool to protect against fraud, because people are assholes sometimes - i get it. they're taught to be that way; it's blowback. but, the process is required. fine.

the legitimate intent of the program would be to allow people to declare if they're at high risk, so that they can be quarantined for a longer period.

of course, such a list would have to be immediately destroyed after the pandemic is over, and with the inevitability of an electronic maintenance of said list, the likelihood of permanent destruction for some time is quite low. so, anybody volunteering themselves to enter data into a list of this sort would have to fully understand the likely near-term permanence of this information, despite any protocols to destroy it. that still may be a preferred option to people in high-risk categories, like heavy smokers or the obese, if they are fully cognizant of the threat of the disease to them, which may be uncommon.

i think the opportunity to opt-out for a while, with the proper documentation, should be provided, regardless.

so, i've got all of the reviews done, now.

the next step is to correct all of the typos for the last two weeks of march.

this is a review of the weeping icon / control top show at deluxx fluxx on mar 12, 2020.

this was a night that was neither supposed to be late nor expensive, but the sudden collapse in the canadian dollar, combined with the closure of the tunnel overnight for maintenance work, meant that going to the show would be more expensive than previously budgeted for, and that there was no option but to overnight in the diner, as the tunnel bus would be out of service from 20:00 on the night of the 12th until 7:00 on the morning of the 13th. once i realized this on thursday morning, i strongly considered skipping the show, but in the end reasoned that the shows at the end of the month would likely end up canceled, anyways, so i'd might as well overpay on one last night out for a long while. so, i caught the last bus of the night over to detroit, which was the 19:00 bus.

all anybody outside wanted to talk about was the virus, and the looming assumption that there were imminent closures coming, indeed that things were being canceled and closing down in real time. people found themselves in the situation where they were just looking for something that was open.

my interest in the show was initially in the second band, control top, but i made sure to get there on time in order to see weeping icon, as well. i strongly considered catching weeping icon the last time they were here, in november:

so, the weather made actually going to this somewhat of a non-starter. i would have had to have dragged myself, and an unknown punk band wasn't going to do it...

it's an interesting proof of concept, but i wish they did more with the electronics than they are. it just kind of comes off as something to distract people while they're tuning or changing busted strings...

purely as a punk act, it's fun enough, if relatively generic.

i actually bet it was fun. but, my impression is that they should be doing more than this, and i hope they do.

https://weepingicon.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-icon

my memory of listening to this record back in november was that i interpreted them as a kind of art-rock band that was under-utilizing it's resources, and seemed to think they had a stand-up bassist for some reason. experiencing them live did uphold my perception of the electronics being used as a tuning distraction, as that is literally what they were used for, but it also clarified the band's intended presentation as very much being that of a punk rock band. it's perhaps worth noting that the band also slimmed down to a bass-guitar-drums three-piece, in noting the minimized importance of the noise and the increased importance of the band's presentation as a punk band.

this is a concept record, and they did play songs from it, but they didn't try to present it conceptually, so my comment that the record is an interesting proof of concept that requires greater elaboration is perhaps not reflective of their future plans - i might expect more straight-up punk rock from them, in the future.

and, as noted, they are in fact intriguing enough purely as a punk band. the guitarist can take up quite a bit of space on her own. it'll be interesting to see what she does with it.

so, i think i caught this band in a state of flux, and less want to make a point of a detailed analysis, and more want to point out what appears to be changing.

control top were an act that i first encountered at the end of the year, via reading through some best of the year lists.

the record is a little generic at points, but this is one of two or three types of music where i don't spend much time worrying about that - it just needs to actually be good and this does that.

they could turn the vocals down a hair. my ideologically rigorous, enlightenment-era approach to anarchism sort of clashes with her post-nihilist anti-intellectualism, but whatever; that's academic, mostly.

that means that i won't grade this too high, but it also means i'd enjoy seeing it more than most of the stuff in the list. 

https://controltop.bandcamp.com/album/covert-contracts

after a few listens, what i found to be enduring about this act is that they actually have punk lyrics in addition to their classic punk sound, which is rare in music of this sort in the current epoch; generally, acts in the punk spectrum with punk ideologies will avoid a catchy and pop-friendly type of sound or image nowadays, while the classic punk rock sound, itself, has largely been appropriated by pop culture and tarnished with bubblegum-pop type pseudo-artistry. perhaps pop culture's recent retreat from rock-era forms has reopened a space for the classic punk sound to be reunited with punk rock ideology. i would welcome that, as i don't tend to get much musical enjoyment from, or have much fun listening to, these hyper-aggressive spins on the style. i miss a more tactile and fun approach to punk culture....

live, the band presented the recorded material without a lot of variation, the high part of the show perhaps being when the singer descended on the floor and directly confronted a number of the male audience members on their hierarchical enforcement of covert contracts by yelling in their faces about it. i hope she wasn't infected, at the time. i was spared this wrath; i received a soft touch on my shoulder, instead.

teener were again booked to play this show, either first or last, and dropped out on the day of.

i didn't really plan the rest of this out very closely; i decided i'd find somewhere open, and kind of wing it. one idea was to just stay at the venue, but it chased everybody out and shut down early under rumours that it might be shutting down for a while - and, indeed, there was a facebook post not long after, indicating the venue would be closing indefinitely.

i had loosely planned to end up at tv lounge until 2:00ish, but they were closed when i got there, also indefinitely. before leaving the venue, i had heard rumours about things being open in corktown, so i took a walk around the corner to ufo and parked out there for the night.

as the concert that was scheduled at ufo was canceled by the band that booked it, the place was mostly empty by the time i got there around 23:00; pretty much the only people that were there were actually staff from other bars that had shut down early for the night and needed to have a drink and chill out and vent.

the people that i'm talking about are reliant on income coming into their respective bars - dishwashers, bartenders. they were rightly absolutely freaking out about what they were going to do if everything got canceled, and simply didn't want to listen to me rationalize with them, they just wanted to vent. so, i backed off a little and listened, and they made their concerns clear, even if they weren't always well-grounded in science, and i had to bite my tongue about it. writing in mid-april, i don't know what steps the government of michigan has taken to help them, but i hope they figured something out.

after however many beers at ufo, i eventually ended up back at the diner, and got something different, a blt, because my usd was running out when i got there. i nodded off for a bit after 5:00, but was out on time to catch the early bus back, make it home before the cold snap hit (again) and make some nachos before getting some rest in.

it would be rather foolish of the americans to essentially abandon the who to the chinese.

let's hope that brighter minds prevail.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-canadian-who-advisor-defends-organization-after-trump-accuses-it-of-being-china-centric

it seems like what he's broadcasting is that what they're going to do is essentially expose different classes of people to the virus at different times, and there will be accompanying spikes with each exposure event. that means that we're essentially staging in immunity. it's increasingly clear that people in the 20-60 age range that have conditions like obesity are at substantial risk to illness. so, get ready for your reckoning.

the hope is of course that reintroducing normalcy in waves will allow the health care system to cope with a series of small crises, in aversion to a great crashing all at once.

so, we're essentially being queued.

i bet a computer science major came up with this.

the counter-argument, which i suspect will be better reflective of the reality when empirical measures come in, is that prolonging sustained exposure in small groups will make little difference in hospital rates for low risk groups, while maximizing the amount of hospitalization that is required for at risk groups. now, the twist is that it might be manageable, but it might also be unnecessary in sum total if the general population can get to greater immunity quicker.

i'm basically pointing out that the government response is ignoring a kind of basic calculus problem, in not actually calculating where the minima and maxima of the curves actually are, relative to a set of overlapping factors; instead, the public health response is basing everything on really one factor, in an oversimplified mathematics that will likely undo it's intended outcome, in the end.

what we appear to be heading for is a long period of sustained minimal transmission, and the health care system will probably be able to handle it relatively well. so, there is some success there, i suppose. but, i insist that the total workload of the hospital system will in the end be greater, which indicates that the number of people impacted will, in the end, be greater than it might have been otherwise, with potentially worse death tolls as a result.

the choice before us is not whether we will have natural immunity, but how we get to it. we're doing it in stages, it looks like.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-return-to-work-will-be-graduated-and-likely-months-off-trudeau-says/

is it possible that covid-19 is some kind of experiment?

i'm purposefully delving into the realm of conspiracy here, with the aim to ask the question of whether it's a valid hypothesis or not. i'm still of the opinion that you need to evaluate questions of these sorts, rather than write them off as "conspiracy theories" off hand, even as i agree that most of the genre of "conspiracy theory", and a genre is what it is, is easily discredited, often by basic logic or appeals to elementary science.

i insist that the evaluation of the question remains necessary, using something approaching the scientific method. let's be sciencey all the time, not just when it fits our preconceptions. so, what evidence do we have before us to support the hypothesis that this is some kind of experiment?

it should be noted immediately that there was actually a simulation performed by john hopkins mere months before this happened, where they ran through a detailed scenario of a global pandemic. now, we're being told that the president ignored warnings created by the simulation, which is somewhat of a tight timeline, in truth. but, to me, that's just curious. so, the institution that is largely managing the mortality statistics in the country did a simulation for something similar to this, just months before it actually happened? hrmmmn.

then, when it hit the country they pretended it wasn't there - they claimed that there weren't any cases because the travel restrictions had kept the cases out, and there therefore wasn't any reason to test anybody, which was immediately blatantly ridiculous to everybody. it is so blatantly ridiculous, that this is maybe easier to explain by assigning an intent to the government to actually allow it to spread before reacting to it. certainly, the actual outcome of their policy failure, intentional or not, was in fact for the virus to spread undetected for quite a long while, before there was adequate testing in place to measure it.

then, in reaction to the onset of community spread, which they seem to have facilitated, they issue a total lockdown on everything, a policy that will actually have the effect of maximizing the amount of harm the virus can do, by slowing down immunity levels. what these economic lockdowns are doing is also locking in the virus' most dangerous phase, allowing it to maximize the number of high impact carriers through the corridors of necessary commerce, and dragging out the effects for months past a point where immunity would have naturally reduced the spread. the result is a more sustained exposure to vulnerable communities that goes on for a longer time and consequently has a deeper impact. again: intentionally or not, the longterm effects of these economic lockdowns is going to be that vulnerable populations get hit harder for longer. so, just measuring the situation by effects, it would seem that the government is actually trying to draw this out.

then, bizarrely, the president shifts his press briefings to being an infomercial for an immunosuppressant used to treat sepsis, which is a common complication during the late stages of covid-19. he's even pushing it as a prophylactic. they're apparently doing trials on young people in detroit to see if it works in warding off the disease, with an apparent intent to ramp up production and distribution. but, this drug is used to reduce the immune response in auto-immune disorders. giving it to healthy people is going to make them more susceptible to the disease, by weakening their immune response, which is what the drug's medical use is. other countries are beginning to fall in line on this, as well. if this gets mass distributed, we'll have another example of the government acting to facilitate the spread and severity of the disease, by incompetence or malice.

it's all adding up to kind of a spooky deduction - it seems like the intent here isn't actually to stop this thing at all.

what are they doing, then? is it some kind of exercise in eugenics, where they're trying to offload a large amount of the health system's deadweight load? if this virus does it's job in drastically reducing the population of very old people and very medically reliant people, you're going to see a different health care system when it's done, one that has a lot more resources, all of a sudden.

is it a perverse experiment to see how we actually react?

is it the beginning phase of a change in how western governments operate?

so, i think these are valid questions here that are worth further examination.

should we trust the numbers coming from federal, state and provincial authorities on this?

i don't know.

some kind of evidence of undercounting would help.

it's probably best to be skeptical, at least in position, for a while.

this is just the latest installment in a stream of disinformation.

listen, i guess the liberal ruling elite in canada caught the nihilism flu, and has decided that truth is a malleable object to prepare for public consumption, but underlying this is actually a kind of desperate, altruistic nihilism, almost a white lie nihilism, to try to achieve what is seen as a public necessity.

so, they're doing everything they can to plead with you to stay inside - not because that's actually going to work, but because they don't know what else to do.

what they need to do is continue preparing, and, thankfully, it does seem like there are some thinking people in the federal government that are rising to the occasion on this. we'll see how quickly these industrial plans actually materialize.

so, i don't want to rip this apart, because...it's not serious. it's theatre. the better mathematical decryption of this is to rebroadcast the message - they are pleading with you to stay home, and resorting to this out of desperation to have you do it, whether it's likely to be effective, or not.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/coronavirus-live-updates-trump-eases-mask-export-ban-amid-backlash/

regarding the effects of globalization on the supply chain, though.

i don't know how many times i've been listening to some prof rant about the effects of neo-liberalism, or some panel discussing the effects of globalization, and heard some remark about what happens to supply chains in a crisis. the general way to make this remark was to present it as an oncoming catastrophic event; you'd often hear something like "just wait until we have a crisis that disrupts the supply chains, then we'll be really sorry, then we'll realize what we've done".

so, to suggest this scenario was predictable is an understatement - the inevitability of this situation was one of the most critiqued components of the system that created it, and one of the most compelling arguments against continuing on with it.

you could probably find a relevant quote warning about this by virtually anybody operating on the economic left. 

anarchists on the ground tend to focus on food sovereignty, but the idea of courses generalizes. the focus shouldn't be about hoarding, though, it should be about maintaining the capacity for self-sufficiency, even if the logic of ricardan free trade does imply the benefits of trade in the short run.

to be clear: the problem isn't really that we've been export-reliant for so long. the problem is that we didn't have a backup plan, in case that failed.

i have to point this out every time this topic comes up - i'm an anarchist, i'm not a communist, so i don't have this intellectual tendency towards emphasizing the nationalization of goods for the fatherland; trade is a good idea, so long as you're actually doing it right, which means actually understanding the theory. the extant "free trade" regime is actually something more akin to a series of mercantilist economies observing overlapping monopolies than any kind of ideologically coherent free trade zone, and we're just seeing how true that is as the system sees stress on it. so, i'll argue that i'm not opposed to tariffs in principle, but tariffs are hard, and you have to be deeply wonkish to use them right - a description that neither applies to donald trump nor to justin trudeau. the reverse argument, though, is also true - understanding the rules of free trade means that it isn't always the best arrangement, especially not when you have large disparities in quality of life between the work forces in the trading nations. in that case, special rules need to be put in place to prevent an absolute advantage in labour costs from siphoning production out of the more wealthy nation, leading to supply chain disruptions in the wealthy country in cases of emergency.

so, i believe in ricardan free trade, if it makes sense, under the rules of ricardan free trade, which don't appear to be consulted very often when attempting to engage in "ricardan free trade", any more. 

so, when trade is mutually beneficial, of courses anarchists would advocate it, as mutual aid.

but, as much as anarchists support mutually beneficial trade, they insist on self-sufficiency, as well. just because we can do a calculation and come to some reasoned deductions on the mutual benefit of trade in terms of minimizing resources allocated to produce those goods doesn't mean we should always prioritize the minimizing of resources allocated as paramount; at the least, maintaining a capacity for self-sufficiency may, in many contexts, be seen as of greater priority than minimizing resources allocated, or, in the capitalist context, of maximizing profits. 

but, don't let them tell you they didn't see this coming; there was a sign at every protest, a comment in every documentary, a remark in every flyer - this was a major component of the opposition to nafta from day one, and we see the predictions coming true.

let's hope that we can react quickly enough to adjust, but let's examine a lot more things a lot more carefully, as well, to ensure this doesn't happen again, and that it's not worse if it does.

i'm encouraged by what i'm hearing about a government-directed response to the manufacturing crisis around medical supplies here in canada. if done well, this could kickstart a substantive manufacturing recovery in the region.

this region has historically been the canadian component of the great lakes automotive manufacturing economy, going back to the auto pact signed by lestern pearson in the 60s, but this has been slowly evaporating since the first nafta was signed, a process that appears to have only been accelerated by the new nafta. this has left the region with a substantive manufacturing excess that nobody has really seemed eager to move on.

in the vacuum created by the decline of the automotive industry, the broader medical industry, including a substantive biomed sector, has moved into southwestern ontario, especially the areas around the university in waterloo. there is a great deal of continuity in retooling these factories for the production of medical equipment, as most of the actual industry in the region, at this point, is, in fact, medical.

we can have silly ideological debates about the role of government, but the reality is that the only way to get an industry up and running in whatever this really existing capitalism actually is is to set up a crown corporation and spin it off.

canada is a large purchaser of medical supplies, so even a shift to domestic production could have dramatic multiplier effects.

let's hope that this government, and successive governments, hold their ground on this, in the face of whatever eventual wto challenges are no doubt coming.

so, these drugs that trump is pushing for covid-19...

i'm starting to piece together a more coherent narrative. they're conducting trials; i stated that what i want to see is a mechanism, regarding just exactly how it is that they expect an antibiotic to eliminate a virus from the system. you can do all the trials in the world, you'll get lucky pretty often given the low mortality rate, but you're not going to convince me of anything until you explain to me how it actually works.

it turns out that my skepticism was well-grounded, and nobody wants to use the drug to directly treat the virus at all. rather, the potential for the drugs is as use as immunosuppressors to combat septic shock, which is apparently a leading technical cause of actual death, related to this outbreak. this is similar to how the drug is used in lupus patients, lupus being an autoimmune disorder where your body goes into something like septic shock repeatedly.

changing the context of the use of the drug clarifies a lot of the hype around it, in cutting through the media babble. it does indeed make no sense to prescribe this drug as a treatment for this virus, at all, but it may eventually be a necessary tool that doctors need to use in patients that are suffering from severe sepsis as a complication.

with that subtlety in the drug's predicted use clarified, a few things should be immediately apparent:

- taking the drug as a precaution, as though it's some kind of magic potion, will, as magic potions often sadly tend to do, actually make you more susceptible, because it's intended use is as an immunosuppressor. if you're relatively healthy, and you take these drugs as a "precaution", they will actually weaken your immune system. that's their medical use - it's the actual intent.

- as such, there is no long term potential for this drug in therapeutic use for patients not experiencing sepsis. so, you should not ask your doctor to prescribe you this drug if you get sick. if your doctor does give you this drug on request after confirming a diagnosis, they should be charged with malpractice, as they should damned well know it's an immunosuppressor, and they damned well know you're infected.

- if your doctor does prescribe you this drug in good faith, you will be struggling for your life when it happens.

understanding this better both clarifies the actual medical use of the drug in context, and clarifies the really depraved behaviour of the president around this. it's actually better if he really doesn't know what he's saying, but i suspect that's less true than anybody wants to acknowledge; this is an immunosuppressor, it's used as an immunosuppressor, and people are going to needlessly die by mass prescribing it.

is this insanity and incompetence or greed-fueled malevolence?

it's a scary question.

but, i'm glad i understand this better, now.

yikes.

https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/detroit-hospital-more-600-employees-tested-positive-coronavirus

this is a review of the sunsquabi/floozies show at the royal oak theatre on mar 5, 2020,
as well as a review of the "classical roots" presentation at the dso,
which ended with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, on mar 6, 2020.

in the week leading up to this show, or excursion, i found myself trying to juggle a number of shows into a one or maybe two day escape, and so flirting with going to the concerto on the saturday or maybe trying to fit a double bill in on the friday, meaning i should come home early on thursday - or even just giving up and going to steve hackett on wednesday, instead.

i do feel that the first thing i should acknowledge is actually that hackett concert. the following was posted a few days before the show:

so, this gives me a better understanding of what the steve hackett set on wednesday is going to be about, and whether i want to spend what was $30 usd minimum on it, last i checked (the $25 seats are sold out). this is really a dad show, though, so he's supposed to yell at me for offering to pay my own way, and then insist on buying me food on the way home. alas....

what is steve hackett? well, he was the not-quite-original-but-certainly-classic guitarist for the legendary 70s prog act genesis. mr. hackett left the band in 1977, so he had absolutely nothing to do with the band's somewhat infamous run of 80s pop singles, and in fact only did two records with collins singing, at all. however, he was the band's guitarist for all but one of their string of classic records (he was not the guitarist on trespass) between 1970-1977.

genesis is known mostly for being the initial vehicle of peter gabriel and then of phil collins (who initially played drums, before gabriel left for a solo career), and is generally thought of as a synthesizer-driven band when discussed for it's compositions. however, the guitar work on these records is actually somewhat revolutionary. amongst other things, hackett is widely credited for introducing the technique of tapping into rock music, something that was picked up on most prominently by van halen and has became a staple in rock music ever since.

on this tour, he appears to be starting with a solo record he did in the late 70s and finishing with a set of genesis material centered around the classic record, selling england by the pound, which was the third with the classic lineup of gabriel on vocals, collins on drums, banks on keyboards, rutherford on bass and hackett on guitar.

he appears to have hired younger musicians to do the vocal and drums duties, which is fine and probably necessary.

if i could get cheaper tickets, this would be a no brainer. but i don't want to spend too much on this show and then regret missing a bunch of others, and this weekend may be full of other stuff that i want to get to, instead. if i had a money tree. alas...

i want to decide what i'm doing on the weekend, first. but, if i go out on wednesday, this is where i'm going....

by wednesday morning, i'd come up with a kind of maximal plan that started wednesday with hackett and ended early saturday morning. i had to face the facts - if i were to go to the hackett concert, i would have to cut something out. i also realized it was going to be seated and mostly populated with older men. if i had another $100 to blow, i would have started here, on the wednesday, and ended up at an experimental noise show a little later, before going home and heading back out for the thursday night.

after scratching wednesday off, i then decided that the most interesting things could be strung together starting on thursday evening and ending on friday afternoon, leaving friday night open as a variable, if the weather and my consciousness, as well as my finances, permit.

this was the ideal that i hoped set times would align around:

1) talking ear @ cliff bell's, 20:00-21:30 - first set.
2) take the bus to royal oak for roughly 22:00 and hopefully catch the last two acts, sunsquabi and the floozies. i want this to go late - until after 2:00.
3) get something to eat. it's a thursday, so i don't expect to find an after party. but, the bus runs all night, now. so, i can make my way back to detroit for the morning.
4) the beethoven concerto is running at 10:45 in the morning.
5) go home, shower, sleep.
6) maybe come back for another funk show on friday night at tangent gallery, followed by dancing.

obviously, imagining set times on my blog doesn't make them real, so the next thing to do would be to actually ask the artists what time they're playing at. this is done these days by posting at the event listing.

talking ear indicated that they would actually start at 20:00 sharp, and perform three 45 minute sets, each on the next subsequent hour. so, if i could get a confirmation that sunsquabi were going to be on a little later, i could maybe even catch the first two sets. perfect.

talking ear would also be playing as a four piece, without their singer, who is now their ex-singer. i will admit that much of the charm in the recorded material is driven by this now departed singer, but that's only really a drawback in terms of the uncertainty in direction that it creates; the rest of the band seems capable of holding my interest, regardless, even if i have little to go by in predicting what they actually would sound like. i'm sure i'll enjoy any new recorded material, once it exists.

i grew up listening to fusion records by the likes of holdsworth, di meola, mclaughlin....as well as some non-guitar jazz, albeit not much of it. i've heard ridiculous amounts of chick corea. there were a couple of bruford/holdsworth records with a singer named annette peacock. that's maybe the closest thing i can think of directly, although i should point out that it's also roughly in the same space as a local act name saajtak.

https://talkingear.bandcamp.com/album/talking-ear

i wanted to get up and dance before the end of the night, but i was actually kind of stoked about starting at the jazz club early; that's something i wish lined up well more often.

unfortunately, after some prodding, we eventually got set times for the royal oak show - and learned that sunsquabi were scheduled for 21:00, making it impossible to schedule both shows. i'd have to cut out talking ear from the night.

this opened up some space for me, as i was planning on picking up beethoven tickets on thursday night, before the box office closed, at 17:00. so, i settled on crashing what looked like a weekly experimental dinner time series at tv lounge, that seemed like it might even have free food, before catching the bus to royal oak.

with all that planned, it was time to get ready to actually go. of course, that took hours longer than planned, and so i ended up failing to make even the 5:30 bus, and instead ending up in detroit around a quarter after six, without much to do but crash the dinner series, which happened before the hour, at the latest.

there was indeed free food, some sort of vegetarian burrito type affair, with some chips and salsa. i got a cheap beer, and found myself outside talking about this virus with somebody that actually works in the insurance industry.

he fully acknowledged the error of insufficient testing, and the problems that a large uninsured population would face. was i concerned, though? this seemed to be his interest - measuring my concern. we're all collecting data in our own ways, aren't we? the whole world's a laboratory. i tried to articulate myself as best i could - being that i was healthy, i was not particularly concerned about myself, or my well-being, and would rather consider it advantageous to confront the virus early, but if i were uninsured, or older or suffering from existing conditions, and i lived in the united states, then i could see some potential for alarm. my lack of concern is due to being in a relatively privileged position as a relatively young and healthy canadian.

he wanted to rely on the who mortality stats, which i insisted were an exaggeration; the high mortality rate in the united states may appear to be more in line with a third world country, or a country like iran that's been battered by us sanctions, but that's really just because they aren't testing; it's not really 7%. it's more like a 0.5%. although i'd be a lot more concerned if i thought it was 7%! but, he needed data, not speculation. in his mind, that 4.5% coming out of china was reason for serious alarm. and, i guess if i thought that was a reasonable mortality rate, i'd be alarmed, too.

the artist performing at the tv lounge on this night is also known as the detroit bureau of sound, and tends to frequently do these kinds of early night spotlights that are a kind of mix of high and low art; i've seen him perform philip glass pieces in dilapidated warehouses, and also do pretentious reinterpretations of cage pieces at energy drink showcases. he had an electronic reinterpretation of koyaanisqatsi up for showcase at the detroit institute of art in mid-march that got canceled. i keep an eye on him because a lot of what he puts together is kind of the perfect pre-show event, even if i end up showing up too late to catch it more than half of the time.

on this night, he appears to have set up a large amount of analog gear in the bar, and decided not to do much with it. i would have to label what i saw as a brap, albeit not a particularly lively one. so, i ejected from the situation a little bit before 20:00, with the intent to catch the early bus out.

i just had to get up and around the corner to temple, down the street to woodward and - hey, there's a bus...no....wait.

gah.

so, i had 20 minutes to wait to catch the bus i initially planned to take, to get to royal oak a few minutes after 21:00, and into the bar by 21:15 - hoping they're running late. when you miss the bus by seconds, the wait for the next one is of course maximal. but, even so, it would take as much time to drive there as it would to bus there, according to google, so i wouldn't actually be saving any time by driving. once i was able to get the driver to stop and let me on, it did run on time, and did get me to the neighbourhood of the venue at very close to 21:00, as expected.

i feared i'd miss the first song when i got there, but i actually showed up with plenty of time to spare. in fact, i'd been in and out for a few smokes, including finding the kind i like, by the time they came on, after 22:00. if i knew they weren't going to be on until after 22:00, i could have caught the fusion band after all.....

sunsquabi are a fully instrumental three piece white-boy funk band that also take strong influences from some specific guitar-driven progressive rock acts, like tangerine dream and pink floyd. while there are lots of bands that are vaguely like this out there right now, sunsquabi caught my attention due to the musicality - which is not to say that this is particularly technical, so much as to point to the wide musical vocabulary. so, they tend to make good use of abstract rhythms and syncopation, for example, in ways that would be better described as playful than technically impressive. the result is a convincingly fun sound that is also more than interesting enough to keep a nerd engaged, one that i tend to enjoy dancing to, as i get lost in the shuffling beats and the soaring guitars. i'd recommend this to anyone, but it's going to be especially intriguing for all those that exist in that intersection of the electronic with the guitar....

i found myself back outside between sets, and this is when the giant blunts started getting passed around, leaving me feeling fairly spaced out before the floozies set. this bar will make you leave your $8 beer on a table, in a room with hundreds of people, before you go for a smoke, and then who knows what's going to happen to it when you're gone. it was against my better judgement, but i did what i had to, and seemed to make it out of the venue able to walk.

the material i'd heard from the floozies also included a horn section, so they seemed a little bit stripped down on this night, as a two piece. this hemmed their sound into something that was a little bit more generic and formulaic, from a modern "edm" template. so, you had lots of dubstep wobbles, for example. i took it for what it was, and kept dancing in between the guitar licks, which were less plentiful than i'd have liked, but the truth is that sunsquabi is a hard act to follow.

my stark suggestion to the floozies is to make it a habit to bring a horn section with them when they tour. they're just not pulling it off as a two-piece.

a lot of people may consider a show that ends a little after 1:00 to be a late night, but it left me with some time to blow, as i could either find a late-night speakeasy in royal oak and ride it out until the morning buses started up or evacuate the suburbs and go back downtown early on the late night bus out. if this show had lingered past 2:00 to 3:00ish, it would have been relatively seamless to catch the early morning bus out, right from the venue. but, the earlier night had me wanting to catch the late bus out, instead. i had time for a beer, before the bus came, a little after 2:00.

i had picked out a couple of divey bars that i thought would be open, but neither were. instead, i found myself at a sort of sports bar, as they were the only thing around there that seemed to be open. it was moments after i ordered my beer, though, that they were yelling at everybody to finish their drink and get out.

the place was actually fairly well populated on a thursday, so it was maybe a bit weird that they were aggressively shuffling everybody out at 1:35, but i had little choice but to drink my beer quickly and be sure i'm not the last one out.

outside now, at 1:45, i'm having a smoke and am approached by a woman who remarks that she likes my red overcoat (indeed, the coat is a bit of a hit) and wishes she could straighten her hair as well as i do. she then proceeds to speak to me in what i presume is some dialect of hebrew, although i would be unwise as to advise on which one.

i have a complex ancestry, and i do get recognized sometimes, most often by native americans, but also by italians and also by people that are from the northeast of europe. i used to get teased for looking jewish when i was in high school, years before i realized i was, actually, of some ancestral hebrew heritage. i've never, however, been identified as a jew on the street and then spoken to in hebrew, with the assumption that i'd understand it.

"i'm part italian and part jewish, so i do have very wavy hair. i wouldn't call it curly, exactly. it's actually also really light and fine, due to the norse ancestry on my mom's side. so, it's more like a thin, fine and wavy hairtype than thick, heavy and curly type. and, i certainly don't speak hebrew..."

"you're not really jewish, then."

(she was disappointed)

"no, not culturally. except i kind of am like a secular american jew in my politics and in my tastes in art, which is sort of a different jewish culture. i'd bet the number of jews in new york city that are bilingual is pretty low nowadays. so, you could think of me like that, and it's not totally wrong. but, i'm only really vaguely aware of my actual jewish ancestry and don't really prioritize it over my other heritage."

"i still like your coat."

"thanks."

after some further late night banter, and an eventual dispersion from the closing bar, i did catch my late night bus out of royal oak, which tricked me into thinking it was going to take me downtown and then dropped me off at the state fair transit centre instead, to await the regular city bus going back downtown.

waiting for the woodward bus at 3:00 am at state transit in detroit is maybe not the most enviable situation to be in, but i can be friendly enough with the other riders, whoever they are. so, one of them wants a smoke, and i give it to him. it turns out he's recently been released from hospital, and nursing a gunshot wound that just missed his vitals; both lucky and unlucky, as he claims, at least, that he was an innocent bystander, and essentially struck by a stray bullet. the doctors told him he should have been killed. right now, he needs to get downtown to get to the mission, which is where he's staying until his wound has healed. and, i can have some of his vodka if i want (i passed).

he carries a sleeping bag around with him on his back, stuffed into his coat. says he needs it to keep the cold out.

"no, you use it to keep the warmth in."
"yeah, gotta keep the cold out."
"it would probably be useful to you on a day-to-day basis if you actually realized that you keep the warmth in, you don't keep the cold out."
"gotta keep the cold out...works good if you get bundled up right...."

eventually, the bus comes and our gunshot victim actually wanders down the street the other way, before he's coerced back by the driver. i admit that i sat in a place that would force him to sit elsewhere.

it's pushing 4:00 when we get back downtown, and i find myself getting off a stop early, due mostly to badly eyeing the stops - i knew where i was, but didn't know where the stops were. as it is, i'm walking south on woodward to the diner when a man in a wheelchair rolls up to me and asks me for a smoke. and, he needs me to put it in his mouth and light it for him too.

obviously, this guy probably shouldn't be smoking. but, what is the use of denying a dying man a smoke?

so, i give him the smoke, and i light it, and i turn around to walk off, but he asks me to come back and help him get a bag out of the side of his wheelchair. i initially thought he meant out of a pocket on the external side of the wheelchair, but after some discussion it is clarified that he meant a bag that was lodged between himself and the seat of the wheelchair. i am able to oblige this request relatively painlessly.

he tells me he's pulling a cup out of the bag to take a piss, right there, in his wheelchair, on the side of the road, on woodward avenue, in midtown. he wants me to get another bag out of the back, and i can't see where, and he's yelling at me to hurry up....

what's going through my mind at this point is a kind of self-righteous indignation as to why it is that this clearly severely sick man is in a wheelchair on the side of the road at 3:00 am and asking a canadian tourist to perform unpaid volunteer work as an orderly. any concept of dignity had left this man behind. everything else aside, that was what had me angry and almost shivering, the fact that i was forced to suffer this man of his lack of dignity so badly.

i eventually walked away, and went straight inside to wash my hands. there's a virus going around, they said.

this man was eventually wheeled into the diner, which was no doubt an unacceptable sanitation decision, but i said nothing. it was hovering around freezing outside.

i always get the same thing at this diner and wanted to take a closer look at the menu, so i didn't end up ordering until well after 4:00, but i ended up getting my breakfast special, anyways, nonetheless. it was barely 5:00 by the time i was done eating, so i just got a lot of water and a lot of coffee and camped out.

of course i nodded off a few times, but they were punctuated by smoke breaks in the cold air that did a good job of waking me back up.

i was lucky that i got the specific waitress doing the overnight shift that sees me as harmless local colour, and doesn't seem interested in chasing me out. i just told her up front that i was waiting for the symphony to start and would probably be there until after 9:00, and she seemed to register it and then said nothing to me about it.

i got some french fries around 7:00 and munched them slowly on purpose.

the food, the coffee, the water and the brisk smoke breaks actually had me largely sobered up by 9:00, when i ordered one extra large coffee to go (the specific waitress had been refilling my cup all night for free, actually) and made my way out to the box office to get a ticket for the symphony.

i was aware that they were doing a specifically african-themed event on this day, something i didn't look too deeply into, and also noticed that they were initially planning on doing the same ravel piece i saw the previous month, which minimized my interest in the whole thing. however, the pianist performing the ravel piece had to withdraw at the last minute due to tendinitis, and they replaced it with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, which i hadn't seen yet. that all of a sudden became a priority when i noticed it; the whole thrust of the adventure is really centered around making sure i can get to the symphony at some point that weekend, with the friday morning show being identified as most tactical, due to there not being a great follow-up show on the saturday and there not being a sunday show at all. this let me get to the two things that were most interesting to me, sunsquabi & the concerto, in one long & epic trip, rather than piecing together two or three half-nights in order to stretch it out.

i still didn't really look into the african themed first part of the show, though - i decided that i'd just go and check it out. i had a vague expectation of something religiously themed, but i otherwise didn't really know what to expect.

they started the show off with a piece called lift every voice and sing, in which the expectation was that we would all know the words (i did not. sorry.) and that we would all stand together and sing it (i did neither. sorry). it seems as though this tune has some political significance in the black community. i just have this aversion to choir-singing for some reason; i don't like the group think, the unity of action, it gets into my skin and makes me squirm. it doesn't really matter what it is, if i'm instructed to stand and participate, i almost certainly won't.

the piece itself sounded like an orchestration of a gospel tune, which i gather is what it actually is.

i'm not sure if this is the exact arrangement, but i think it is.

this was followed by an arrangement of ave maria. is ave maria black? it seems somewhat farcical on first glance, but i take it that this particular arrangement must have been constructed by a black american. it's still a little bit of a curious pick.

these pieces were running into each other like a medley, or, i guess, like a haphazardly thrown together symphony; these were movements, and the third was....a meditation on the word 'hallelujah'. it has a very minimalist feel to it in the reich or glass sense, but i was almost cracking up, really.

they then went into two pieces by a black female composer called nkeiru okoye, the first of which is supposed to be a hopeful reaction to 9/11 but actually kind of comes off as a walt disney megahit, to me, which is perhaps just a topical reflection - if america were to produce a hopeful response to 9/11, it would have to be in the form of a disney film. you can and i might suggest should imagine heroines singing soliloquies into their mirror in the middle part, psyching themselves up for their task. the big band perhaps gives it a downtown manhatten feel, but it kind of just comes off sounding like 49th street massacre.

https://soundcloud.com/nkeiruokoye/voices-shouting-out-1

the second piece by this composer was apparently a world premiere of her piece black bottom, which is a sort of opera in several short movements about the northwards adjoining neighbourhood in detroit, which is also currently the party district. i didn't even try to follow this, but i generally have no interest in opera, so i was not a good test subject; to me, the piece seemed sort of disjointed and didn't flow well, but i'd probably say that about most opera. i think that the dso did have this at their youtube site previously, as it is in the google cache, but it appears to have been taken down; as it was the world premiere, this is probably the only extant recording, as of this time.

the fifth piano concerto started up after a short intermission, and at that point i became cognizant of the nature of the audience - it was black, but it was also very young and apparently in attendance due to some kind of function. it clapped between the movements of the concerto.

this was my write-up, a few days after the show:

so, we didn't do a preliminary review of beethoven's 5th piano concerto.

the reason i didn't catch this earlier was that it was added at the last minute. the program was initially supposed to start with what the dso decided was specifically "black music" (and i'll have a bit to say about that when i do the review) and end with the same ravel piece i saw a few weeks ago, but the pianist had to drop due to tendinitis. so, they brought somebody else in at the last minute to do what is one of beethoven's most classic works.

i hope they didn't pick beethoven in order to buy into the urban legend that he was black. the arguments i've seen would lead to the conclusion that he might have maybe been distantly arabic - if you want to pull something out of his tonality, that's really what you pull out, and these reaching deductions about some paintings at most have him looking a little tanned, rather than black. it's supposedly due to the idea that his mother came from an area that was once under moorish control. in fact, the idea that the moors were black is itself just a eurocentric myth that should really be vigorously corrected across the literature; european art constantly depicted the moors as dark-skinned, and they of course were, but they were dark-skinned in the sense that an arab is, and not black like subsaharan africans. that is an anachronism that we've picked up fairly recently. so, shakespeare's contemporary audience would have actually known that othello was an arab. what the moors really did was create a neo-carthaginian state that was fundamentally semitic in every way, not african. but, i don't think anybody actually takes this idea seriously as it isn't based in any hard evidence, and i'll remind you that there is an urban legend that mozart was black, too. rather, this idea seems to get it's support from a strain of historical revisionism called "afrocentrism" that essentially argues that everybody was black - including historical figures like darius (iranian) and cleopatra (greek) that quite clearly were not. maybe, though, there were good reasons to pull the ravel from a concert about black music...beethoven was at least about liberty, equality and fraternity, even if his mother was actually polish and he was, actually, pretty much lily white.

this piece is perhaps beethoven at his most cliched, and you can kind of interpret that in a variety of ways. is it therefore beethoven at his peak? or does it get a little bit expected, in a sense? regardless, it's impossible to deny the sheer enjoyment of it, if you love the aspects of beethoven's work that he is still best known for all of these years later - the raucus piano parts, the sheer fucking with christian tonality and the nice, catchy melodies that he wraps all of that into. we get beethoven as barnstorming revolutionary, beethoven as purveyor of catchy tunes for the masses and beethoven as epic, brilliant troll all at once. it's hard to present an argument against such compactness.

but, it is a little predictable in terms of following his own previously established form, for better or worse.

if you ever get a chance to see this, jump at it. there's a magic to it. really. i'm glad i stayed up all night for it...

i was aware before i left that the weather might turn on friday night, but it was also supposed to hit a peak of niceness on friday afternoon before rapidly deteriorating. in fact, the wind was already starting to pick up when i got out of the orchestra hall around 13:00, enough that it was somewhat of a difficultly cold walk home.

i was finally back in before 15:00, a little less than 24 hours since i'd left, and this ritual did end properly with nachos, a shower and some good sleep.