dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

if the other published numbers are right, then the magic number you want to look for in the united states before this starts to slow down on it's own is 200,000 deaths.

but, i'm still calling for 350,000 deaths there, minimum.

in canada, the magic number is about 25,000.

so, this is the irony - as they are (much) closer to the hump than we are, they could get through this faster than us.

look at new york, today. the rest of the country will be there in another six weeks. i see no end to this here, at all - we could be dragging our asses through this six months from now.

fwiw, an ifr of .3% would suggest a true case count in the united states that is in excess of 50 million people. at .6%, considered a high estimate nowdays, it would suggest over 25 million cases.

in canada, a .3% ifr would suggest almost 3 million total cases, whereas a .6% ifr would suggest nearly 1.5 million.

if the ifr is under 0.3%, which i think is closer to the consensus since the last time i looked when 0.6 was considered reasonable, it would suggest pushing two million cases in quebec, given the death count of 5687.

and if it's more like 0.1%, which was the lowball i used in my model, then you'd be looking at 5.687 million cases. in ontario, .6% is 460K cases, .3% is 930K and .1% is 2.782 million cases.

obviously, nobody knows the exact number of people that have been infected in ontario or quebec. but, when your experimental indicators gives you a range in the 600K-5700K range, and your study throws out 125,000 (no doubt with a large error rate), you've either overturned the existing science or you've done something terribly wrong.

why would they lie?

so canada can win on twitter.

relative to the warped understanding of reality presented by twitter. of course.

well, maybe faulty tests are more likely...

maybe.

i wouldn't put it past them.

it's not consistent; there's something underlying what they did across the country that is deeply flawed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently has a best guess of 0.65% for the IFR.

so, that 4.5% in quebec, as well as that 2.5% in ontario, are really red flags as to consistency in the data.

if the death rate for the virus is 0.6%, a more acceptable estimate, than we would expect upwards of a million total cases in quebec, at this point. even if you creep it up to 1%, you're still looking at upwards of 600,000.

as we've seen low-ball testing throughout canada, the most reasonable way to explain the dramatic disconnect is to point fingers at the tests. i know that the media was focusing on false positives when these tests rolled out, but the actual issue in front of doctors was false negatives. that is, the tests available at the time were known to miss a large number of cases. it's still hard to recoup reasonable numbers out of the ones presented, given published error rates, unless you assume that they're over-sampling rural areas relative to urban areas.

again, there's really only two possibilities, given that we know that death rates are pushing 1% at the very highest, and should be lower in advanced health care systems like canada.

1) canada has an astronomically high death rate, compared to similar countries or
2) the data is drastically underestimating the prevalence of antibody immunity in the general population

...and (2) is far more likely.

that 4.5% death rate in quebec is a higher number than can be calculated by naively dividing out the number of deaths by the number of actual found cases in the united states, which is roughly 3%.

so, i don't expect those results to hold up.

really, if i didn't know any better, i might think there's been an attempt to fit the data to naive who numbers, and an attempt to downplay any regional spread.

and, to be clear: i wouldn't trust the canadian government to tell me the time of day when we're standing directly below the peace tower. they have a history of just rank dishonesty, especially in times of crises. truth is malleable to a greater cause. and, if i didn't know better, i might think that's exactly what it's all about.

so, i'll wait for some independent analysis.

but, what have we sacrificed all of this for, if we're no closer to ending it? what have we gained, in all of this misery, if the end result is one of the highest death rates in the world, and no immunity to show for it?

i mean, you might look at those numbers and think you won some kind of stupid game or something because you kept the infection rate the lowest.

but, you're not winning if it means the death rate is the highest.

so, i'm going to assume that the canadian government must be using malfunctioning tests that are missing a lot of positives, and expect that independent testing eventually adds up a little bit better with the data in front of us than the government results have.

so, call me skeptical...

i mean, what's the death rate in quebec if there's only 125,000 cases? it's 4.5%! quebec's health care system has poorer outcomes than other places in canada, but those are 3rd world mortality rates.

in ontario, the official stats would suggest a 2.5% death rate, which would imply ontario must have a terrible health care system.

the numbers are just not consistent with the facts that we have, meaning:

1) our health care results have been alarmingly poor or
2) they're wrong.

i think (2) is probably more right than (1).

but, we'll need to wait for independent studies to verify the results.

it's very frustrating to consider the possibility that the government has banned everybody from having fun for months, with no end in sight, and we're not even close to immunity yet.

and, it's not consistent with findings in other hard hit areas. bc was not hit hard, but montreal had a proper pandemic, and toronto at least saw a substantive number of cases. with that many cases, if there's not substantive immunity developing, why not?

there have been a lot of reports of these antibody tests missing a lot of positives. we've seen this across this country now, and while the bc results seemed reasonable, the ontario results did not and the quebec results are just not believable at all. if you're to take these studies seriously, the prevalence seems to be about the same across the country, and differences in testing and outcome are just error.

i guess if the results are correct, it means we're going to need to see a whole lot more dead canadians before we get through this.

but, i'm going to put out a call for non-government bodies to do some antibody testing in canada, because what the government is presenting to us doesn't make any sense.

the longer it takes to build immunity, the longer this goes on for.

i don't want to be the least immune, weakest, most vulnerable country in the world :(.

https://nationalpost.com/news/national/almost-125000-quebecers-aged-18-69-infected-with-novel-coronavirus-study

i've made my concerns about china relatively clear over a long period of time. they are an expansionist, imperialist civilization that would see this continent as empty land to colonize. if they could, they'd enslave us and move in - don't trick yourself into believing otherwise.

and, they are a different civilization; no aristotle, no jesus, no alexander. the only meaningful historical point of diffusion was via mongol expansion, and they came merely to slaughter and subjugate. expect no different in the future, should it end that way.

so, canada has a choice that needs to be made in a broader civilizational context than i think is currently fully understood, or is even fashionable to try to understand. it's our nature to be open, and that's preferable, but we need to maintain some lines of defence.

yet, my concerns be as they may be, i know that history is littered with decadent aristocrats that are just as happy to sell their nations out to rising tyrants as they are to try to mount a defence.

if the chinese were to stop shipment of a vaccine to canada over a legitimate legal process involving a relative of a valued member of the ruling clique (rather than any actual threat to it's security), it would reflect rather poorly upon them. that is corruption, plain and simple.

faced with this kind of corruption in the chinese ruling class, canada should not be compliant, or wonder what may have been had it been more compliant. rather, it should seek a greater level of autonomy in the production of this material.

as it is, i do not believe that vaccine research is an area that has been harmed by the neo-liberal order in this sense, although manufacturing a vaccine in the end may be an open question - and something that the federal government should be monitoring and perhaps altering the capacity for.

so, one hopes this does not actually happen; if it does, it should be seen as a disincentive to integrate supply chains with the chinese, rather than as an incentive to be compliant.

https://nationalpost.com/health/china-spat-may-be-threatening-canadas-bid-to-get-early-access-to-leading-covid-19-vaccine-experts

and, now it's time for the inevitable round of trivially criticizing sexism in the media around a prominent candidate, or, as it would be, category of candidates - 'cause all them black women are all the same, right. it's via occupying that unique intersection point between gender and race that the negro female develops her unique characteristics, and artificially imposed hindrances within society.

listen, these gender roles are ancient; they're cultural, they're symbolic, they're religious, they're remnants of something that developed socio-biologically and they're baked into every day life. we're just beginning to understand them, we're not even close to making them go away. so, it's up to individual candidates to define themselves transcendent to their assigned roles, and that's going to be hard for as long as those cultural realities remain around us as we exist, in our lives.

so, it's kind of just background noise. you're yelling at the moon. it's how things are, and something women know they just have to deal with.

i'm not opposed in principle to the symbolic placement of a black woman on the throne as a placation tactic, as i think even the most cynical instance of the concept would have positive ramifications, socially. but, i just don't see a candidate i could actively support, and am finding myself more attracted to 2024 instead.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

march is done.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/03/
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/03/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/03/
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/

so, february, 2014 is now both consistent & complete. i ended up copying a few files around, and deleting a couple as well

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/02/

https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/02/

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/02/

https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/

i know i've said this before, but that's really it for a long time, now.

if i had kids, i would get them immunized on the existing immunization schedule, which does not include any experimental vaccines, but the way this law is written would be a model for any vaccine legislation in canada, in the sense that you would have the opportunity to opt-out by signing a statement of conscience. that is, it's only mandatory if you refrain from freely choosing to arbitrarily opt-out.

so, if some libertarian group decided this was terrible, all the court is going to tell them at the end of the day is "look, there's a waiver, you don't have to actually do it.". at the end of the day, a truly forced vaccination law would be unconstitutional; instead, we consistently legislate strongly worded suggestions with loopholes inserted by the constitution that are wide enough as to make the law worthless, then claim the supreme court upholds the violation.

what the supreme court upholds is that those who choose not to be vaccinated due to their beliefs cannot be forced to do so. the government can pass whatever law it wants, so long as it upholds that rule. that is the precedent, and it will carry forward.

fwiw, there is a difference between giving your kids a tetanus shot and give them an experimental vaccine for the common cold. i think that older people may want to be a little more risk adverse here, but i wouldn't actually be in much of a hurry to vaccinate the kids - i'd want to wait that out a bit and see how it goes.

public health units are also subject to a level of proportionality in their decisions. that is, they can't just cite a precedent as an excuse and then do whatever they want. so, the question of coercive legislation regarding this virus will ultimately need to be weighed against it's actual threat, which is where i think the disconnect is.

we don't legislate mandatory flu vaccinations for children to attend school, and i don't imagine we'll legislate covid-19, either.

but, if we did, you could always opt-out.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/court-challenge-of-ontario-s-vaccination-law-unlikely-to-succeed-experts-1.4661318

Monday, August 3, 2020

see, this is what happens when a communist experiment needs to rely on the imperialist hegemon for protection.

at least their autonomous self-discipline should make them good slaves as oil exporters in the petro-empire. and, i'm sure there will be some oil produced for local use....for a few months.

i'm sorry that i'm just not naive; it's not that i didn't want to believe in the possibility of an autonomous socialist kurdish state, it's just that it doesn't make sense at such a subregional level, and the ramifications of cooperation with the americans were simply impossible to evade. when you accept help from america, you become it's client.

is this legal? no. but, the united states seems to have carved an enclave out of the country by sheer force, and it's probably not wise to try to dislodge them. assad may have won the war, but he seems to have lost the northeast, perhaps for good.

all of this is better than open warfare, and it does remain true that building strong interconnected economic foundations remains the key to building peace in the region (which is what america has constantly tried to prevent, until recently).

as i'm a climate activist, i don't assign the middle east the same tactical value as other regions in the world. the united states is even producing it's own oil, right now. it doesn't seem worth it. so, my prime concern is the conflict halting (so long as the crazies are suppressed), and really my biggest opposition to the outcome is the exact commodity being traded. leave the oil in the ground....

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/03/delta-crescent-energy-syrian-oil-391033

see, i can go along with this to push for smaller class sizes, anyways. that's some good kleinist thinking.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/08/03/thousands-sign-petition-asking-ontario-to-reduce-class-sizes-for-elementary-school-students-this-fall.html

these are very low numbers for toronto, which makes it incredibly vulnerable moving forward, if subsequent studies back up the findings.

do the numbers make sense?

well, these are about the same numbers as presented by bc, and we know that the outbreak in vancouver was much milder than in toronto. if about the same percentage of people were infected in toronto as in vancouver, why was the death count so much higher in toronto? the population size doesn't account for it.

so, not really; given the number of deaths that are publicly acknowledged, and the fact that it is publicly acknowledged that many deaths are uncounted, one would expect a much higher rate in toronto than vancouver.

so, are there potential biases around the sample? well, they made some attempt to randomize it; i'd rather wait to see what further studies say than aimlessly nitpick.

so, i'll acknowledge the study, but i'm a little skeptical about it, it just seems a little too low.

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/epi/2020/07/covid-19-epi-seroprevalence-in-ontario.pdf?la=en

with that, i have now finished updating the things i needed to update for the already published sections of the blog.

i am going to run through a similar analysis of the things already posted to 2014, but it will be a much faster process. as mentioned previously, the primary motion should be a slimming of the politics blog to include less frivolous posts.

the january music journal package at bandcamp has been updated by updating the files for the deathtokoalas blog. the purpose of this update is solely to ensure that a level of consistency around certain types of posts is maintained throughout the blog.

as these updates are minor and to the deathtokoalas blog only, it will not be documented in the notes.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/01-2014-music-journal

the deathtokoalas blog was edited to remove a news link, add a pynchon quote, add a courtney love article and also to add five cover art posts in order to ensure consistency of type across the blog:

january

19) pynchon quote
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/01/its.html

20) courtney love essay
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/01/classic-essay.html

21) pop music cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/01/pop-music-tribute-to-dioxide-cover-art.html

22) curious george suite cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/01/blog-post_9.html

23) ignorance is bliss cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/01/ignorance-is-bliss-cover-art.html

24) deny everything cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/01/deny-everything-cover-art.html

25) acidosis cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/01/acidosis-cover-art.html

~~29) delete this:~~
~~https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-world-has-changed-very-little-in.html~~

this file was also updated at the smashwords site:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026660

got the files.

finally.

so, here comes a bunch of update posts.

they're talking about moving troops from germany to poland, in the long run, making it more of a shift of troops towards the russian border.

they won't like that, you know. there were verbal agreements made....

https://www.c-span.org/video/?474327-1/defense-secretary-esper-announces-11900-troops-withdraw-germany#

Sunday, August 2, 2020

see, this is a good example of the stupid side of donald trump's foreign policy.

trump's argument for pulling troops out of germany goes something like this: because germany engages in commerce with russia, it is unfair for it to ask the united states to protect it from russian aggression. i guess that the conclusion is that if they are going to engage in commerce with russia then they should face the consequences of russian tactics.

it's trumpian in that it's a threat, an intimidation tactic. the goal is probably not to remove troops from germany, but to bully the germans into buying fracked natural gas from the united states. so, it's a bluff, and we'll see if it actually happens.

but, it still demonstrates a fundamentally untactical way to view the world that has the potential for strongly self-defeating outcomes.

years ago, the united states saw germany as a tactical subject-ally, both in the sense of it's utility as a manufacturing center and in the sense of it being a buffer state to the access of western technology; that is, it was necessary to control germany for no other reason than to keep the russians from benefiting so dramatically from the understanding of vastly superior german technology. so, the united states deployed troops in the region to protect something very valuable to it.

while commercial links of the type described by trump did not exist in the cold war, an america of the past may have actually found it convenient that so much of the energy potential of russia's productive capacity was being exported to their competitors, who are our client-state, instead. stalin would have laughed at the idea of exporting gas to western europe - that gas belonged to russia.

so, the germans might have some right to a little self-dignity in the face of trump throwing away as valuable a prize as they, on such flimsy pretexts; the existence of those troops is hardly an act of benevolence, but muscle to protect a valuable asset.

if it weren't a bluff.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/31/president-trump-takes-on-the-permanent-war-lobby-over-germany/

so, they're projecting 230K dead, now.

i'm standing by 350K, minimum.

so, i got the 2013 travel blog to convert, which is just for personal use, but it means i can close that folder and keep trying with the 2014 stuff.

two more files left to convert, and a handful of things left to update.

so, the last update that i posted was for the december music journal. i was then able to get my third trimester files converted, which right now is for personal storage. i had initially converted the full 2013 documents last week, but the chromebook crashed before i could transfer them, and i've been fighting with that now all day.

i managed to get the full 2013 deathtokoalas pdf downloaded early this morning, but i'm still struggling with the travel blog.

it also took me all day to remember the trick to get smashwords to update the pdf file (you have to unclick online version, then reclick it after). this is the only place that the 2013 deathtokoalas compilation is uploaded to, but it is the most appropriate way to present it here.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026620

this is the errata for this update:

deathtokoalas

september

1) profile picture update:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-got-little-lazy-or-was-that.html

2) potential cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/death-valley-in-bloom-good-potential.html

october

3) kimmel post:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/note-that-26-states-so-far-have-opted.html

~~4) delete this:~~
~~https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/10/google-account-password-changed.html~~

5) demo #1 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post_14.html

6) profile pic:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post.html

november

7) demo #2 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/demo-2-cover-art.html

8) inrisampled cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrisampled-cover-art.html

9) inriched cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inriched-cover-art.html

10) inrijected cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrijected-cover-art.html

11) warning cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/warning-cover-art.html

december

~~12) delete this:~~
~~https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/12/this-is-balanced-and-informative-talk.html~~

13) weird wave form:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/very-fucking-weird-waveform.html

14) inrimixed cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimixed-cover-art.html

15) inridiculous cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inridiculous-cover-art.html

16) inricycled a cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-cover-art.html

17) inricycled b cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-b-cover-art.html

18) inrimake cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimake-cover-art.html

i've spent a fair amount of time park drinking, and i have a few tips if you're concerned about the cops bugging you.

it's not toronto, but in ottawa there's a large amount of wooded areas near the river that are on what i believe is ncc property that can accommodate a reasonably large group - 30-40 people. a frequent social event that came out of the local occupy encampment was bush fires in a series of clearings off the parkway. just make sure you take your garbage with you.

if larger groups clear out of the public parks proper in favour of more secluded spaces, it could open up more possibilities for smaller groups to enjoy the parks, which is more typical of normal life. while i agree that alcohol bylaws in parks are an infringement of personal liberty, there are a few ways to get around it.

i would suggest, for example, that if you bring alcohol to the park then you do so in unmarked or differently marked (even better.) containers. i tend to carry around a bottle of mountain dew with me, so i always have a flask of convenience. if some cops walk by and you're drinking a bottle of coke, they won't have anything to say to you.

but, i like this kind of thinking, and i'm curious to hear the nature of any official response to it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/public-drinking-ontario-fines-parks-1.5670177

i'm a little baked; i'm going to re-articulate the kind of main point that i'm trying to get across.

if you elect biden in 2020, he's going to pick a youngish female vp, and the assumption is that she's going to be in power within 2-3 years. so, you're essentially allowing biden to pick the 2024 candidate for you, which turns him into the lamest duck of all time. a biden administration will almost instantly transition to the vp; he'll have six months to take a few trips, and that's it. further, we're going to know who that is fairly soon.

a key question that those on the american left need to ponder is whether it makes more sense to accept the candidate biden is presenting to them, or whether they are better off waiting and trying to pick a new candidate in 2024.

you should expect almost nothing from biden's presidency itself, at all.

a biden win may just end up blunting any momentum brewing up, as people take on a false sense of victory, and misplace their faith in a conservative administration to make changes it has no intention to make.

a trump win could accelerate that momentum, and lead to a more substantive change of power the next time around.

i guess the question is this.

what is more likely, at this point?

will a biden administration pave the way for a new generation of leadership that advances the ideas of the left, or will it impede that progress, requiring the process to essentially restart?

if the latter, are we better off essentially bypassing biden and looking to start fresh in the next cycle?

i remember back in 2016 that there was this argument that you should vote for trump because, in four years, he'll create such a backlash that it'll flush in a left of centre voice, for sure. i think that the face of this argument is probably jimmy dore; it's who i remember hearing it from.

that struck me as wishful thinking. rather, it seemed obvious to me that widespread opposition against trump would lead to a weakening of the centre, and a wholesale shift of the democratic party to the right - which is how we went from carter to clinton to obama, a sequential move towards conservatism, remember. like, that was exactly what we didn't want to do, because it was exactly what got us into this mess. if the intent was to create a revolt within the democratic party, the way to do it would be to let the democratic party rule and run itself into the ground.

at this point, it seems like i was right. joe biden is basically a republican, and the movement in the party over the last four years has been a very hard shift to the right, despite what some delusional media would have you think. now, people are just hoping that a biden win will be helpful for this swath of issues, with all evidence suggesting the exact opposite. along with this has been an influx of wealthier voters into the democratic party that seem interested primarily in identity issues, which is just going to lead them on further in the same direction of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

my primary interest is not in removing donald trump, but in recharting the cultural course in the other direction. so, how does that argument work, now?

well, if what we didn't want was a big-tent, right-of-centre democrat than we got exactly what we dreaded. so, does the argument work better now? is it better to vote for trump in hopes that four more years will lead to some substantive upheaval?

i don't know yet - we need some more data about where the democrats are going with this. if biden picks susan rice and broadcasts that he's going to bring back the neo-cons and pick up where obama left off, it could very well be that this argument from jimmy dore makes more sense now than it did then - despite the reality that i'm sure he's distanced himself from it, and is all about stopping trump now (ironically). certainly, the left has a worse choice now than it did four years ago. if he picks somebody more left-wing, it makes the choice a bit more blurry.

so, what might happen if trump wins?

well, the unrest we've been seeing around race issues, while not revolutionary in scope at the moment, could become revolutionary if it refocuses away from race and puts a greater focus on organizing around class. when will the society break under climate change? how bad is the virus going to get, and might it provide for the possibility of more radical change in four years, when the ongoing demographic changes are that much more accelerated?

if we pick biden, it could slow that revolt down by 8-12 years if it just puts in place another conservative government that people need to reject all over again. if we pick trump, now, at this juncture in time, it could pave the way for a much better democratic candidate in 2024.

i'm not going to make a prediction, i don't know. i need to see the vp pick, first. but, the names in contention are all intending to appeal to a conservative black vote, which is charting a path towards competition with the republicans over the south. they always all want the south....

but, that argument would appeal to be more compelling now than it did then. and it's something i'll be thinking about, moving forwards.

so, i've got the following files updated, but i can't get the site to convert them:

- full 2013 travel blog [personal records]
- january 2014 deathtokoalas [bandcamp, smashwords]
- full first reconstruction phase deathtokoalas blog [lulu, drive]
- full first reconstruction phase travel blog [lulu, drive, smashwords]

there is no january 2014 travel blog, and i was able to download the 2013 deathtokoalas blog, which is also having trouble converting at the smashwords site.

so, i'm going to stop to eat and hope everything works when i'm done.

it's extra frustrating because i had downloaded a working copy previously but i lost it when the machine crashed.

i've been sitting here for hours trying to get this to work.

as mentioned previously, there are reasons why i want to use the microsoft site to convert and not one of these shady free conversion sites, but if the microsoft site refuses to skip the conversion to docx, i don't have a choice but to resort to the shady sites.

docx is simply not an acceptable file format for me.

so, i guess i'll try again when i get through the next phase, but, for now, i need to move on.

this is such a horrible waste of my time.

upload.

view version history.

fail.

delete.

repeat.

over. and over. for hours. why?

but, on the 35456th try it will work. and all i can do is wait.

:(.

i really wish there was a way to force the microsoft server to read the file properly.

it's just random. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but something seems to flip when it does.

maybe i should make a clear post about where i stand regarding gimbutas, renfrew, cavalli-sforza and the role of religion in science.

colin renfrew is a christian fundamentalist, and i don't think it's a coincidence that his model is essentially a relabeled telling of the biblical narrative regarding the tower of babel. that is a vicious statement to level at somebody that has legitimate academic qualifications, but it would appear to be true nonetheless.

the issue was ultimately to be decided by sforza, who was able to provide an empirical test for which model was more correct, and what he discovered was that the answer to the problem is better resolved via dialectic than via competition.

while renfrew's anatolian model was shown to be inconsistent with the spread of indo-european languages, which was shown to instead conform very closely to gimbutas' kurgan model, his anatolian model was also shown to be a relatively good survey of the existing understanding of the spread of farming from an origin in turkey, which was uncovered rather clearly in the data.

that would mean that renfrew's anatolian hypothesis could be salvaged by attaching it to earlier language groups, which we can currently only find in the substratum but may have been ancestral to poorly understood languages like etruscan, pelasgian, sumerian and elamite. so, instead of renfrew's very late linguistic derivations of every language group, as per the tower of babel, you have instead a model of linguistic diffusion via farming that is strictly local in scope, and now entirely lost.

so, the chronology in the synthesis is that this neolithic expansion would have taken place first, in the years 10000-6000 bce or so and then the kurgan invasion would have come in after that, starting around 4000 bce or so.

the megaliths seem to be strongly correlated with this cultural farming expansion, and central to the existence of these people in rather profound ways.

fwiw, i think it's pretty much settled that homo sapiens probably just outbred neanderthals, and overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. there was substantive neanderthal introgression into the anatomically modern homo sapiens, but in the end they just got back-crossed out.

one would expect that a species like neanderthal, that was adapted to a cold climate with scare resources, would develop lower breeding rates than a species like sapiens, which lived in warm climates and had abundant predators. when the climate warmed up, allowing sapiens to move north, they would have carried those higher fertility rates north, and there you go.

they tell us we have some percentage of neanderthal genes depending on our existing racial genotypes, but it's never really discussed what those genes are. i would expect that we'll eventually learn that the genes we inherited from neanderthals largely have to do with adaptations to colder climates. if true, the introgression no doubt increased the fitness of the donor species.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2003/09/22/bones-from-french-cave-show-neanderthals-cro-magnon-hunted-same-prey/

i'm going to suspend disbelief around the evidence, and wonder if it upholds the idea of neanderthals worshipping bears, in the first place. there's quite a bit of reason to expect early hominids to have had some kind of perceived spiritual relationship with wild bears, whatever one thinks of the arrangement of the bone fragments.

i've previously pointed to lions as the perfect representation of the word monster, but for humans living in more northern climates, the best example of a monster would clearly be a bear. like humans, bears demonstrate a large amount of bipedalism, to the point that they seem vaguely hominid. if i didn't know what a bear was, and i saw it coming at me, i might wonder if it was some kind of zombie apocalypse or something. further, i would imagine that any species of hominid in a bear's range would have experienced a large amount of predation at the hands of those bears until relatively recently, meaning living humans may very well have had memories of having their children or other family members eaten by these monsters that roamed around them.

my understanding is that humans eventually developed some very specific rituals around the killing of bears; there appears to have been a procedure that involved puncturing their lungs with arrows, to make sure they were really dead. this suggests that early hominids may have ultimately seen bears as dangerous competitors for the niche of head omnivore, rather than as superiors. one wonders if any observed ritual behaviour around the bears may have been to disturb their spirits, in an attempt to try to stop them from returning.

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-bear/

Saturday, August 1, 2020

there's a different story like this every few years. what it seems like is that the stones have multiple origin points.

these megaliths are all over the place, and one wonders if that is generally true, and maybe provides fresh evidence for the hypothesis that the purpose of the monuments was as a meeting point. if there were multiple origin points, it could be that there were multiple groups involved in making the monuments, and they could recognize a place where related clans came together for celebration or trade, or even be treaty or territorial markers.

let's take a step back.

most people probably don't realize that stonehenge is merely one example of a type of very ancient building structure that seems to have originated with the neolithic revolution and spread with farming from modern turkey across europe. a wide variety of evidence suggests that a caucasian, but not indo-european, people migrated into europe many thousands of years before the kurgan invasion brought the existing languages and r1* genotypes into the region. these people would have held out on britain longer than anywhere else, but the functions of the megaliths they built on the island are foreign in origin and purpose.

if it could be established that the stones came from many places, it could provide for a loose model as to how different communities in this farming culture, which spread over the entire area that caucasians are indigenous to today, carried out certain relations with each other.

https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/world/2020/07/30/stonehenge-discovery-origins-large-sarsen-stones-finally-traced/5547629002/

i'm going to be getting back to work tonight...it's just a few more things to upload, and then i can get to 2014.

ok.

so, i got most of the cleaning i wanted done and picked up a bit more pot yesterday, to smoke through the rest of the rolling tobacco with. i also picked up some edibles to experiment with - and these are for experimenting, not for storing, so i will consume them relatively soon. the strain i picked up was royal highness by good supply, which is a company that has been selling the cheapest pot in the store for a while now, but always had slightly lower thc numbers; not this time, so i tried it. it's actually a little closer to the kind of buzz i'm used to, which is a bit of a nice surprise. it's good to know that the price tag is really not a market mechanism (and it rarely is, in reality).

the edibles i picked up were a chocolate bar sectioned into 4 pieces, with 2 mg each, and 2 gummies, at 5 mg each. that will allow me to try the 2s a couple of times to get used to it, before deciding if i think the 5s are a good idea or not - and ultimately whether i think looking at 10s is a good idea.

i'm approaching edibles more like i'd approach mushrooms, for now, which means i need to make sure i'm in a comfortable space before i try it. that may be overly cautious (my experience with edibles has been that it has knocked me out, but i don't know what doses i consumed), and i may end up wasting some of the chocolate, but i think it's best to ease my way in.

if this works out, i'll be happy about it; pot has been my last excuse for lingering levels of smoking for years. i've been waiting for a better solution for a long time, now. let's hope it's this easy.

so, that's my new diet, that i'm going to try. officially, this will be my daily intake, but i'm sure i won't be able to actually eat this much.

a) fruit bowl:
- 1 kiwi
- 1 banana
- 10-11 raspberries
- 20-25 blueberries
- 5-6 strawberries
- 1 medium-to-large scoop of cherry ice cream
- 250-350 ml of high-fortification vanilla soy milk

b) omelette:
- 4 eggs, cooked in olive oil margarine
- 50 g of wholesale genoa salami, pre-microwaved in slices and chopped
- 1 medium tomato (smaller than the ones for spaghetti, so that's a cost factor i didn't consider)
- 1/2 a red pepper
- 50 g of full fat marble block cheese
- 2 slices of rye or pumpernickel toast, with olive oil margarine
- 350-450 ml of real, but fortified, apple juice

in practice, i will probably make the omelette 4-5 times a week, and have fruit bowls daily.

if i know i'm only eating every couple of days, it makes the most sense to ensure that i eat the most nutritious meal i can every time, rather than pretend i'm going to eat every day, then work out averages to ensure proper requirements.

you know, i'm just looking at the components of these two meals and wondering why i don't just eat omelettes every day. this is eggs v tomato sandwiches....

bread <-------> bread
margarine <-----> mayo
salami <------>salami
cheese <----->cheese
tomato <------->tomato
red pepper
eggs

all i'm doing is cutting out the eggs & red peppers, which are two of the more nutritious components of the omelette.

i started eating tomato sandwiches in early 2013 because i was getting some truly delicious, firm, bright red greenhouse tomatoes in these plastic containers at the giant tiger on wellington, in ottawa. i just got hooked on them and brought the habit to windsor where the tomatoes are much bigger but a little less tasty. i eventually decided to move to the pasta to boost the calorie count (which didn't work out, and just led to me eating less and screwing up my calculations). so, i decided to go back to the tomato sandwiches, to get back to eating more eggs.

but, why bother?

i have to finish the open package of pasta first, but i think i'm going to omelettes full time.

what's the cost of this meal?

1) bread - $0.50
2) salami - $0.50 [wholesale]
3) cheese - $0.50
4) tomato ~ $0.50
5) 1/2 red pepper ~ $1.00
6) 4 eggs - $1.03
7) margarine - $0.10
========================
$4.13

hrmmn.

& i do recall the price being an issue, now that i think about it. the fried eggs i've been eating would be $1.50 less, which is $2.63

tomato sandwich costs:

1) bread - $0.50
2) mayo - $0.25
3) salami - $0.50
4) cheese - $0.50
5) tomato ~ $0.50
6) hot sauce - $0.25
=================
$2.50

pasta costs:

1) pasta - $0.20
2) red pepper ~ $1.00
3) tomato ~ $0.50
4) salami - $0.50
5) caesar - $1.00
6) cheese - $2.00
7) hot sauce - $0.25
=============
$5.75 ~ 2*2.88

if i had pasta six days of the week and eggs once a week it would be 6*2.88 + 2.63 = $19.91/week.

19.91/4.13 = 4.82.

so, if i were to have eggs five days a week (and just fruit the other two), that's $20.65, not including the cost of fruit. 7*4.13 =$29. while i know i'm not going to actually eat seven days a week for any lengthy period, this applies to the other numbers, as well. so, this would be a 50% increase in the cost of food, for me.

if i alternate every day, i'd have seven of each over a two week period, so 0.5*7*(2.50+4.13) =$23.21/week; (7/2)*(2.5+2.63) = $17.96. the second number is no doubt why i did it. and, if you take the salami out of the sandwich (or alternate between tomato sandwiches and salami melts, as i did initially) that $17.96 will go down even more, too.

i've been thinking about this all day now, and i think it really is a contradiction - there's not really a good way to move to this for nutritional reasons without paying for it. if i want to do this, it's going to cost me a bit; it's the unavoidable trade-off. i'm good at finding sneaky tricks to absolve contradictions via dialectic, but there isn't one this time. good food costs money; that's how it is.

so, i'm going to give moving to a full egg diet a shot and see what the outcome is. for right now, at the height of the summer, i'm only eating anything at all every day or two. and, i'll see how i'm feeling about this in a month or two - if it's working out, if i want to tweak it.

see, i'm pretty soft on crime in general, but when i say i don't believe in punishment, and that incarceration should be a mental health concern, you have to realize this comes with a wholesale discarding of much of the existing legal precedents.

iirc, the literature suggests four valid reasons to incarcerate somebody, but i can only really accept one of them, and that is to protect the safety of the community. yet, in doing so, i take that single reason extremely seriously.

while i understand that the existing precedent suggests that punishment for multiple crimes should not be excessive, if we flip the issue over and look at it from a community safety perspective, multiple crimes of the same sort over a period of time becomes an issue of grave concern. this person does not appear to have made a mistake, but rather repeatedly carried out the same behaviour. that suggests some habituation to it, and the need for exceedingly strong intervention to correct it.

permanent incarceration via locking somebody in a cage is not a particularly good way to correct for behaviour, granted. but, in situations where it is decided that intervention is unlikely to be successful, it becomes necessary to protect the community.

that said, i would envision the prisons of the future to look more like enclosed communities than torture chambers. if we decide that people need to be removed from society to prevent them from harming others, that should not prevent them from being able to exist in some kind of relative comfort.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-reduced-sentence-for-serial-sex-offender-matthew-mcknight-spurs-uproar/

listen, there's no doubt that trump has made some terrible foreign policy decisions as well, but i'd view pulling out of the who as less concerning than redeploying to the middle east; you gotta take a weighted average, here. biden will do some things i'm ok with, but he's also going to do some things that enrage me.

but, what jumped out at me reading the article was to wonder if a biden presidency might actually be best implemented if it reverses the contemporary roles of presidency and vice presidency. that is, maybe biden is better off letting the vp do the speeches and appearances and stuff, while he tends to legislative priorities. maybe the vp with senatorial experience that he really wants is actually himself.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7243577/joe-biden-foreign-policy/

due to how small most of the numbers are on the chart, it would probably be more useful for him to present the data not as probabilities but as upper bounds.

so, if he says the probability is 0.6%, and the margin of error is 6%, then he should present the chart as <6.6%.

but, he might find, then, that essentially all of the entries look the same.

i think if you saw the margins of error here, you'd be a little concerned.

i toyed with doing a little bit of this at the start, but the amount of data available here hasn't really allowed for me to put much confidence in it. we know the numbers we're getting are pretty flawed. that said, it is reasonable to consult a variety of sources when you make a decision - just draw in the error bars, yourself, when you do.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/statistician-worried-back-to-school-plan-risky-1.5671012

with the fat shaming, my main irritant is people that find it very important to try to undo a general media bias against the acceptability of being overweight. this is a movement that seems to have come out of attempts to minimize unrealistic advertising to young girls, which i agree with to a degree, but in this case has been taken too far, and flipped over on it's axis; in a misguided attempt to stop girls from being coerced into being underweight, they've embraced an even more unhealthy lifestyle, and an even more negative message. media messaging should be focused on promoting healthy bmis as normal, and encouraging everybody to remain healthy.

it follows that media biases that demonstrate an aversion to obesity ought to be as welcome as media biases that reject the anorexic images we once saw dominate media, that these things should be seen as equivalently undesirable.

some coercion, here, is to be desired, i think.

i'm also imagining a vigilante mask police that ends up spreading the virus by going around and yelling at people.

sometimes it's best to leave things alone.

see, in principle, the question is if this works or not. it's an informal means of social control, and i'm in principle in favour of that.

perhaps i should clarify some of the remarks i made about fat shaming. i would certainly not recommend randomly attacking fat people walking by on the street for no reason; if my comments were misinterpreted to suggest i am proposing that we all go out and yell "fatass!" at every behemoth that comes across our path, i do apologize, as that was not my intent. rather, i would advocate that fat shaming be done in more intimate settings, by loved ones and health professionals, that have the person's best interests in mind. further, something that utilizes a little bit of wit is probably helpful; you don't want to depress this person too much, as that will just lead to more eating.

i think there's a different psychology to mask wearing, though. it's sort of a reversal of the situation, as it's usually going to be healthy people that don't want to wear the masks, and people more likely to catch it that want to enforce mask wearing. as a non mask-wearer, i can tell you that i'm not particularly concerned about the opinions of people that want me to wear a mask, and i'm just as happy to avoid them; part of the calculus built into my decision to not wear a mask is that i'm reasonably distant from people to begin with, and reality at the moment is that i'm just not walking into many high risk situations.

but, in the hypothetical scenario where i was living with a high risk individual and refused to wear a mask (in fact, if i was living with a high risk individual, i would without question be considerate enough to take all relevant precautions), due to some temporary deficit in thought, i would be likely to respond to an emotional plea that laces into me for putting that person at risk.

as with any means of informal social control, execution and context are key.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/bill-gates-suggests-calling-out-non-mask-wearers.html

he has a conflict of interest on this issue and should avoid making policy prescriptions.

i would vote for bill gates, though. this was posted on dec 12, 2016.

---

bill gates v donald trump?

i'm in.

revenge of the nerds.

this would be epic.

"i come forward to represent the interests of rationality and science against the dark forces of magical thinking. i bring forth realism; i champion data. we shall always follow the evidence."

meanwhile, trump gets to play high school bully to his most advanced desires.

"look at him. he's a fucking loser. he's got four-eyes glasses. maybe we could hire him to run our email servers, or something? i hear he's good at that. loser. i bet i know what's microsoft about him."

he would then proceed to place an L over his head, and walk menacingly towards him.

and, you could imagine the speech you'd get from gates.

"i've been called a loser my whole life. and, yet look at what i've accomplished?"

i'm not sure the nerds will win, in the end. but, i'd still like to watch the game.

postnot broadcast:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/08/it-should-be-noted-that-bill-gates-is.html

it should be noted that bill gates is both intellectually and financially invested very heavily in distance learning.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-explains-how-he-would-fight-coronavirus-if-he-was-president-dont-mislead-people-130857486.html

it's just a reminder that the real mob bosses in new york were always the dutch aristocracy.

those italian immigrants were just street agents.

wait.

so, they're lacing the opiates with an agent that counters the effect of the antidote, now?

so, they're trying to kill you? doesn't sound good for business....well, unless the model is to steal your money quickly, and snuff you out before they get busted.

there's been rumours for as long as opiates have existed that the whole thing is a population control scheme, and the whole crux of the opium wars, as driven by the harriman family, provides the only leaked model for how such a thing may be implemented. i remember my stomach sinking, the first time i read this:

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council....

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-officials-brace-for-perfect-storm-as-covid-19-contributes-to-increased-drug-overdoses

so, i've noticed this happen a couple of times, now.

if i logout for a few hours, the posts start broadcasting again for a short period, and then they stop.

are they getting intercepted? is that what's happening?

listen, pigs - i broadcast the posts to myself (that is, email them to myself, from the blogger interface; there's a "send updates" feature at the site) to ensure i have a record of them. if anybody else is receiving the broadcasts, i'm not aware of them. but, this is very useful to me for record-keeping purposes.

i actually don't care if you want to receive updates. it's set up that way - that's the point. subscribe here:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

or, send me an email address to add to the updates list. it's not necessary to physically intercept the transmission; i'm intending for it to reach an audience.

but, if you must be a spy, realize that you're not only copying the information for your own records, but also preventing me from receiving the email; that is, i'm not getting copies of these updates because whatever you're doing is not letting them through to me.

i would appreciate it if you'd correct your surveillance software, so it's not preventing emails from reaching me.

as an aside, if i was actually some kind of bad person, the fact that you're making it so obvious would not be working out for you - i'd have dropped this line of communication, by now.

let's talk about kids, as one example.

we know that the initial strains of the virus have had very little effect on kids - they're not invincible, but, compared to more lethal threats like the flu, this virus is of least concern. that is, if you have kids, you should be more concerned about them getting the flu than you are about them getting covid-19, so long as your sole concern is the kids.

for now.

now, let's say that a mutation appears that makes the virus more lethal in kids. maybe it's producing virus at a faster rate. maybe it's killing cells at a faster rate. maybe it finds a better way to trick the immune system. the opposite may happen too, but let's suppose the worst case - let's say the next wave starts killing kids at a rate more comparable to the flu, even.

and, let's say your kid gets hit with the second wave, without having defended itself against the first one.

if, at that point, your child had already defended itself against the initial strain of the virus, it would have developed some level of immunity to the new strain; as it is, your child is now being forced to defend itself against a greater threat, without any defenses at all.

now, you can argue that this isn't a fair argument, because we could have stamped the thing out if we had tried better, but the level of naivete underlying that is too great to accept as reasonable error, and we are nonetheless past that point, now. we should all be able to agree, with confidence, that this virus will not be stamped out, now.

as an adult nearing the age of 40, i'm getting to that middle point. i don't have another 40 years to bump into this thing and beat it effortlessly; i have 10-20, depending on my health. give it to me now, please.

in a real sense, what the state is doing here is a kind of helicopter parenting, and the results are going to be more or less the same.

if you oppose helicopter parenting (and you should.), then you should oppose what they're doing for the same reasons.

if it was ebola, or aids-gone-airborne, or some other deadlier thing, i'd have a different story.

but it isn't.

and, you will suffer from your decisions, if you make the wrong choices, in the long run.

so, it's not that i don't think proper mask use is going to work to some minimal effect if all the sufficient clauses are met, although i'll argue they're overrated, and their efficacy is being overstated. it's that i don't want to protect myself from the virus - i want to expose myself, and develop immunity naturally.

and, it's not that i don't think that vaccines will be effective, up to the most recent strain of the virus. it's that i want to beat the virus on my own.

so, the messaging around the situation is finally starting to change to what analytically-minded people realized was obvious from the start. i'm starting to hear more talking heads talk about the permanency of the existence of the virus, and the who is warning to think in terms of decades when planning.

so, we're not going to get rid of this. ever. it's here, forever, and you have to get used to it.

now, i want you to carefully listen to what i'm going to say next because it really is crucial in understanding how this is going to affect your health moving forwards.

this was my argument from the start:

1) you can't wipe out a virus with social distancing or mask use, and it was crazy to ever think you could. no, they have not wiped it out in asia, they've just postponed the inevitable, and now they're stuck - they have no way out of lockdown, and will be in fascism forever. but, they don't have a cultural history of barbarism and anarchy like white people do. they just don't. they really will tolerate all kinds of tyranny that we just won't stand for, here. so, it's not that asia has won the fight against anything, it's that they decided they're happy enough to live in a fascist reality, anyways - they will still be in this lockdown 40 years from now, if they don't find some kind of breaking point. and, new zealand is in the same mess (although australia has now been hit.).

2) because you can't wipe out the virus, you are better getting it when you are young, and perhaps fight off a few mutations of it. that way, it won't kill you 50-60 years from now.

3) i've always supported vaccination for the elderly, but due to how widespread this disease is, the vaccines will have short shelf-lives. maybe it's not exactly seasonal like the flu; maybe it's every 2-3 years. but, if you just to do this via vaccination, you're going to have to get vaccinated over and over and over and....which is going to create a culture of dependency on the vaccine, like exists with the flu. you know those healthy 23 year olds that insist on getting flu vaccines, then die from the common cold at 28? the state got mixed up in it's projection, but it shouldn't be encouraging this kind of thing - it should be sending young people out to get sick.

the logic you need to follow is this:

if you are weak, protect yourself and wait for the vaccine; otherwise, preventing yourself from exposure is just harming yourself in the long run. you will run into this virus eventually, and if you've never seen it before at 75, it will likely kill you. if you've fought off ten different strains by the time you get there, you'll have a far better chance of winning in the long run.

it's a perfect example of the tendency we've developed to coddle, and we don't want to see the ramifications of that play out.

for the zillionth time, protect the weak.

but, otherwise?

you need to think of this more like throwing your kids or yourself in the deep end, and sinking or swimming.

you don't want to deny yourself exposure to this when your immune system can handle it. you want to get this now, not when you're too old to fight it.

Friday, July 31, 2020

this is from 2013 - a long time ago.

but the way the drug is being used for covid patients is the same as it is being used for lupus patients.

does dr. fauci have any comments to make about a study such as this?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3674253/

i'm not dr. fauci's peer, and i'm not going to pretend i am.

but, this is my opinion of his position.

this isn't a situation where a randomized study makes any sense. the study itself indicates that multiple treatments were used, and assigns the different results to that fact; fauci seems to think that's a bad thing, but it actually represents real-world use, as this drug probably wouldn't work as a sole treatment option. it's only going to be useful when you see patients fall into the cytokine storms. randomized trials are just going to lead to the drug being used in situations that are not actually appropriate.

so, his claim may sound convincing, but it isn't - it demonstrates that he doesn't really understand the situation very well. it seems like he's trying to rebut the second study rather than the first - but, as stated, i would expect the second study (the prophylactic one.) to fail.

i don't know what he's doing. maybe he's embarrassed and humiliated and digging in and hoping it works out. maybe he's legitimately confused.

but, i think an analysis and deconstruction by his actual peers would be highly useful, in context.

i mean, if you're going to tell me to pick between peer review and one guy, i'm going to pick peer review.

sorry.

"he's the country's leading..."

it doesn't matter; argument from authority. fallacy. wrong.

can we peer review dr fauci's testimony?

thanks.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/house-committee-coronavirus-1.5670440

how many people had tweets deleted or accounts restricted over challenging an article at cnn that insisted people were losing immunity?

it's surreal. truly.

our school systems are failing to teach basic science, and the media is just taking advantage of it to maximize profit - while the social media gatekeepers and government agencies tell us to relax and trust their lies.

it's a perfect dystopia, isn't it?

there's only one way out - educate yourself. do your own research. use critical reasoning; do not suspend disbelief.

only you are in charge of your mind.

be vigilant.

it took way too long for them to write this article, but it's better late than never.

read that and then compare it to the bullshit you've been reading in your twitter feed, for what? weeks? months?

my stepmother is (was? i don't even know. i guess she's over 65 now, anyways.) a bone marrow specialist with the red cross for some time, working specifically in the oncology department at the cbs. she ended up getting fired for harassing a colleague; i guess she couldn't throw the colleague out of the house. so, i admit i cheated a little. but, it's, like, introductory bio, guys...

i have a tendency to attack people for being ignorant fucking idiots, but i'm a patient person. you don't know this; maybe you should, but you don't. fine.

but, how some of this garbage got published at big sites like cnn, with no apparent attempt to bother checking the facts before generating the clickbait, is beyond me. there's dozens of articles by big organizations that made somebody a lot of money, but really, really just shouldn't exist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/opinion/coronavirus-antibodies-immunity.html

wait.

pence's wife is named karen.

ahahahahahahahaha.

ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

it's a shame there won't be any large gatherings between now and then, because i can just imagine a room full of mostly black people at an hbcu or something yelling...

KAREN! KAREN! KAREN!

or, how about this

SWEAR-IN, KAREN!

oh, it's fucking dodd.

that explains it.

dodd strikes again, apparently, with the dodd prank act, i guess?

....and, in other news, representative karen bass has reportedly filed to change her name to schmaren bass. hope that works out for her.

although, if she does end up in the white house, biden'd better be sure he doesn't break the law, eh?

i've never heard of karen bass, and i know nothing remotely about her.

but, it's a joke, right?

the name's a non-starter. is nobody over there reading twitter, or what?

so, if biden picks a black woman called karen, how long before black america spontaneously combusts, in a warp in space-time?

i'm imagining the speech. after five or ten minutes of empty pandering and talking about how important black americans are to the campaign, he stops and says.

so, i've picked my candidate, and we think that black americans will love her. her name is....

(pause)

KAREN....

...and, then all of a sudden, the earth starts shaking, the lights start blinking, and anybody that were to look towards the sky at that exact moment would have seen swirls of colours in the night sky, for that split second.

and, then that's it.

biden is gone. and, black america has imploded, gone to some other dimension within our vast & poorly understood cosmos.

well, this is nice to see.

hey, you give me some good news every fucking once in a while, and i'll post it, eh?

https://news.ontario.ca/mma/en/2020/07/canada-and-ontario-invest-in-affordable-housing-in-kingston.html

one thing that is probably true, though, is that the babylonians had more actual raw data than we do.

we have actual sunspot data, for example, going back a few hundred years.

they probably had thousands of years worth of observation, by the end of the process. those observations are probably lost, but (ignoring errors, like procession) they may have helped them understand cycles that we're really only able to guess with math. they probably recorded celestial objects we've never seen, and saw them come through more than once.

it's actually one of the great tragedies of history, and we can only hope we find something useful, eventually.

it's a fair enough critique; i may have been a little anachronistic in my language. i guess this clarifies what i meant to say.

but, this also helps to explain two things:

1) why the islamic authorities were so uncomfortable with the math & astronomy going on
2) the existence of certain strains of islam (like sufi.) that are kind of kabbalistic in scope. that is, there has continually been a synthesis of islam with astrology happening under the radar, and that's what they were trying to stop.

we had the same bullshit in europe. it's known now that newton, for example, was an avid alchemist - and that he spent a large amount of his life trying to convert base metals into gold. but, he had to keep it underground, or he'd have ended up dead.

and, if you look into it, the whole kepler/copernicus crowd had astrological streaks of it's own.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/babylonians-scientists/462150/

ei is in need of reform and has been for a very long time; it's stuck in the 50s, in a lot of ways.

so, this is beyond necessary, and i hope they make it better.

but, my confidence is fairly low. let's hope they prove me wrong.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7239834/cerb-recipient-move-ei/

personally, i don't carry a phone.

you might want to think about that for a little while.

i highly advise against downloading this or otherwise interacting with it in any way at all.

in the end, you might get arrested for alcohol consumption.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/07/31/health-canadas-covid-alert-app-goes-live-friday/

they're trying to shut the bars down.

that's what they want.

according to the official tallies, cases are supposedly going down. so, why are they targeting bars & restaurants, at this point in the process?

well, they just passed a hijab law for kids, with the apparent purpose of habituating them to mask use. i mean, just think about you're doing - you're telling 10 to 15 year-old kids to wear masks at school. what's going to happen?

1) they're only going to wear them when there are adults looking over them.
2) they're going to grab the front of the mask repeatedly (defeating the point)
3) they're going to grab each other's masks and play games with them. there will be kids that have their masks stolen.

..and you can follow my train of thought from there.

these are actually exactly the reasons that health experts hesitated to even talk about masks for so long - if you don't wear them right, they'll make things worse.

on top of that, you're talking about kids in very close quarters. if actual medical masks may have some marginal benefit in stopping spread in spaces like malls, hijab-type cloth masks are going to be entirely useless in stopping the spread amongst kids in close proximity to each other.

and, you're not going to succeed in keeping kids apart from each other without exceedingly strict measures that nobody is going to tolerate.

it's a crazy idea, for any reason other than to try to habituate. that's what they're doing. deal with it.

and, what's next on the list?

alcohol.

muslims forbid any consumption of alcohol.

are you starting to get it yet?

and props to the first restaurant owner that hands out adult diapers in protest.

resign immediately, mr. ford.

your authority is no longer in force.

i mean, the rules are just getting hilarious at this point...

lol.

props to the first person that shits his pants in his seat in protest of the requirements.

they're breaking their own laws.

doug ford needs to resign, immediately. by breaking the rule of law in such an absurd fashion, he has defaulted on his previous mandate. he no longer has any authority, and no laws he passes have any force.

we need an election, immediately.

in the mean time, how do you deal with this kind of fascism?

1) non-compliance, in whatever form it takes.

2) civil disobedience.

3) targeted legal action.

while i have no interest in sitting in a bar without live music, i will not be abiding by these rules, and i dare you to do something about it.

https://www.sootoday.com/coronavirus-covid-19-sault-ste-marie-news/bars-restaurants-now-required-to-keep-customer-logs-for-covid-19-contact-tracing-2605541

btw.

babylon > baghdad.

if you're wondering.

and, why do i call the "islamic golden age" a "babylonian renaissance"?

because that's what it was.

while muslims like to take credit for this now, the islamic authorities were actually not particularly impressed by all of the star gazing and astronomy that was going on and acted more to suppress it than to support it. the names that have come down to us are almost all kurdish. the contribution that islam played into this was really on the level of ending the damn war, which allowed the ancestral populations (which were semitic, not persian) to kind of regain themselves.

so, they built a city called baghdad on top of the ruins of babylon, but it just turned back into babylon, and picked back up where the babylonians had left off, in staring out at the stars and trying to figure it out.

the babylonians were, in their day, master astronomers, and we have stories of pythagoras traveling to babylon to meet the "sages" there for good reason; large amounts of what we call greek math are probably ultimately babylonian, in origin. we just can't trace it back; instead, we get these dead ends at the greek. more often than not, those dead ends are going to go back to babylon.

and, that's what happened - a return of babylonian science, in the city they built on top of the wreckage.

baghdad was eventually decimated by a grandson of genghis khan, and brother of kublai khan, and i'm in the camp that argues they never fully recovered.

i've been over this before, but briefly.

while there have been some attempts to link kurdish ethnogenesis further back in time, both the origin of the term (which means 'tent-dweller' or 'wanderer'.....which i'm interpreting as refugee) and the proposed date of linguistic differentiation from persian suggest that kurdish ethnogenesis did not actually take place until well after the islamization of the fertile crescent. stated very tersely, when the dust settled after the major shift in power that happened after the arabs moved north and (1) kicked the romans out and (2) flat out conquered the persians, there were all of a sudden all of these iraqi persians living in the mountains, and there's really not a story as to how that happened - kind of like how there's really not a story about how we ended up with a really large amount of jews in eastern europe.

we know that there was nobody called kurds in the region during the classical period, and we know that persians had been in control of iraq almost continually at that point for roughly 1500 years, with the only substantive break occurring in alexander's lifetime; the post-alexandrian seleucid state was eventually overrun by parthians from central asia, but it was essentially a continuation of the achaemenid state. so, the persians had a very deep history in iraq at the time of what was initially an arabic military occupation. so, we know that there was no such thing as a 'kurd' in any of the literature from the time of cyrus (c. 550 bce) until roughly the year 900 ce, and we know that the persians dominated the region for almost all of that period, until about 650 ce (roughly, and the dates are actually a little blurry).

then, we have these kurds living in the mountains like refugees, speaking a new dialect of persian that just pops into history just right then. further, we have a lot of muslims in mesopotamia, all of a sudden, living in baghdad rather than ctesiphon or seleucia (initially babylon). over time, we see these kurds develop as a kind of ruling elite, as well. if you look into it, you realize that the entire babylonian renaissance that was centered on baghdad was really kurdish, rather than arabic, in origin.

i don't even know how you'd convincingly prove the hypothesis, but it just seems obvious to me to put two and two together and deduce that quite a lot of iraqi persians must have ended up in the mountains around the time, as a way to evade what was happening in the city, and surrounding areas. and, all you have to do is look at what happened in the isis invasion to get a kind of rough idea of how that must have happened - the arab groups come in from the south in a rage, and the persians must have sought higher ground to get out. a few hundred years later, they have a new dialect and a new identity. or, sort of; if you can interpret being called a refugee as an identity.

what that means is that, if i'm right, the kurds are essentially a 1300 year old iraqi persian refugee population.

yes...

1300 years of being refugees in the mountains.