is social distancing actually a cult?

i'm for real eating, now.

think about it.

i have no earned income. therefore, i've experienced no loss in income.

what's the worst thing that can happen if i apply?

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/04/20/ontario-to-allow-people-on-social-assistance-to-keep-part-of-emergency-benefits.html

you are not a child, and the government is not your guardian. you will not be rewarded for good behaviour, and if that's what you're thinking then you need to snap out of it.

if social distancing is working, it means that the more you comply, the longer you will need to comply for.

you won't get a reduced sentence for good behaviour, here; it's the opposite - if we all comply perfectly, we'll be stuck with this for the next two years.

if you want to speed this up, you should be supporting policies that increase social interaction, not those that reduce it.

do you understand that?

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/03/30/should-governments-give-an-end-date-for-social-distancing-covid-19-study-says-theres-a-catch.html

i don't suffer idiots very well. you might have noticed that.

but, we'd better at least learn from this, because if you think i'm being intolerant now....

ok.

it would be impossible to find stats on deaths due to the "common cold" because there's no such thing as the common cold - that's a term we use to describe dozens of disparate viruses that create similar symptoms.

but, any of these viruses might kill you if you're 110 years old, or if you have aids.

the comparison is not that bad, actually. but, nobody thinks the numbers are that low. or, not yet, anyways.

we don't have flu-like coronaviruses, though; coronaviruses are the common cold, and that's the best comparison we have to this one, as well, even if it's in it's beginning stages. a number that low might be realistic in a few years, once it's really run it's course.

for now, the correct answer is "no".

to be clear...

if what we've done is working after all, then the intent of the policy was to push the peak forward along the axes of the graph, meaning we'll need to wait even longer to peak.

so, i'm suggesting that toronto will peak at the end of may, because i don't think these policies are working. but, if they are working then that means that we'll be pushing the peak to a later point in time - july or perhaps august.

does those make sense to you?

do you understand?

do you understand why what the premier said today is complete rubbish?

if toronto were actually at a peak - and they are not. - then the proper conclusion would be that social distancing had no effect at all, and the virus has a mortality rate that's drastically lower than 0.1%,.

we can calculate that.

if we're at peak, that means we're at herd immunity. no, that's what the peak is - there's no other way to peak.

if we have 600 deaths with .666 infection, what is the mortality rate?

let x be the mortality rate.

15 million*.666*x = 600 <----> x= 600/(.666*15 million) <---> x= 0.00006006006

so, if we're at a peak than the mortality rate is .0006%.

that's comparable to what? the common cold?

we're not at peak, and the mortality rate is not that low. the premier is just an ignorant buffoon.

what the ford government is claiming is that social distancing rules had the effect of accelerating the peak.

this is perhaps the single most ignorant statement i've yet to hear in regards to the situation.

i'll repeat my own position, which i think is the consensus position - community spread in ontario doesn't appear to have started until march, weeks after italy or new york. if we are ~6 weeks behind new york, we shouldn't expect to see death tolls in toronto that are comparable to the peak in new york, which happened at the beginning of april, until the middle of may or the beginning of june.

you should expect toronto to peak at the end of may or the start of june.

but, what if social distancing is working? would you expect it to accelerate the peak?

no. the purpose of social distancing was to slow down the peak, in order to protect health care resources.

if you wanted to accelerate the peak, you should have increased transmission rates.

it's just a constant stream of anti-science bullshit from queen's park. and, this man needs to go. now.

i'm going to want to split the update into topics, though.

- court case updates
- illegal entry updates
- computing updates
- covid-19 updates

etc

i said one more update, but i'm going to need to do two, i think, on second thought.

i was hoping to find some kind of shortcut in reviewing this chunk of time from the 13th to the 31st of march, and i'm giving up - i'm going to have to do it the long way.

so, i'm for real stopping to eat, first.

it's very strange what we're seeing happening, here, even if we've had forewarning with russiagate and a few other things.

across the country, it's the democrats that are giving into fear mongering and ignoring the science, and republicans that are following the data.

i'd like to pretend i'm baffled, but it's really a continuation of an existing trend - republicans are becoming more science-oriented; democrats, less so.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-u-s-floridamorons-trends-after-people-flock-to-reopened-florida-beaches

i'd like to call for doug ford's immediate resignation.

he's not intellectually capable of dealing with this, and should realize it and step away.

i got some sleep today, which is necessary sometimes.

i'm almost done the vlogging update. one more.

i'm going to eat first.

so, how will we know if this is done before we get a vaccine?

we're getting decent bounds on the mortality rate, now. 

we'll need to calculate herd immunity based on mortality - that's how we'll know it's done.

and, we'll measure the body count in ontario by thousands, not hundreds, when it is.

unless you want to live like this until we get a vaccine, that is.

the initial modelling had a death rate around 1% of those infected. we know now that that's about ten to twenty times too high.

it also had r-not values around 1 or 2. we know now that that's 2-3 times too low.

those are the sources of error in the models, and we can fix that to come up with better projections.

but, the focus of these policies was never to burn the virus out, it was only to slow it down.

we were never going to save anybody, we were only going to prolong their death by weeks or months.

why did we do this?

was it to reduce the total death count?

no. that's wrong....

the reason we did this was to slow down the hospitalization rate. you've forgotten already, haven't you?

remember all those charts you saw on twitter?

remember?

no?

"we can't stay locked down until we get a vaccine."

you're right, we can't.

that's what i told you in the fucking first place.

we should not be talking about peaking in ontario until we get a minimum of 5000 deaths.

and, i'm sorry if the government confused you, but maybe they were right to talk down to you, at least.

"but, social distancing is working."

even if it was working, that wouldn't suggest a lower total death count, in the end, unless we stay locked down until (if.) we get a vaccine.

remember, there's only two ways to stop this: mass vaccination or herd immunity.

and, there's no way to get to herd immunity without experiencing a lot of death, because it's going to work via trial and error.

so, even if social distancing was working, that wouldn't imply that you could cut the death rate to a tenth of what it would be, otherwise. it would just mean you could slow it down....

how many dead people should you expect in ontario when this is done?

well, there's about 15 million people here.

15000000*.666*.001 = 9990.

that's an exceedingly crude calculation, but i'd argue it's better than the ones the state is producing.

we're a long ways from getting there.

it's the perfect example of what happens when you elect a fucking moron.

if this is too much, just remember this: what's about to happen in ontario is not a "second wave".

the epidemic hasn't started yet.

if they were to run the models with a case count that was derived from the death toll, which is going to be a better metric than the testing anyways, then they'd get very different results.

guessing parameters is messy, and nobody is going to nail this. you need to expect large amounts of error.

but, this is certain: if you feed the model bad data by suppressing the testing, you're going to get the same garbage out that you put in.

and, it will not be the models that will be wrong. it will be the government that botched the response...

the ford government has refused to test, thereby limiting the number of known cases to a few thousand.

but, we've had almost 600 deaths, here. the observed mortality rate in ontario is over 5%, which is nowhere close to reality.

we know, now, that the actual mortality rate is under .1%.

that would suggest that there are more than 600,000 cases in ontario, already. but, that's not the end - that's just the start.

so, the ford government's focus has been to distort the numbers by refusing to test. it seems to be afraid that it's going to face bad media if too many cases are uncovered. then, they argue that the deficit of observed cases implies the epidemic has passed, when the truth is that they just haven't tested for it.

then, they put the bad data into the model, and conclude it's not happening.

no, you fucking idiots. you're not testing...

doug ford is alpha idiot.

he's the counterexample.

and, ontario is going to come out of this as the perfect demonstration of how to do everything completely wrong.

let's hope it buries him.

ok, i'll bring out my crystal ball.

abracadabra! oopa loompa!

what's going to happen here is that they're going to reopen before the epidemic even starts. then, when the epidemic starts here on time, we'll blame it on reopening too early - when the reality is that we shut down too early, and then reopened before it even hit.

i don't think we should have shut anything down at all - i think we should have put the vulnerable in lockdown camps until it passed. but, if we were going to shut down, we should have shut down starting now, not starting last month.

it's a confusing mess, i get it. so, what should we do? we should reopen, yes. but, not only have we not peaked, we haven't even started. so, when we reopen, we should not get jittery about it.

but, we will.

hey, if their attempt to suppress the data just makes idiots out of them, i guess there's an upside of that.

but, it hasn't peaked. it hasn't started....

the response in ontario has been bungled on purpose.

first, they don't do enough testing to pull out anything meaningful from the data. then, they put that fragmented data into the models, which just produces garbage results. then, they base their policies on the garbage they got out, by putting garbage in.

sadly, the sitting ontario government is so stupid that it seems to think the primary issue in front of it is limiting the number of cases that are reported, in order to skew the reporting - because they think you're too stupid to figure it out. and, if you voted for these fucking idiots, then maybe you are.

the data on cases is of limited value much of anywhere; it's absolutely worthless in a jurisdiction that refuses to do enough testing. if you can't see it, it's not there, right doug? you fucking idiot...

that said, given that the infectiousness of the disease was dramatically underestimated, and that it's mortality rate was dramatically overestimated, i don't think that shutting down society is helping minimize the spread of the disease at all. so, i don't oppose reopening.

but, has the data peaked?

the initial response from the federal government was the correct one, which limited spread in the community by encouraging openness. community spread does not appear to have sunk in here until they brought in counterproductive authoritarian measures to stop it. as such, we are months behind the curve in the united states.

in ontario, i don't think the epidemic has even started yet - all we've seen is background. those numbers are likely set to ramp up in a week or two.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-begins-working-on-plan-to-reopen-as-modelling-data-suggests-cases-have-peaked-1.4904027

again: don't be surprised if you see a small uptick in cases in new york tomorrow, because there's a pattern of underreporting on sundays. we haven't reached the social pinnacle of full secularism in this society, just yet.

and, we still need to wait for the effects of easter to show up in the data.

but, yes - these new numbers are in line with my projections.

so, i decided to get through the concerts (that i can't go to.) for the rest of the month, first. there wasn't much after the rachmaninov show this weekend. and, may actually looks a little bit boring, although it could be that the best stuff already got rebooked.

back to the vlog updates, now. let's hope i can get this done by sunrise and have a highly productive week after that.

so, which would have been worse?

i don't know.

i really don't.

i don't know if i regret endorsing clinton to stop trump, instead of endorsing stein as a passive way to stop clinton.

and i don't expect to know for a long time.

...and then you get mad at me for telling you the facts of the matter.

and, i say - "no". not on my watch...

we're going to talk about reality, or we're not going to talk at all. we're going to talk about the real hillary clinton, as best we know her. and, we're going to come to some unexpected and painful realizations as we do it.

if you want to run off and cry, i can wait. if you want to yell, i'll walk away, or shrug it off.

but, i'm not conceding to fantasy.

i'm going to burst your bubble, and make you see reality, whether you like it or not.

clinton was raised a republican. she's a conservative - across the board.

but, the cultural perception of hillary clinton is largely a strawman created by rush limbaugh, newt gingrich and rupert murdoch that is designed to smear her as "too liberal". even her supporters seem to be overwhelmingly voting in favour of the strawman created by the right, rather than the candidate's actual policies.

they've completely defined the debate - you probably voted for or against the strawman.

think about that.

the more substantive point i'm trying to make is that when i have these arguments, my opponents rarely seem to be properly informed about the issues, and this holds across the spectrum. they get very angry at me, without realizing that their anger is largely rooted in false perceptions of what reality actually is - that their perception of clinton is a projection, and they'd have been sorely disappointed by what they'd get.

i don't have the appropriate studies to cite, and i don't think it's likely i'll get them unless somebody specifically studies the issue, directly. but, what i've hypothesized in the past is that the fake left's perception of clinton is actually indirectly defined by fox news and other right-wing media, who have created this strawman of clinton as this extreme leftist - much as they did for obama. but, people know better with obama, i think. with clinton, the smears have been going on for so long that even people that define themselves as leftists have lost their grip on the truth of it.

certainly, if you got your information from right-wing media, you'd think clinton was pro-choice, because that's one of the things they use to smear her with, and have been for many, many years. but, she's been trying to correct the point since at least the 90s - she's opposed late trimester abortions her entire political career. she's on record for this as late as mid-2016 - at townhalls, in debates. they don't want you to know that, though, so they pick up their bullhorns and they yell and scream the opposite, and that yelling and screaming has defined the skewed perception of the reality of it, both in their own audience and amongst their opponents.

yes, i would like to see that more rigorously examined, or at least for somebody to examine the point a little bit more clearly. the fact is that clinton's political position for many years has been to support a constitutional amendment to permanently end late term abortions. that's the fact. why do so many democrats think otherwise?

is it possible that clinton would have found herself at war with her own party, and had to concede on so many of these points that i'm concerned about, where she's just about as far right as a democrat can get and still be a democrat?

that's an empirical question. i don't know.

she could just as well have succeeded in shifting the centre even further to the right, which is what both obama and bill clinton did, and the most substantive legacy of both of them...

i'll concede that some of these things that i'm citing - like her abortion policy - seem too abstract to be of any real concern. her position on abortion is a matter of the public record, and it's just the simple truth that she's never been properly defined as seeing the issue as being about choice, as being about autonomy - she's been clear for many years that she sees the issue as a health concern. legal, safe and rare. she always underlines and asterisks the rare. and, unlike many other issues, she's never obfuscated on this point because she seems to think that unwavering support for abortion rights is unpopular and hurting the party's chances to appeal to the centre; any legislation from her, any judicial appointments from her, would have the strict focus on ensuring the rarity of the procedure. but, could she actually get the amendment in place? she'd need a republican legislature to do it as a first assumption, and it would probably destroy the party. so, i point to her actual position on the matter as a reality check, but that doesn't mean she'd have a realistic path to doing any of it. but, the same analysis holds for trump, who is hardly a pro-life republican, and it is well known has stated support for pro-choice policies in the past.

i'm keying on abortion, because it's the best argument i've seen to hold your nose and vote for her. but, a careful analysis largely even debunks this - trump is hardly jerry falwell, and clinton is well to the right of her own party on this issue, and may very well have found herself fighting against it.

if you think hospitalizations in new york plateaued rather than peaked, i'd like to see your definition of a peak.

the deaths look like a plateau and rapid fall, at this point. there's ways to analyze that to determine if there was really a distorted peak or not.

the hospitalizations - like most of the other metrics - went straight up and down.

hey, we're all guessing, still. we'll need antibody testing to prove the case, one way or the other. but, there is a very strong argument right now that this thing just ripped through new york without a passing concern to our behaviour. unlike the governor, i don't get paid for this, so i'm not going to repeat myself.

three caveats.

one - reporting on sundays seems to be a little lower. so, don't be surprised if you get a very steep drop tomorrow, followed by a small increase on tuesday and a return to the general shape on wednesday.

two - we're still waiting to see if we get a boost from easter. we should be able to indirectly estimate immunity & exposure levels from the data we see next week, regardless, and see which hypothesis it's most consistent with.

three - the data has only begun to be reported daily recently, but deaths in nursing homes seem to be ticking up, as total deaths fall. 

i think we're very close to this thing falling down to background levels. for now, please continue to keep the weak inside and away from danger.

one policy that harper pushed that i agreed with was a massive subsidy program for greenhouses to grow food locally, which is not just useful for food security, but also for carbon reduction, due both to reducing transportation to bring food to canada and reducing the reliance that outdoor produce has on oil-based pesticides.

it was a pleasant surprise, and evidence that you will inevitably agree with even your most strongly held opponents if you examine a large enough number of concerns.

this sort of wishful thinking about the democrats and where they actually stand on the spectrum and what positions they're likely to actually promote is widespread and deep-seated and goes back to at least the 1992 election, where clinton appears to have been elected on the perception that we would do exactly the opposite of what he actually did. i do remember that election, but i have no memory of carter, and my weak analysis of his presidency is that it was kind of the last gasp of the old solid south. he later distanced himself from it, but carter was initially successful by running as a racist old southern democrat - and that appears to be what people expected from him. those voters went to perot in the 90s. so, the 1992 election opened up a new era in the democratic party.

one of the worst examples i can think of is this delusional perception that al gore, the leading congressional hawk on actions against iraq throughout the 80s and 90s, would have somehow acted differently, had he been elected. this position is not based on an absence of evidence, but a negation of it; all evidence suggests he would have been more aggressive than bush was. he'd been aggressively pushing for an invasion of iraq for 20 years, and he was the architect of the situation that made it such an immediate cakewalk, namely the sanctions and the no-fly zone. 

so, the idea that al gore would have spared saddam hussein is absurdly ignorant and just deeply delusional. however, it's almost ubiquitous in certain circles.

one of the worst things about trump is his environmental policy, and i'm hardly going to defend his record on the point. he's been a disaster on that file. but, would clinton have been better? the best evidence we have for the issue is her handling of the keystone xl pipeline, and it's not very inspiring. 

so, i want you to be fully cognizant of where i'm coming from on this - i'm trying to look at the actual data in front of me, rather than draw partisan conclusions, or buy into specious media narratives. the general direction of this administration is pretty terrible, but it has truly come with a few positive surprises, too. but, that's inevitable; i'm sure i agreed with reagan on two or three things, too, even if i can't think of them, right now. what i'm more concerned about is comparing what we've seen from trump to what a sober analysis would have expected from clinton, and the stark conclusion is that i don't see a lot of reasons to think that i'd be happier about existing policy if she had won.

but, i still can't answer the general question, and i don't expect i'll be able to until years after trump leaves office.

let me be as clear as i can.

do i really think clinton would have been worse than trump? what i've been trying to say for years now is i don't know.

i know that when people present clear criticisms of trump to me, they're often misinformed about clinton's positions on the matter. the most substantive argument i've heard is about abortion, but most of these people are deeply misinformed about clinton's position on abortion, which is not at all aligned with the pro-choice movement. she wants a constitutional amendment to ban late trimester abortions!

so, you can throw all of this stuff about how terrible trump is at me, but my general response is "ok. i agree with you. but, your argument is rooted in the perception that clinton has a different policy, when the reality is that she actually has basically the same position."

and, there are some counter-arguments, too. i'm still opposed to nafta and still want to eventually get rid of it, but the amendments to it do have some major victories that the left has been trying to accomplish for 35 years. these are foundational victories, that most people probably thought would never happen. clinton would have followed her private position on nafta once elected, not her public one. further, while trump has committed some war crimes like all of his recent predecessors, we haven't started a new war, yet. how long do you think it would have taken clinton to bomb somebody in order to prove that she's "tough"? a week?

do you know what clinton's immigration policy was?

there's not any value in relitigating this, but i don't feel i have any clarity, here, yet.

i did endorse clinton, but it was an exceedingly weak endorsement, and i've stated repeatedly that i'm not convinced i was right to do it - which means that i have this nagging feeling that i should have endorsed jill stein under the argument that clinton was worse, and not given clinton a weak endorsement with the intent to block trump.

but, i don't think i'll be able to answer these questions for years to come, still.

all i can state with clarity is that it is probably the worst set of choices americans have ever had - with the possible exception of the one they're going to have in november.

we've been focusing on boomer retirement so long that....

you do realize that gen x is actually starting to retire now, right?

most people that study this cut the boomers off before 1955, and introduce a transitional generation from 1955-1965 where people could self-identify either way. and, if you were born in 1955, you are now 65 years old.

both of my parents were born in that transitional period, but they're both clearly boomers, if tail-end boomers. i'm also a cusper (1981), and i strongly identify as the last gen xer. the cusp breaks in the other direction; my grandmother, who had two children before she turned 20 years old, is also a boomer, meaning she's of the same cultural generation as her children. my dad's parents were not boomers. and, both of my sisters are quite clearly millennials.

i have a legit gen x aunt who isn't far from retirement, but that's about it.

time just evades you sometimes, really.

i'm getting started now.

i hope i get to see these guys some time.

i'm actually an advocate of the idea that you should quit your job if you don't like it, but i understand that that's easier said than done.

i would, nonetheless, encourage you to get up and walk out, asap.

"if you don't believe in intellectual property, why do you sell your music?"

the same reason you don't quit that job you hate.

if you give me a ubi, or a check for a few million dollars, i'll set up an ftp site that distributes everything i ever touched for free.

until then, i need to at least passively participate in this system, whether i like it or not.

fuck patents.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne55x8/teledildonics-patent-has-expired

"but, they have patents."

oh.

i see.

they have patents.

then fucking cancel them, then.

i don't care about your stupid fucking patents.

a question nobody is asking...

could we get some anti-trust legislation around proprietary requirements in medical testing? some standards?

you shouldn't be forced to deal with one company to ramp up testing.

in the end, they may only end up available in download packages as a part of the aleph-discs.

they didn't succeed in increasing album sales, so they're really not a priority, except for purposes of historical documentation.

i would expect most communication to be written for the foreseeable future.

when am i going to actually upload these vlogs?

i wouldn't expect anything for years.

so, what did i get done yester...this morning. it was this morning before i peeled myself away from this thing.

the backlog of laundry is now done.

and, i've reimaged the 90s laptop for continued use as a youtube player and moved it away from my bed and back to my couch. i had to try a few times before i got it right, in terms of system files. and, then i slept. that's less than i'd have liked.

it's time to eat another meal, but i'm going to eat it on my couch like i used to, before i turned the laptop off out of concerns about surveillance. it's a step towards normalcy.

i'm then going to take a shower and finally get to work on this vlogging update, which i expect to take another day or two.

i know, i know. i'm trying to focus, but the distractions are maximal right now...and everything is in disorder...

people are going to continue to die from this disease.

every day.

forever.

and, when you are old and weak, you may one day die from a mutated strain of it, yourself.

my model suggested around 3000-4000 deaths in the metro detroit area.

they appear to be about 50-60% of the way there, and seeing declines in new cases.

have deaths from covid-19 exceeded background levels in ontario?

not yet.

but, the rate is continuing to increase.

there's a phrase they use in computer science to describe what happens when you put bad data into good models - garbage in, garbage out.

does that mean you should wear a mask?

what it means is that you should stop freaking out about getting it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5

if trump had redirected funding that was intended to go to the who to something like doctors without borders, would i have supported it?

yes.

new york hasn't crashed yet, don't get cocky. and, please understand that the crux of my argument is that the virus is extremely contagious - that this r-not is twice or three times what is estimated in the models, even as the mortality rate pushes towards 0.1%, or lower. that means that my model suggests that roughly two thirds of people in new york city are either carriers of the virus or have antibodies for it, right now. so, your grandma is in greater peril going out for a walk now than she was last week - and that holds everywhere. give it a week past the point that deaths reach background levels.

what are background levels? 30 deaths a day? 70 deaths a day? we don't know.

apparently, 61,000 people died of the flu in the united states in the 2017/2018 flu year. if you naively divide that by 365, it's 167 deaths/day - but that assumes constancy, which is wrong. the seasonal flu is seasonal. you'd want to do something like assign 75% of the deaths to the first six months of the year, which would give you a death rate more like 250/day until the end of the flu season. given that we're still in flu season, i wouldn't be surprised if the death rate for the flu is around 200-300 deaths/day right now as we speak. that's across the united states, not just in new york. but, i would encourage new york to actually do the math on this to get a set of bounds as to what they can expect normalcy to actually be, moving forwards. you're probably looking at at least 25 as a realistic goal....

so, it's probably not going to fall to zero for a city like new york. like, ever. we'll know when we get to background when we see it, but we can take some better guesses now than we could a few weeks ago, given that we now have a better understanding of how low the mortality rate is than we did previously.

i would support banning the salvation army, too.

i actually live in a country that did ban (technically, nationalize.) the red cross. my dad's third wife worked for them for most of the time i knew her.

we have a government run body called the canadian blood services now, instead.

religion has no role to play in health care.

at all.

the who does need reform, but, fwiw, i would actually support defunding the red cross and jailing the members of samaritan's purse.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/16/white-house-steers-withheld-who-funds-to-other-organizations/

even with the virus issue...

my own argument has been that governments across the world have bought into the pseudoscience of social distancing without properly evaluating the evidence for it, and that it's almost certainly not going to actually work. so, i'm not prioritizing the economy over health, so much as i'm pointing out that this isn't going to work, and arguing that focusing on the weak while otherwise loosening restrictions would actually be more effective - i'm having a debate over which policy best prioritizes health, and in the process pulling out a policy that also has minimal effects on the economy, but not actually because of it. if i thought social distancing was the best health policy, i would support it; i don't. and, i'm being proven more and more right every day, it seems.

but, which side of the spectrum is rooting their policies in religious concepts about the sanctity of life and insistent on passing rules and laws to uphold those religious concepts, and which side sees the universe as an empty, barren place where life has no inherent meaning?

so long as government exists, it should do what it can to protect the weak, and i've been absolutely consistent on that point.

but, i don't believe that life is sacred; life has no inherent meaning, no value, no purpose. the difference is that i advocate for mutual aid, but i am far closer to the nihilist republican position than i am to the religious democratic one.

now, if you could only explain this to the moral majority voters that still think they're voting for reagan, or to the cultural left that thinks it's still voting for bill clinton....

i mean, we can have a total order here.

anarchism > socialism >> liberalism >> nihilism >> conservatism/progressivism.

i'm an atheist, through and through; i want religion to just stop. completely. forever...

but, this is an example of the broader realignment issues, in that it falls neatly into this narrative i'm trying to build about what the lesser evil may be, moving forward. i'm a socialist, clearly. but, when forced to choose between conservatism, as presented by the democrats, and nihilism, as presented by the republicans, my opposition to conservatism may actually be stronger. i'm just as likely to argue that republican nihilism is preferable to democratic conservatism as i was to argue that democratic liberalism was a lesser evil to republican conservatism.

likewise, if i have to choose between a democratic party that is embracing some kind of burkeanesque interfaith approach to religion, and a republican party that is moving fully into a post-modernist framework that may pay lip service to it but doesn't actually legislate around it, i'll pick post-modernism as the less horrible option, even if i think both are terrible. i'm less afraid of post-modernism than i am of comparative religious studies.

we're still a ways out from this, and things may change, in the end.

but, seeing the democrats spend money on "mindfullness" and "meditation" is bone-chilling. it makes you stop and wonder where the country is going to be in a few more decades.

that's another potential battleground coming up, as the spectrum flips over.

it used to be that people that called themselves liberals, or aligned on the left, were absolutely vehemently opposed to any kind of religious instruction in the classroom. getting religion out of the schools was a foundational principle of liberalism, and arguably even a populist issue.

now that these fake left groups are increasingly operating as the political representation for recent immigrant groups that actually want more religion in society in general, this is an issue that we may have to relitigate, and with strange allies in doing so. we're seeing this play out in quebec, and it's probably just the start of it.

the party that the democrats are turning into is one that seems likely to embrace the central role of non-christian religions in the classroom, meaning it's going to have to change it's position on christianity in the classroom in order to remain consistent. and, we're seeing signs that the republicans may be flipping over on that, as well, as they increasingly embrace post-modernist approaches to religion, and distance themselves from the religious right.

where do you fall on an issue like that?

are you going to follow the democrats in their slow and inevitable reintroduction of religion into the classroom, as a red meat issue for their increasingly ethnic voting base? will you decide that you disagree with them, but it's not a voting issue? or are you going to hold your ground, as you find yourself increasingly attracted to a republican party that you have no common ground with on economics?

i don't know, either. really. we'll have to see the specifics.

i know i'll continue to oppose the reintroduction of religion to schools, though.

and, i know i'll continue to argue for the abolition of the catholic school system, here in ontario.

i don't sign petitions, and especially not online ones.

but, if you're inclined....

i don't care how you waste your time at home, but this absolute idiocy has no place in the education system.

https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-education-please-remove-the-mindfulness-program-from-canadian-public-schools

uber alles, michigan.

your kids will meditate in school.

lol.

there's some more of that evidence-based policy.

*sigh*

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/whitmer-launches-free-coronavirus-mindfulness-resources-for-michigan-residents.html

this is a better approach than walking around with guns.

and, i hope they win, too.

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/michigan-residents-sue-governor-whitmer-over-coronavirus-pandemic-orders

the who is now claiming there's no evidence that antibodies cause immunity, which is like something out of the twilight zone. it's just weird.

listen: i'll admit that i've been kind of baffled by what i'm hearing from them since this started. you can sort through the side to see my reactions. so, this is just the latest in a series of bizarre announcements that i've been struggling to make sense of from day one.

based on what i've heard them say, i'm actually more worried about the influence of some kind of shady muslim group than i am about the influence of the chinese, who corrected some of their data today (as was expected; expect more), and, frankly, seem to be as baffled by the situation as everybody else. it's actually south korea rather than china that i'm most skeptical about hiding cases and/or deaths right now, after all of that propaganda in their favour.

so, i don't want to advocate defunding them, especially given that doing so would just hand the body over to actors that are hostile to this continent.

but, i might call for the director to resign. and, i might suggest some kind of investigation to figure out what the hell is going on, and why they keep making these bizarre announcements.

again: you don't need an advanced degree to be baffled by the claim that there's no evidence that antibodies help with immunity. this is just the latest in a series of flatly weird announcements coming from the who since day one on this. so, i'll ask the same question i asked when this started: what's really going on, here?

further, the delayed reaction in singapore is actually exactly what you'd expect, as i've pointed out. nobody should be surprised by that.

the south koreans continue to post these almost unbelievable statistics, but there's other weird reports coming out of south korea about people being reinfected, which is making me question the data altogether. maybe there's some specific thing they're doing that i don't know about, but they're really stumping me - this is a mystery, an open question. an outlier....

japan is not experiencing a second wave.

rather, they just started doing testing.

i'm not isaac newton.

i'm a guitarist on disability.

ok.

*deep breath*.

so, it seems to have taken me some time to burn through the news after waking up around 15:00 this afternoon. i guess that's ok. there was some big news...

i'm going to get my daily fruit bowl now, get a start on the remaining laundry and look to pivot towards finally getting to an update on that vlog. i'm awake, i'm alert and i want to refocus, now.

damn.

i'm not gloating.

but, i wish the public health response - everywhere - was more rigorous in it's analysis.

who was making these choice, at the end of the day? were the decision-makers doctors? or mathematicians?

The study estimated that 2.49% to 4.16% of people in Santa Clara Country had been infected with Covid-19 by April 1. 

ok. so, that was two and a half weeks ago, actually.

the current number of cases in this county is 1870, according to google. (50*1870 = 93500, 80*1870=149600). the population is about 1928000. so, updated numbers would suggested 4.8-7.7% - if the growth is linear, which is no doubt wrong.

so, that study is a proof of concept because it's 17 days behind.

but, it gets the point across - even in the county with the earliest, strongest lockdowns, you're still looking at widespread transmission and substantive infection rates. i want more studies before i throw numbers out there.

don't get giddy. i've made an attempt to avoid gloating for weeks. this actually suggests it's more important than ever for us to ensure we're continuing to protect the weak; don't think otherwise. but, it's also increasing evidence that these controls are neither working nor were they reasonable.

i know. i'm a nerd. but, listen - there's no reason to think this isn't a huge curve ball. how is your governor or premier going to react to this realization that infection rates are already out of control? i don't know....

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronavirus-infections-study/index.html

more consistency - 50x-80x.

and, this is basically exactly what i was waiting for, although the numbers seem a little low, to me. but, this is san francisco, where they locked people down early.

i want to see similar testing done in new york.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

the sewage data would seem to suggest there are about 50x as many cases as are being reported, give or take. yeah.

so, that would suggest that there's actually closer to 1.6 million cases in canada, and a mortality rate around .08%.

for the united states, you're looking at 35 million cases and a mortality rate around .1%.

consistency is a key component of the scientific method, kids.

why didn't anybody else think of that?

i've been presenting the infection rate as a percentage of the population. you've heard people on tv, though, talk about this variable, r with a subscript of 0 - called r-not, which looks like R0 and is called the basic reproduction number. you'll note that i haven't done that, that i've stuck with an infection rate instead. why am i doing that?

the reason is that this basic reproduction number is something that should be uncovered empirically, not something that should be guessed at. the modeling is making that number up, and i'm actually assigning that process to quite a bit of the observed error.

i can throw out an infection rate as a rough bound in the context of a conditional (if the infection rate is .666 then....) as that is tautologically contained within itself so long as it's well-formed. i can also calculate an infection rate from an observed death count, and an otherwise derived mortality rate, which i'm far less apprehensive about pulling out of the existing data, even as i recommend some skepticism. however, i'm not going to guess the basic reproduction number by observing the number of found cases. i don't feel there's enough variables there to do that, even as i point to the contagion level appearing to be higher than appears to be the accepted guess, due to the nature of the curve.

for that reason, i've kept my models very simple and preferred to talk in english about the disease being "very contagious" and "not very deadly". if we could find that r-not empirically, though, i might be more willing to talk about things as functions of each other, and look at some more complex modelling. what i've been waiting for is antibody testing.

you'll excuse the pun, but this is a very crude way to measure that number that i hadn't thought of. it's inherently better than a guess, though. and, it's aligning with my general analysis that we might be burning out due to immunity, rather than "flattening the curve".

https://abcnews.go.com/US/sewage-analysis-suggests-england-metro-area-fewer-500/story?id=70068740

i have more or less the same criticism for modern day organized satanism that i would for the cult of reason.

they call themselves atheists, but they sure seem pretty religious, if you ask me.

what does "less critical of the reign of terror" mean?

they kind of went bonkers in the end, clearly.

but, given the reality of the ancien regime, and it's interrelationship with the papacy going back to fucking charlemagne, i don't see what else they could have done. i don't exactly want to justify the barbarity of the reign of terror, so much as i want to realize it as a necessary evil. in the end, i'd rather cite voltaire than robespierre. but, these priests probably needed to die - there probably wasn't any other way to end this.

it didn't take long to collapse, though. and, i'm hardly going to defend the ending stages. but, i'm more likely going to criticize the process in terms of it undoing itself, that is by comparing the cult of reason to a religious group, than in criticizing the actions that were taken. in the end, the fundamental problem with the reign of terror was that it became the ancien regime and continued it's crimes, not how it treated it as it dismantled it. this is the same fundamental critique as ought to apply to stalinism, as a type of neo-czarism, or maoism's current perversion into reconstituted confucianism (even if i think the peasantry lacks true revolutionary potential).

i'm not writing this essay just right now.

this is the mainstream view, i believe - and i'll allow my opponent the source, given the distance of events.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/edmund-burke-v-thomas-paine-nat-brown/

but, this text here came out of the exchange as well and is quite often defined as the beginning of the left-anarchist tradition, or the point where it became distinct from a general small-l liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Men

it also has a lot to do with why i may allow myself to use the term "liberal", with a small-l - all of the influences on anarchism before 1800 would have identified as enlightenment or renaissance liberals.

see, quebec is the one place where i'm going to actually blame the people, not the government. or, at least, not the provincial government. and, some people...

again: this is a right-wing government, but it is also a secular government. that is a weird mix in the existing era, where right-wing governments have generally used religion as a tool of control. the thing is that the silent revolution cut across party lines, creating a situation where almost all religiosity in quebec is immigrating into it from outside of the province. so, there isn't a nativist right to whip up. what there is is a cultural consensus on secularism, which has ideological roots in the french revolution. that's leaving the fake left to represent immigrant communities, which make up almost all religiosity in the province. as a secular leftist, that puts me in a weird position. but, quebec might be a bit of a taste of the future in places like california, as well - it may represent a taste of the reversal of the spectrum on specific issues that is on it's way towards normalcy, continent wide.

so, what do i do when faced with secular fiscal conservatives and economic keynesians that align with the religious right? i don't know...

i know that the specific issues in front of us have led to me being a lot more lenient on them than i'd like to be, because they align on the secular v religious axis rather than the fiscally conservative v. economic keynesian one.

and, i think i'm going to be badly disenfranchised for quite a while, leading me to do this kind of thing more often. i've remained broadly critical of trump; even if i think he's frequently been less bad than what could have been, or might still be, i still think he's been pretty shitty. the caq, though, seems to at least actually be legitimately on the right side on a lot of these issues of secularism, empiricism, data - anything that reduces to that shift away from catholicism that defined revolutionary france. which isn't to compare legault to robespierre, either - even if i'm actually a little less critical of the reign of terror than the culturally english burkean conservative narrative around the events usually is. anarchism actually has it's ideological roots in defending the revolution against the burkean critique.

the provincial government made the right decisions around senior facilities, and they made those decisions early. i applauded them for it; almost on cue, they were criticized for being draconian, and insensitive to the social requirements of the elderly. but, i doubt those that made those arguments then would make them now. they also specifically cracked down on religious gatherings, and deserve a lot of credit for sticking to it.

the reason they have more cases is that they've done more testing, which is also commendable. they're testing at a far higher rate than anywhere else. that's the right approach; the low numbers in other provinces are reflective of incomplete data, and governments that are taking the wrong approach.

quebeckers also have the highest level of self-compliance with distancing rules, according to a number of metrics.

so, it looks like they're doing everything right....

but, people in certain communities seem to have not listened, and it's created a lot of hardship - within their own communities.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/covid-19-quebec-april-17-1.5535556

chretien's opponent in 1993 was technically kim campbell.

but, the election was a populist backlash against mulroney that permanently destroyed the historical entity called the progressive conservative party of canada. it did not recover.

what exists today is really a different political movement, stemming from a different political ideology, namely the social credit movement, which originated in the west.

i actually don't really have an opinion on john turner, given that i have no active memory of him, and he didn't really actually do anything, so there's been no history to look up. he was a sort of caretaker leader for a while in the early 80s, before he lost to mulroney in a major landslide.

but, referring to the fta/nafta as the "sale of canada act" also seems quite prescient at this point.

i wish i knew more about these years myself, actually. 

i do remember the tail end of mulroney's years as pm, if vaguely, but i was largely pre-political in those years. my first real memory of any kind of political anything in canada was the populist backlash against the gst in the 1993 election, when i was 12 years old. i don't even remember what i thought about this at the time, but i doubt it was very informed, or that i'd defend any arguments i made at the time. i remember the election, though - the widespread elation and euphoria at the defeat of mulroney, who was just widely despised by this point.

regardless, i'm reading through this right now.

http://irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/po/the-year-in-review/litt.pdf

there's some more context here.

chapter 3 starts on p. 41.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=Sct5eW57-hIC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=%E2%80%9Ca+monstrous+swindle,+under+which+the+Canadian+government+has+ceded+to+the+United+States+of+America+a+large+slice+of+the+country%E2%80%99s+sovereignty+over+its+economy+and+natural+resources.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=REUy2Hlpav&sig=ACfU3U0cpDn6lFgRdxFwMmX9_f6ohz7IKQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQ0suAtvDoAhWFVs0KHTPfB8oQ6AEwAHoECAsQKQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Ca%20monstrous%20swindle%2C%20under%20which%20the%20Canadian%20government%20has%20ceded%20to%20the%20United%20States%20of%20America%20a%20large%20slice%20of%20the%20country%E2%80%99s%20sovereignty%20over%20its%20economy%20and%20natural%20resources.%E2%80%9D&f=false

“a monstrous swindle, under which the Canadian government has ceded to the United States of America a large slice of the country’s sovereignty over its economy and natural resources.” - pierre trudeau, describing the fta (the precursor to nafta)

more prescient words would be hard to find, on this date.

i'm not going to modify my language to better align with backwards american colloquialisms.

sorry.

historically, conservatives supported mercantilism, while liberals supported free trade. this is actually the etymological origin of the terms conservative and liberal in our political system - it refers to the nature of the trade policies supported by each party.

in canada, the conservative party officially opposed free trade until roughly 1985, when it all of a sudden embraced the results of the mcdonald commission, designed to seek renewed reciprocity with the americans, something that nafta is definitely not.

so, if you look at the situation at face value, it seems as though the conservatives switched sides. but, they haven't, actually. rather, the language has reversed. it really is right out of orwell.

it's actually the liberals that switched sides, by embracing a nafta that uses the language of free trade but is, in truth a fundamentally mercantilist agreement. chretien ran against it, but found himself stuck when he got into office, unable to actually undo it. mulroney had sold us out....

despite launching the committee that led to it, the most vocally prominent opponent of nafta in canada until the day he died was in truth almost certainly pierre elliot trudeau.

so, when i attack doug ford as a mercantilist conservative, it's being done in the context of a british-canadian political tradition. that might be confusing to you if you live in the united states, but all i can tell you is that we're a different country and that you'll need to learn the history if you want to follow the discussion.

if they do this right, it could be a very smart study.

but, now i'm wondering what studies they're citing, and what they actually say.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/sewage-study-windsor-university-of-windsor-1.5535575

but, sitting there and blaming the americans for hoarding supplies is like saying your dog ate your homework.

i'm sick of bullshit excuses from doug ford.

we don't have the capacity. we don't have the manufacturing. we passed the legislation that resulted in this. this is our fault.

and only we can fix it, by undoing the mistakes of neo-liberalism that brought us here.

no.

listen...

if our metrics suggest a steep decline, and it doesn't happen, then we have a contradiction. we have some biases. we have some skewed data.

and that's what statisticians do - they sit down and figure that out.

the hospitalization numbers are probably the best indicators, so the bias is probably on the other side. but, we don't actually know that.

we hollowed out our manufacturing capacities in this province - and we see the consequences, which we were warned of. repeatedly.

we're lucky this is a weak virus.

and, we need to adjust and undo this before a real crisis does hit us.

new york's numbers could still crash tomorrow.

or we might see a continual gradual decline.

the other metrics still suggest a steep decline is imminent. but, we're still running out of time for it to actually happen.

what about new york?

it's frustrating, but a wobble is a wobble and it doesn't mean anything either way.

so, you think i'm vicious with the fake left?

lol.

the guy's probably so fucked up on prozac that we'd be better off with his dead crackhead brother.

we should have the capacity to produce medical supplies in canada, and in ontario specifically. that we do not is a consequence of our failed trade policies going back decades; like so much of what is wrong with this country, the buck stops here at brian mulroney, and his sycophantic relationship with ronald reagan (who is, likewise, the root cause of virtually everything wrong with america).

of course they restricted exports in a crisis. any country would.

don't blame it on them.

it's our policies that failed. it's our fault. and, it's specifically the fault of the conservative movement in this country, which is responsible for embracing these mercantilist trade agreements that were labeled "free trade" as a kind of newspeak.

so, i don't want to hear these nationalist deflections. i don't want to see anybody wrap themselves in the fucking flag. i want a proper analysis on the failure of the trade policies that led to this catastrophe, and i want legislation introduced at the proper level of government to remedy it.

if you think trump is an idiot, look up some of these news conferences with doug ford, who talks to the camera like he's strung out on ssris.

"why don't you attack trump like that?"

because he's not half the fucking retard that doug ford is.

...and because trump doesn't have a capable opposition to replace him.

trump is probably less terrible than clinton would have been, and might actually legitimately be less terrible than biden; we don't have that issue in the legislature in ontario.

i repeat: this is what happens when we collectively ignore science in favour of "common sense".

and, i never, ever, ever, ever want to see any government anywhere make that mistake ever again.

that was wrong.

and i don't want to hear another fucking word of it.

...instead, we insisted on relying on common sense.

the major problem here is that our public servants didn't read the documents that already existed. these readings were no doubt assigned, but they didn't do their homework - and then they flunked the test.

all we had to do was follow the guidelines that already existed, but we didn't.

i don't want to co-exist with the faithful.

and i don't want to hear any more appeals to "common sense". ever.

i don't want to live here anymore.

where in the world can i move to where religion just doesn't exist, and everybody just knows how to behave, where evidence and reason reigns supreme?

where?

tell me.

i'll go.

immediately.

please.....

we have completely thrown the science out of the window here in ontario.

and i am ashamed and embarrassed to live here.

it's exceedingly frustrating to have to deal with these fucking idiots. constantly. every fucking day.

we have years worth of detailed science to draw on, and these idiots like doug ford and evan solomon don't even bother reading it, they just insist on relying on this set of backwards fallacies that conservatives call "common sense".

and, the media just feeds right into it.

despite popular perceptions to the contrary, the science is absolutely clear that almost the worst thing you can do in a pandemic is introduce travel restrictions.

would closing the border have stopped the spread?

no.

the science on the issue is clear: travel restrictions make the problem worse.

and, his backwards, anti-science rants need to fucking stop already.

doug ford does not represent the people of ontario.

at all.

he's a complete embarrassment to the province, to the country and to the universe.

and i am saddened and ashamed that i have to look at his ugly, worthless face every day.

rather than sit there on his fat, lazy piece of shit ass and blame the issue on the united states, why doesn't he do his fucking job and get testing rates up?

i don't want doug ford in ontario. i don't even want him to exist at all.

don't listen to this idiot. the people of ontario always have and always will welcome cross-border interactions with people from the united states.

now, if we could find a way to erase the entire ford family from existence, on the other hand...

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/i-don-t-want-them-in-ontario-premier-ford-fires-back-after-trump-suggests-loosening-border-1.4899199

so, i got a surface clean done, including the rest of the dishes and an overdue shower. i'm actually going to do some very serious cleaning when i finally get done with 01/14 and pivot back to period 3, so this is just for now.

i'll be slowly going through a basket of laundry over the next few days, as well.

but, for now, it's time to nap.

how did that sublingual tablet go yesterday afternoon? i can't claim i've noticed a large difference, really. we're going to do that on thursdays for a while and see what the outcome is...

so, i found myself in an odd situation last night.

i finally made a large plate of pasta and sat down to eat it around 9:00. i would normally eat a half a plate, and put the rest in the fridge. but, my fridge is so full of fruit and soy milk that i had nowhere to place the leftovers. what do you do?

i decided to force myself to eat all of it, and it took quite a while - time i spent by watching get smart rereuns on dailymotion. i can't remember the last time i watched this much tv, and i actually really don't like it. like so many other people, this computer is my only way to understand what's happening right now, but i don't want to develop a habit of using the device for passive entertainment - it's unhealthy, both physically and mentally.

but, after eating twice as much as normal, i found myself horribly bloated and had to sit down for even longer, meaning i watched some more old reruns.

so, i lost another day.

i need to get up and finish that cleaning, now - including doing laundry, as well as cleaning myself. is it time to wash my jacket and put it away for the year, yet? or should i wait a few more weeks?

the spring has been variable, so far. we've had some warm days and some cold ones; i'd guess it averages out to something relatively "normal", even if it feels more like a series of swings. so, it's hard to tell if i should do it now or wait, but if i'm able to stay inside into mid may like i want then the answer may be more obvious next week.

ok. up i go...

i do not want to live in a religious society, and i will fight as hard as i can to keep the authorities from enforcing their religious rules on me.

read the handmaid's tale, yet?

this feels ominous. really. i'm trying to be proportional, and the fact is that i spend weeks inside, regardless. but, the direction this is moving in is increasingly worrying.

we're banning alcohol, ripping up the constitution and forcing people to wear face masks in public, none of which has any basis in science whatsoever.

i feel like i woke up in a backwards, muslim theocracy like iran.

and, like many other people, my patience with this is finite.

i can acknowledge the point that some people may develop a physical addiction to alcohol, but i reject the premise of keeping the store open to support alcoholics - alcoholism is not a real thing, it's just a made up disorder to try to christianize people. my mother thinks she's an alcoholic, so i grew up around this stuff, and it really is very scary in how it brainwashes people - i've seen it, first hand. she thinks she has a genetic disease that prevents her from being able to control herself, which is incoherent in so many ways that i don't even know where to start. she's just a drunk...

but, that's not the point. alcoholism or not, this is food.

we fought many long and hard battles against prohibition, and i'm not about to let that battle go without a hard fight.

everything else aside, if you ban the sale of alcohol in canada, you're going to see a rise in petty crimes like theft and vandalism.

this is a personal choice that needs to be made by individuals, not something that should be pushed down by authoritarian bodies.

personally, i almost never consume alcohol in my own house; i haven't touched that bottle of vodka since i left on the night of march 12th, and probably won't until i go to another concert, whenever that is. but, i'll be damned if i'm going to let a fucking government make that choice for me.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/stay-sober-who-s-advice-as-canadians-drink-their-way-through-the-pandemic-1.4898528

the science happens to be on their side, and my allegiance is to science, not to political ideologies.

but, i don't think that going to the state capitol with guns is very useful.

rather, they should just open their businesses and carry on. if the cops try to shut them down, they should resist with non-violent tactics, and then fight the issue in court after the fact.

i would like to see a critical mass develop, but this one doesn't appear to have much revolutionary potential.

i do wish that the media would stop calling these people conservatives, though.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trump-supporters-protest-coronavirus-orders

the last virus that we dealt with in this region was not the spanish influenza, or polio.

the last virus that we dealt with in this region was nafta. and, from the carnage that was created, emerged a slogan, often stated by the bourgeois elite when challenged about holding to such a destructive policy: there are winners and there are losers.

but, what that means in context is that there are those who are wealthy and own property, and those who are poor and do not - a brutal truth in an economic system that routinely discards life for a few pennies on the dollar.

now, we have a virus that is deadly for the elderly and weak, and largely harmless for everybody else (with statistically valid exceptions for what amount to the unlucky, which is a constant through existence).

do we still have winners and losers, now that this is no longer about class, and the family members of the elite are just as vulnerable as those of the poor?

it's funny how they change their tune, isn't it?

what do we do then?

what i told you in the first place - you lock the old folks up and throw away the key until christmas, and you let everybody else go about their daily lives.

it will kill some young and healthy people, but the universe isn't a safe space; viruses kill people. that's life.

in the end, we ended up locking up the old folks like we should have done from the start. it took thousands of dead geriatrics; we're slow learners, but we got the point, and we adjusted.

at this point, we're clearly going to need to do antibody testing before we're able to realize that what we did had almost no effect, and i'm not expecting a reversal of policy until it happens.

toronto and montreal are each going to have thousands of dead, as will detroit. whether vancouver goes down the same path or not will depend on how long they maintain their protective barrier around their seniors for...

what that means is that we should not expect that our earlier adoption of social distancing should lead to substantively different outcomes.

some areas like bc seem to be doing some different things right, and those different things seem to have been high impact. unlike quebec and ontario, bc acted swiftly to protect it's seniors facilities, partly because they were the first to experience an outbreak. there are other factors - bc has a lot of mountains and bodies of water that split the province into isolated regions and act as barriers to spread - but a combination of efficient policy with useful geography and what is no doubt just good luck seems to have worked to at least keep the thing away from the vulnerable. so, they reported 14 cases yesterday, which probably just means that they're keeping it away from the weak and the other 1000 new cases in bc just aren't sick enough to seek care. they need to be careful to keep their measures in place, but this should really be a model, at least in terms of how they're treating the elderly. but, isn't that what i said from the start?

if we had focused on the people that needed the attention like the planning documents suggested, and that only bonnie henry seems to have actually read, we'd be in the same situation bc is in - where there is no doubt still substantial spread, but very low mortality as a result of it.

to recap, what's my analysis here, so far, for north america?

1) new york overestimated the death toll because it overestimated the effects that a slow adoption of social distancing would have, in combination with an overestimate of the mortality rate.
2) canada underestimated the death toll because it overestimated the effects that a rapid adoption of social distancing would have.

in both cases, the error is that the efficacy of social distancing was overestimated.

is that a proof? well, it wouldn't count as a proof in math, but it's pretty close to one in science - i've essentially falsified the theory as pseudo-science. it's crude, but you can tell me if you're convinced or not.

there's still nobody better in the opposition to replace him with.

so, the models in new york drastically overestimated the problem. the politicians are claiming they overestimated the transmission rate, and social distancing slowed the spread; i am skeptical of this claim, and would suggest instead that they overestimated the mortality rate.

in the end, the death toll is going to be equal to the infection rate multiplied by the mortality rate. so, if your death toll is lower than expected, you have three options to correct for:

1) you can hold your mortality rate steady and decrease your infection rate, which is what the government is pushing.
2) you can hold your infection rate steady and decrease your mortality rate, which i suggest is closer to the truth.
3) you can decrease both factors by differing amounts, which is going to inevitably be reality, but isn't an idea that is being advocated by anybody right now. so, it could be that social distancing is working a little bit and the virus is a little bit less deadly than expected. some separation will eventually be required; right now, the debate is which factor is dominant.

we've seen the opposite in canada, but i should caution that the data is national while the reality is local. why then did the models in canada underestimate the number of deaths?

we could just adjust our reasoning, and this would create some problems for people pushing this widely embraced and rapidly developing pseudo-science of social distancing, to the extent that it doesn't turn into a process of collectivist masochism (if that isn't a redundancy).

then, it would follow that one way to explain why canada underestimated the death toll is because it underestimated the transmission rate, and social distancing did not reduce the spread - or wasn't followed. you'd have to conclude, then, that new york actually managed to do more social distancing, and more effectively than canada....despite the fact that it's actually the baseline used to calculate the worst case scenario. that's not quite a contradiction, but it's certainly inconsistent, and the results are definitely incoherent. if you base your models on the assumption that new york is what happens when no social distancing happens at all, and then new york beats your prediction due to overperforming you on metrics of social distancing, all you've managed to produce is nonsense. which is what i said from the start. so, if we're going to conclude that the numbers are wrong because we underestimated the transmission rate, we should really be deducing that social distancing was less effective in reducing the spread than the modelers initially guessed it might be - not that we're not doing it right. and, this is consistent with my analysis of new york.

the second option would be to argue that they underestimated the mortality rate, which would not be consistent with data we have elsewhere in the world. this is so unlikely that i'm going to discard it offhand.

so, then we're left to conclude that the case study comparison of state data in new york (where they were late to act, and overestimated the death count) and federal data in canada (where they reacted very early and then underestimated the death count) actually produces a consistency - in both cases, the modeling seems to have overestimated the effects (or lack thereof) of social distancing. it's actually pretty much perfectly consistent.

oddly, the provincial governments also seem to have largely overestimated rather than underestimated the toll, so it's starting to look like my analysis of ontario is going to be very similar to my analysis of new york. and, this difference is reflected in the public policy, as well.

trudeau has a knack for knowing the right things to say to persuade secularists to vote for him, but he also has a long history of falling head over heels into complete pseudo-science. this was a big issue under stephen harper, who muzzled scientists and tried to reorganize (perhaps succeeded in reorganizing) the research potential of the state as a propaganda tool of the oil industry. they ran heavily on this point; they were supposed to bring back science to the canadian government, to reintroduce the centrality of evidence-based decision making.

this is what we actually got, instead:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/trudeaus-deliverology-on-the-verge-of-becoming-a-punchline/article37023338/

...as it became increasingly clear that this guy is his mother's child, and he is more into yoga and vague concepts of "spirituality" than he is into science, reason and math.

so, it shouldn't surprise anybody that this is the government that bit the hardest, or that there might be people inside of this government that are legitimately shattered by the failure of the policy.

they put everything on this - the prime minister, the government, the party and maybe even the entire society. in the short run, they're more likely to blame it on us for being stupid than they are to admit they were wrong, despite that position having absolutely no empirical support. whatever they do, you can be sure that it will be full of copious attempts to uphold their point and plead that we stay the course. but, in canada, they can't do what cuomo is doing - because the numbers are worse than predicted.

i don't know what it's going to take for them to admit they were wrong, and this isn't working.

i just hope that, in the end, we all realize that there have been people like me pointing to actual science since day one. the worst thing that can come out of this is a retreat from science, or a return to religious backwardsness.

who should biden pick as vp?

he says he wants to pick a black woman to "reward their loyalty", which to me is conceptually weird. if he picks a kamala harris or a stacey abrams,  would random black women across the country feel as though they were being rewarded? why, exactly? neither candidate is particularly in tune with the issues that most affect black voters, with the exception of the issue of just being black.

regardless, running for president isn't like working in a coffee shop, and this isn't the time for black voters to decide they're going to get their 6th cup for free (especially given that the 2008 election already happened). in order to win, he needs to focus on winning mostly white states in the midwest...

elizabeth warren has demonstrated rather clearly that she's not going to pull very much of the vote. in a move in a very different direction than warren would take, biden has been doing townhalls with mark zuckerberg recently; you'll recall that the central plank in warren's platform was to destroy the internet, and zuckerberg was public enemy number one, for her. she was campaigning directly against him. so, biden doesn't appear to have her on his short list, and i would agree with people that are arguing that she would not be likely to help him win in any substantive way - she might even end up repelling voters that would otherwise lean in his direction, due to whatever hangover from hillary clinton.

likewise, i would strenuously avoid kamala harris, who demonstrated through the course of the process that she's neither a serious thinker nor a competent manager. she's like a black sarah palin. but, this is the outcome i'm more worried about. she could quite foreseeably cost him the election.

stacey abrams is also on the list, and i'm not entirely sure why, given that she's unlikely to even carry her own state. generally, you have to win a few elections before you get promoted to vp - you might want to even be a two-term governor. she may hinder biden less than kamala harris or elizabeth warren, but she won't help him where he needs to win.

so, if you're looking through black female candidates in the upper midwest, who stands out? the mayor in chicago?

he really shouldn't have boxed himself in like that. but, he may have conceded the process the moment he did it - don't be surprised if he does pick a black southerner, and then basically spends the next six months repeating the mistakes of bernie sanders, which were also the mistakes of hillary clinton, in ceding all of the actually competitive states, while trying to win states he has no chance in.

i don't have a suggestion.

but, avoid kamala harris. she's toxic.

my hearing in june has apparently not technically been cancelled yet.

i won't have an opportunity to reschedule it unless they cancel it.

and, it seems like they're still not dealing with motions until they go back to the office, although i'm going to try to make some calls tomorrow.

i haven't completely given up on teaching, i just deprioritized it. there were so many other things that were so much more important to me.

and, i actually kind of think that teachers should be older people, not young people. i can understand the argument for young teachers in elementary school, because it's not that different from babysitting, and too wide of a generational gap can be a big problem with young kids. but, certainly once you get to high school and older, i'd rather see a systemic focus on telling young teachers to wait in line, perhaps by increasing the educational requirements. there's something kind of backwards about letting people in their 30s and 40s teach at high schools.

if i ever do this, i'm going to actually find myself preferring to teach adults. i don't have a lot of patience with kids, actually; i'd rather deal with grown-ups. and, i suspect there's probably a demand for that.

but, i'm more interested in my art.

right now, i need to eat.

"you can't construct a peak from a plateau, that's just making thing up."

no.

it's what statisticians do - they look at messy raw data and they analyze it for errors and biases to try to reconstruct a reflection of reality from it.

the best way to explain this to a non-technical but educated audience is actually to bring in the allegory of the cave - the data is really shadows on the wall, and what we're tasked with is a way to figure out what's going on by analyzing those shadows.

if you insist otherwise - that the data is reality, and analysis is just making things up - then you are essentially the prisoner shackled to the wall, that can't see things for what they really are.

so, maybe it's eastasia, now, for the next few months.

i need to eat.

this is a useful little find for chromebook purposes and how i made those images on a computer without a hard drive.

https://jspaint.app/

so, our data might end up looking like this:

what we need to know is if reality is really actually more like this:

.....or if it isn't.

and, that's too hard to eyeball - you need to do actual math to figure that out.

if the numbers in new york crash over the next week (and, again - easter is a complicating factor. but, we're starting to get enough data in to understand the fluctuations as more than random.), what we're going to have in front of us is a steep incline, followed by a bumpy and short plateau, and then a steep decrease.

from a data analytical perspective, this is the most confusing outcome possible, because we're left with the problem of trying to reconstruct a peak that might or might not be there.

factors to consider include:

- delayed reporting (so, somebody dying on a monday but not being reported until the wednesday, for example)
- the effects of ventilator systems on essentially postponing death by a few days
- just flat out unreported deaths

and, i would need actual, real data in order to do actual, meaningful work in order to get a real handle on that - that's too subtle to eyeball from some bar graphs.

it will be interesting to see how the msm pivots all of their "covid-19 lab theory debunked !!!1!!!11!" articles, once rachel maddow starts broadcasting anti-chinese propaganda on a nightly basis.

do i think they created this in a lab? well, there wasn't any evidence of this, until the president started pointing fingers, thereby incriminating himself. but, the insistence on trying to write this off without investigating it, despite it being an entirely plausible hypothesis, did raise some eyebrows with me from the start. why were they so insistent on shutting that down?

if this is a bioweapon then:

1) it isn't a very useful one
2) releasing it seems to have backfired and the united states is currently experiencing incredible blowback from it.

but, when was the last time the united states did something that didn't backfire? it was back when joe friday and maxwell smart were on tv. really. before that, even. so, maybe it's blowback, but that's not really a convincing argument against it.

again: i don't currently have any reason to think this was an engineered virus.

...except the people trying very hard to stop me from wondering about it, and the apparent increasing attempt to blame it on china, instead.

Friday, February 28, 2020

i don't understand what's going on with the coronavirus at this point in time, and i haven't presented a hypothesis.

i have pointed out that the reaction seems to be unjustified, given the weakness of the virus. this is really just a variant of the flu.

or so they tell us, anyways. i can hypothesize about actors and motives, but i can't make up data. the data says this is not that scary. but, then, why are they doing this?

so, what i've drawn attention to is that contradiction - they tell us this thing has a 0.5% mortality rate, and then they treat it like it's ebola. they, here, is not the media, it's not "liberal" politicians, but it's rather the global authorities that you expect to operate outside of the alarmism, and actually adhere to the science.

so, when these agencies tell you that this disease is not very dangerous, and then act like it's a serious threat to global health, it makes you wonder what's actually happening.

are they hiding a deeper death toll in order to prevent mass panic? that would explain why they tell us one thing, and act as though another is true.

or, is there some kind of power grab going on behind the scenes?

i don't know....

i know there's a contradiction.

we'll have to see how this plays out, but it really has to be one or the other - either the death toll is far greater than is claimed, or this is going to be used as an excuse to take away people's rights.

again: i could shrug it off if it was a politician overreacting. but, these are the global health authorities, and something is not adding up.

15:02 

the data they've given us says that chances are that you'll catch this thing and have it pass without even knowing you have it...

but, again - why is the who freaking out, then?

they don't have elections to worry about. they're not pandering to their base. they're supposed to be beyond all that shit.

we'll see what happens...

at 15:12 

like, apparently the country with the second highest death toll is iran.

that's just kind of a curious fact.

at 15:34 

so, did they create this thing in a lab?

they could have. if they did, they'd probably let it loose in iran first.

but, you'd think they'd be a little more efficient.

so, i'm going to classify that claim as highly doubtful. but, anybody trying to browbeat you with the idea that that's "debunked" or "wrong" should be treated as a propagandist - it's entirely plausible, in principle.

at 15:36

 let's kind of think this through, though.

if a new virus shows up in china and starts killing chinese people, is it more likely that it was created by the chinese or by their enemies?

if the chinese were going to create viruses and let them loose, you'd expect them to let them loose here, right?

so, who is the most likely suspect, if we take the premise seriously? it would be the americans, of course.

which is making the infection rate in iran seem curious.

but, i still think this idea is dubious, because the virus is just too weak for that. it might save the chinese some money on public health care. it's hardly weapons-grade material...

at 15:40 

so, i got the groceries put away this morning, at least, which is a process of putting fruit into tupperware containers. i got halfway through the dishes, even made some pasta. i fell asleep around 9:30-ish.

so, that was a longer day, and i was able to rebound with only a few hours of sleep.

i'm going to make a bowl of fruit and eat the pasta i made yesterday, now. or, at least, about a third of it.

and, i can get to cleaning after that.

and, then, get to doing some work to close down the month.

well, how did maxwell smart see himself?

that's not speculative, we have plenty of evidence to cite - and the answer is that he saw himself as joe friday.

again - if we end up dragging this out for the next five years, it's just an admission of guilt on behalf of the deep state, and their crony donald trump.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/the-u-s-is-trying-to-find-out-if-the-coronavirus-came-from-a-wuhan-lab