i almost tricked myself into posting an argument about the child ifr using total case statistics, which would be misleading at best.

but, do you want real world stats, here? empirical probabilities?

i don't know how many children have contracted the coronavirus in california right now, but there has been a total of one death. it seems that roughly 17% of the population in california is under 18. if we naively assume that 17% of the 600,000 cases are in children, that is 102,000 cases. 1/102000 = 0.00000980392 = 0.000980392%.

those are not quite real world numbers; an ifr would need to be calculated from actual cases, which are probably closer to six million than 600,000. but, it is clear that even if a few more children perish, the empirically derived, real world probability is going to remain infinitessimally small.

the facts are that the ifr is just so low.....

with kids, it really is least concern. but, it's real - and expect your kid to get sick, and to need to take precautions regarding that, at least.

kamala harris will be the black sarah palin - picked to rev up a portion of the base that required little incentive to vote, and in truth representing them only transparently. a more representative pick would express more consistent conservative values.

she will simultaneously repel those she was not picked to woo, and fail to increase turnout amongst those she's been targeted towards. we already saw her fail to generate interest in her own constituency during the primaries. let us recall that she dropped out because she had no path to victory, in no small part due to disinterest towards her from black voters.

i will say this, though: the kamala harris that you get on one day is a different kamala harris than you get on another. there's some possibility she may be handed a golden script and hold to it, but i think that possibility is remote.

she was the most toxic candidate possible, and perhaps the only certain way that he'd lose.

ironically, this shifts my calculation in the other direction. as i believe that harris will sink the ticket rather badly, i'm left looking downballot and not wanting to endorse the greens too heavily. for, remember - my choice is between supporting the democrats, or passively supporting their opponents by advocating for a third party.

i would expect the polls to tighten up, and in the places biden had to swing to win.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_828496?ri18n=true

it's true, though.

nuclear winter is one solution to climate change.

i just think we can do a little better than that, even if it's not an empirical deduction.

i keep getting trapped in adding categories to the travel blog, which is preventing me from crossreferencing 2014.

there is going to be a major update soon that is going to increase the size and scope of the blog dramatically.

the rate of community transmission is lower in canada because it's had less time to spread.

at some point, we've lost the plot with this. the whole point of it being safe to send kids to school is that they don't experience serious symptoms, not that they're impervious to getting it. so, we send them to school in masks and worry that they'll get it; the point is that sending them to school is of least concern because it's of little consequence if they get it.

well, 99.998% of them anyways.

when schools open in september, lots and lots and lots and lots of kids are going to get sick. but, if you didn't know any better, you wouldn't tell the difference between any other year.

just keep the kids away from the elderly for a while.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7262819/children-coronavirus-schools-reopening/

again: this kind of thing doesn't really irk me that much. this is the reality of governing in a capitalist system; every government does it, and the next government will do it, too.

but, you have to make a stink of it when it happens, anyways.

and, they're kind of swimming in it right now, because they're not even...the term they use is "the appearance of conflict", or something. their actual legal obligation is merely to make it look like they're not skimming money out, and they're not even trying, it's just rampant corruption and nepotism every which way.

i might not care myself, but this is how conservatives win back, and ultimately then lose, power. these are gifts.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/pmo-and-morneaus-office-wont-say-if-katie-telfords-husband-communicated-with-them-since-joining-private-mortgage-company/

russia is always the guinea pigs.

"We see this as part of competitive behaviour by some western pharma companies that want to dominate the vaccine market and do not want to have competition,” RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev said

that is anthony sutton's explanation for the confusing level of capitalist support for the soviet union, from day one. see, if you're a market libertarian (like sutton was.) then the kind of monopolized economy inherent to marxism sounds like a catastrophe, but if you're actually a shareholder at an actual corporation, monopoly access sounds like a great idea! so, these western bankers just shoveled money into the soviet union to fund the experiment, to see if that kind of model would lead to the total corporate dominance they always dreamed of. sutton called these people vulgar marxists, because they co-opted marxist theory and utilized it's insights for the benefits of maximizing accumulation. in their private communication, they often sounded like marxists, as they were funding marxists, but they flipped the whole thing over; it was the marxists that became the useful idiots for capital.

not much has changed apparently.

after all, russia was chosen because it was backwards, because it had always been backwards. it's the great paradox of white supremacy; the direct descendants of the ancestral white homeland have been at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy since year zero - past capitalism, past feudalism and into classical times.

somebody has to be a guinea pig.

if they're doing this, let's hope they can track it well enough to study it.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/industry-body-calls-russian-covid-19-vaccine-a-pandoras-box

i have pointed out in the past that the broad crux of ecological science is traversing in a direction that is convergent with the holistic tendencies of indigenous worldviews and that this provides for the potential of a deep synthesis that truly must be the future of the party, if it wishes to survive. the ideology of the canadian green party should, and must, in a very real sense be a combination of the scientific method, and where advanced insights into technology can take us, with explicitly indigenous concepts of land stewardship and ecological interconnectedness that overturn the aristotlian conception of humanity as the centre of everything; it is the only feasible way forward, and if the party misses it's chance to grasp it, it might fade permanently. we need to keep the science, but pretty much everything else about the west needs to be rethought.

i've been in and out of indigenous advocacy groups, studied some indigenous law and have talked to indigenous activists on the ground, and this kind of laundry list of issues you hear from politicians really isn't close to were their heads are at. there's such a wide spectrum of views on so many of these topics, from sovereignty to the indian act, that it's hard to make sense of laying down ideas ahead of time and pushing them forward.

what the next leader of the green party needs to commit to doing is talking to indigenous people. like, really talking to them - going into their communities, taking note of their concerns and then bringing them back to the party, where some very direct proposals can be drafted.

and, this should be a major project for your party, because the mla is right; i've never understood why the greens haven't sought to build a base in the indigenous community, because it's perhaps the only obvious way to build one.

is the geographical thing complete bs? i think you need to be a little more subtle.

in 1976, the democrats were probably going to do well in the northeastern & union states, but they needed a southerner on the ticket to win georgia. that year, it was the president that was the regional factor, not the vp; nonetheless, by picking mondale, carter did manage to balance the ticket. so, geography was important in 1976.

1980-1988 were landslides, so it's hard to make sense of how geography may have made a difference.

but, my recollection of 1992 was that a very important part of the calculus around picking gore was trying to hold the upper south - tennessee, kentucky. the presence of ross perot makes these analyses difficult, and it does turn out that those handful of states were not decisive, but clinton didn't know any of that when he picked gore; the clinton campaign did legitimately believe at the time that those states were key to victory, and absolutely did pick gore partly in an attempt to win them.

that was why it was ironic that gore could have won in 2000 by carrying tennessee. but, 2000 was overall more like 1976, in the sense that george w. bush had his father's name recognition in key states like florida. so, pointing to cheney and saying that geography doesn't matter is not really grasping the situation.

biden, as well, was chosen partly to help the ticket in the midwest, and there are some states like ohio that obama may have had difficulty carrying without him. but, in the end, the geographic advantage in 2008 belonged mostly to obama, who carried truly decisive states like north carolina by mobilizing black voters.

so, really, what we see over the last few decades is not that geography doesn't matter but that the successful candidates have had decisive geographic advantages of their own.

while biden may do better in some places in the midwest than clinton did, there's not any good reason at this point to think he'll actually beat trump in most of these places. what i'm getting at is that biden's geographical strengths are largely neutralized by trump. we are consequently back in a scenario where biden should be looking for a regional advantage, either by trying to excite black voters to the levels that existed in 2008 (which is an absurd premise, given the historical events of that year), by keying in specifically on hispanics (something that i strangely haven't seen discussed at all, given biden's poor numbers with hispanics) or by doubling down and taking a serious run at the midwestern white vote.

as of right now, biden's geographic base appears to be in solidly red states. he's going to need to build a base in purplish states in order to win.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/politics/joe-biden-vp-pick-kamala-harris/index.html

this paper attempts to argue that the edicts of ashoka were actually based on the delphic maxims, which have apparently been found in the region in tablets dating back to 300 bce (about 40 years before the first known fragment of the edicts).

the texts i've read on the indo-greeks have stressed that there was a black hole in the historical record in terms of understanding the exact greek influence on buddhism, but they would be fairly old and it appears out of date at this point.

i did not realize that there were concrete proposals for a genealogical link, based on actual archaeological findings; this theory appears to have advanced quite a bit since the last time i looked into it.

https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/dha_0755-7256_1990_num_16_1_1467.pdf

this paper makes a similar point, if you can't read french, without being explicit:
http://www.singor.org/publ/singor201201.pdf

this is the world that ashoka saw himself as existing in:

it's interesting to note that, in the edicts, ashoka seems to position himself in a greek world, rather than an indian world. he doesn't mention china, or the areas to the east of india; his geography is restricted to the greek world, the areas conquered by alexander. this is quite strange, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edicts_of_Ashoka#Ashoka's_proselytism_according_to_the_Edicts

it turns out that the earliest known buddhist writings were actually literally written in greek & aramaic - the same languages used to write the bible.

menander, who lived a little later but is central to a lot of buddhist writing when it appears, was also a greek.

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

i'm not familiar with this source, but if you want something that's not me, this discusses an academic source that has traced greek influence on the development of buddhist thought.

i understand that buddhism traces itself to before alexander, and i don't dispute that, but the earliest actual writings we have were created during the period of hellenic influence and they really do seem to have a distinctively greek style to them. it's actually very easy to believe, without getting technical about it.

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/consider-source-buddhas-hairdo-greek/

interesting google search hit.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity

would i have at least gotten along with early christians?

if they gave me enough wine, maybe. it'd liven the debate, at least.

the thing is that early christians were kind of not that different from pagans; they're thought to have carried out most of the same mystery rites, and essentially would have been left alone if they'd have just acknowledged the primacy of the emperor.

given that this was the major crime that christians were charged with, not accepting the superiority of the emperor, i have to admit i'd probably be a little sympathetic to them. they don't seem to have been particularly prude people at that point in time; rather, they were known for wild parties, orgies and who knows what else. they kind of sound like anarcho-primitivists, in an era where the population was low enough to actually live it responsibly.

at some point, some fascist thugs took control of the councils, and they started passing rules and outlawing heretics and whatnot; you can see the beginnings of a dangerous institution develop here, many years before constantine. i'd consequently break with them fairly early - potentially as early as the first generation after his death. i guess the shit really hit the fan with paul, right? that's only about 50 years after his death.

but, i don't think i'd have much particularly negative to say about the very, very first christians. i could maybe get along with them, a little.

and, yes - early christianity itself was another example of greek discourse in opposition to authoritarian rule, it just happens to be the one that got badly co-opted, and turned into a vehicle of tyranny, culminating in (but not beginning with) constantine's declaration that he saw a cross in the sky that demanded he conquer in it's name, perhaps after consuming too much ergot. we forget it was the romans that invented the holy war to attack the persians, and neither the crusaders nor the arabs, who both adopted the idea from the book of roman tactics.

whatever early christianity's position on these matters was, the institution that developed in western europe after the fall of rome and called itself a christian church had little resemblance to anything championing discourse over authority.

while growing up in canada means you've been raised in the west and are a westerner regardless of what you look like, it's important to point out that the west is not the only culture that was dominantly influenced by the greeks. it was perhaps a pitstop in the long run of things, but greek mathematics and astronomy, especially, were developed rather substantially in baghdad during the babylonian renaissance; the centrality of greek origins in this renaissance is itself rooted in the deep cultural realities of centuries of hellenic dominance in the region, from the persian collapse led by alexander through the parthian uprising and well into the roman takeover of the levant, led by pompey. the roman-persian war was initially built on a struggle as to who would inherit the greco-persian empire, a question that history never resolved, until the appearance of islam, which did not inherit it but dismantled it.

that ancient hellenic influence, as projected by alexander (but, in fact, preceding him, culturally) spread to the furthest eastern reaches of the indo-european sphere, and all the way into india itself. the legend is that very large numbers of alexander's soldiers ended up india when he died and just kind of stayed put there. when they did, they set up colonies with their own systems of government and manufactured their own art and whatnot. cultural exchange between these greek settlers, called indo-greeks and greco-bactrians, and the indians themselves was in fact exceedingly deep, and the effects of hellenism in india can be traced very far into the future.

i mean, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_influence_on_Indian_art

it's a deep academic discipline - well studied, because it's so prominent in the art.

while i'm not aware of any tradition of plato or socrates in india, the period of hellenic influence in india coincided with the earliest buddhist writings, and it's hard not to see an influence from greek discourse on the way that the writings are ordered. it's known that many extant buddhist sculptures were essentially greek in construction, so the influence was there. regardless, buddhism is also a discourse-based system of thinking, rather than an authoritarian one.

i understand that there are cultures on this planet that are highly hierarchical, and in which authority is paramount. these cultures are as ancient as any other, and sending out experts to bark orders may be an effective strategy in those cultures.

but, white people have always been all about discourse; the one thing that survived the vicious dark age that set in with christianity was the platonic discourse, which was the central focus of a real education, in those days. everything was always about talking it through - democracy, the market, philosophy, etc.

we lost that, but we brought it back, partly because it better fit the character of celto-german anarchy as it emerged from the boot of judeo-latin dominance. one of the misunderstood things about the vikings, and one of the things we actually understand best about them, was how startlingly democratic their society actually was. they would constantly convene at assemblies in ways that seem to have been lost to the romanized peoples they encountered. the english common law parliament is also a unique relic of german democracy that survived in hybrid form, where it disappeared virtually everywhere else. it makes sense that the new german aristocracy in europe would identify more with greek democracy than with what had become latin tyranny, and the renaissance kind of gave them the chance to make that choice, as to how they would be civilized. we often think of the renaissance and enlightenment as a struggle between the authority of the church and the primacy of empirical science, but it was just as much an overturning of judeo-latin civilization in favour of greek civilization. with that process, the west inherited all things greek, including the centrality of discourse, which better fit it's shared barbarian character with the ancient greeks than the dominance and authority of judaic religion.

as with any reversal of thought, the struggle is never complete; today, we still see proponents of authority over discourse in the west, and they continue to wield power. but, our history is clear enough - nothing much changes in barbarian cultures without recognizing the centrality of discourse within them, without reaching out to the demos, without having a debate, or maybe even swinging it out.

if you want to get things done, you need to fit the approach properly to the culture.

this article is very poorly written, in it's survey of the science around the topic. that said, it would appear that this doctor is promoting the use of the drug as a prophylactic (which is not based on any science), rather than as a treatment in severe cases (which appears to be part of an effective strategy to prevent septic shock, when it sets in, which is the same way it is used to treat lupus, rather than malaria). as badly written as the article is, the doctor appears to have genuinely misunderstood the science.

however, her confusion is not a reason to censor her.

when somebody is confused about something, attempting to silence them is more likely to increase their confusion than resolve it. people easily develop persecution complexes, and like-minded people are quick to erect martyrs out of people that they feel are being suppressed. if your goal is truly a greater public understanding of the proper uses of this drug in the context of treating covid-19, it is a far better idea to engage this person in discourse, and try to convince them that they are incorrect than it is to silence them or shut them down with force.

further, before you silence dissent, it is always of paramount importance to ask yourself if you might be wrong. for, you might be wrong, and history will judge you terribly for it.

the science is in fact crystal clear that there are valid therapeutic uses for this drug (which is in fact approved by the appropriate bodies, worldwide, for these reasons) in the context of treating severe cases of covid-19. a little discourse may help everybody understand this better; clearly, sending experts out and demanding people obey their authority isn't actually working that well, is it?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/kulvinder-kaur-gill-tweets-cpso-1.5680122

there's an underlying assumption in the discussion around food security in the north that the problem is infrastructure related, and just the result of bad planning. this perspective seems to be pervasive, but it's rooted in a sort of denial of the purposeful colonial practices that have led us to this point.

stated as tersely as possible, the food security issues are an entirely artificial problem that was created on purpose. and, how did we get here?

well, there have been people living there for thousands of years, and they always had plenty to eat before - they ate high fat diets of caribou, seals, walrus, narwhal and supplemented shrubs. it may be hard to grow plants that far north most of the year, but there's not an actual deficit of things to eat. and, what has happened?

what happened is that we moved in, rounded the people up into settled camps (stopping them from migrating) and fed them by shipping in food from the south. we also brought in the church to brainwash them into colonial living norms, which led to the demonization of traditional food sources as "country food", and a people raised to interpret their own traditions as backwards and satanic. the next things that came in were oil and guns; dogsleds became replaced by skidoos, spears by rifles. and, over time, they've forgotten how to hunt.

i'm not sure that it is possible, or even makes sense, to talk about undoing this. but, you can't truly address the issue without understanding that we did this on purpose, to separate these people from their heritage.

and, yes - now they're hooked on doritos and coke, because it's what we fed them with.

these areas are more than capable of sustaining their own food networks, but in order to get to that point you have to loosen the colonial grip that the federal government has put in place in order to prevent it.

so, it took me a few days longer than i'd have liked it to get groceries done; i picked up a few things late on thursday, a few more on friday and had to wait until saturday afternoon to get some raspberries & strawberries at the far store, as they were overpriced at the close ones. so, i'm a few days behind.

i've got my workstation set back up now and am ready to get back to work in rapidly finishing up the consistency check over 2014 and moving to rebuilding 2015 in one swoop.

guinea pigs. what have we done to them?

it was the other night, walking home with groceries, maskless, that i was thinking about the virus, and potential vaccination approaches. with all of this skepticism around basic science (people challenging the science around antibodies, for example) that i'm pushing back against, it's frustrating that we're not seeing a more healthy skepticism around vaccine use; the potential dangers of handing out an untested vaccine don't seem to be registering with the general population, who seem a little bit frighteningly naive about the safety of untested vaccines, as they've been conditioned to be by a media that understandably targets vaccine skeptics as a public health nuisance.

but, i need to stress that a tetanus shot has been widely tested for a long period of time. we know that adverse reactions are rare, and it's a relatively safe way to protect yourself from something that can legitimately kill you. it's going to be impossible to do proper testing with these covid-19 vaccines before releasing them; the safety trial is going to be the first deployment of the vaccine.

so, the people that get the vaccine first are going to be...guinea pigs. you want to argue you should give it the elderly first, but given that the first recipients are going to be guinea pigs, is it potentially better to give it to a more resilient population, like kids?

but, then do you support treating kids like....guinea pigs?

and, i stopped and decided that, no, i don't support treating kids like guinea pigs - it is the elderly at risk, and they must assume it.

but, then i stopped to realize that i don't even support treating guinea pigs like guinea pigs.

what have we done to these creatures? we have entirely co-opted their identity, fully stolen their existence from them. for when we think of guinea pigs, we no longer imagine vibrant, high-strung rodents flopping around the edges of the forest floor, but imagine animals in cages under human experimentation. they exist, in our language, solely for our own amusement.

there's a historical parallel in how we've used racial terms to refer to slaves in various languages, so that the word that we use to describe that racial group is the same word we used to describe the concept of a slave. in english, we've adopted the word slave from anglo-norman invaders, who brought it to the island with a germano-latin ruling class that enslaved the slavic-speaking speakers to the east of europe, largely to sell them to the arabic rulers in the middle east. so, in english, our word for slave is the same as our word for slav. in arabic, the concept of slavery is intrinsically tied into the physicality of blackness, which is something that partially developed in the united states, as well.

i support them in principle, but this is maybe not the best idea just right now. 

if you don't want to wear a mask, then don't. it's not necessary to gather in the park and make a show of it; in a sense, they've got you, if they can get you to do that. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/anti-mask-march-montreal-aug-8-1.5679598

time's just about up, justin.

well, he's got the ndp in place to blame, when the bankers grill him on it.

but, people are losing or have lost patience. if he's serious, he'd better be spending his vacation working something out (wouldn't that be a dramatic change, itself) and be ready to ram it through on day one, because he doesn't have much public goodwill left, and consequently doesn't have much time left to change minds.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/08/08/insiders-say-justin-trudeau-doesnt-want-an-election-he-wants-to-remake-canada.html

i want to be clear....

my skepticism about the virus, and criticism towards public health measures, isn't rooted in a political persuasion. i'm not sitting here hoping that people get sick, and if i thought we could have stamped the virus out, i would have supported it.

but, my analysis of the situation was that the virus would not be suppressed. this was based on what i was able to gather about the contagiousness of the virus, combined with what kind of measures could be realistically put in place; i pointed out that the social distancing thing was really just a ridiculous joke in terms of keeping people apart from each other, and that the laboratory assumptions put in place in these studies around mask use did not reflect the realities of people fidgeting with masks, putting them in their pockets, accepting them from centralized locations that are touched and breathed on by dozens or hundreds of people, etc.

i legitimately expected these measures to fail - not because i wanted them to, but because a sober analysis concluded that they just would. and, if you listen to the public health experts, it was clear that they all knew that, they were just reacting out of desperation, to try to solve something they didn't know how to deal with.

see, here is where i maybe get political, but i'd challenge somebody to negate this phrase and argue it: i don't think it's the role of government to take wild guesses on policy and hope it works, but rather that it is the role of government to look at the data through sober, critical filters and make the clearest deductions from it possible. if government had done that, if it had truly followed the science rather than base it's policy on faith and hope, then it would have concluded that it should have brought in policies to mitigate the eventual spread, rather than policies to stop it from spreading.

and, then, what does mitigation mean? it means protecting the elderly and weak, and trying to keep the spread within communities that have the highest chances of fighting it off. something we've learned is that the spread of the virus comes down substantively at around 20% exposure. while the measurements we've observed around that magic number of 20% represent a broad cross-section of the population that is at least partly demographically representative of the population as a whole, the lesson from that observation is that the contagiousness of the virus decreases to a manageable level when you can provide immunity to as little as one out of five possible spreaders. policy should then be shaped around building in immunity in the much greater than 20% of the population that is at least risk of mortality.

at this stage in the pandemic, opening the universities is probably the best thing they can do.

but, if you're old, stay inside and away from students during september, please.

you're going to tell me a cricket has a brain.

a cricket has an eye, but it doesn't really have a brain. the nervous system is actually really localized, so it's able to function independently when parts of the body get chopped off. one wonders if that's a first step to regeneration, or a mostly lost memory of it. but, what that means is that the neurons in the head of the insect, in addition to the optic neurons, are just the local cluster for functions in the head (like eating), and are not any different than the local clusters elsewhere in the body, that are for movement and reproduction.

a brain is supposed to be a centralized processing unit that oversees the control of the entire organism, and insects do not have that; they have an optic bundle that controls for functions in the head and a series of other bundles that control for other localized functions.

so, then, do they have six brains? it's a meaningless compound phrase, a contradiction in terms. i was taught that they have a ganglia that exists throughout their body, rather than multiple brains. but, we can call things what we want, i guess, so long as you realize that "six brains" is sort of an incoherent idea, and that what you're calling brains are very limited and segmented in the scope of their functions.

it's interesting to look at insects that have eyes, though, because it seems to suggest that brains may have evolved from eyes, rather than the other way around. further, who knows; in a few million years, maybe some insects with eyes may develop actual brains, as the optic nerve takes control of the ganglia system.

i've been over this a few times before; i understand that i'm an omnivore, that this is necessary, but if you look at the animals that we choose to eat...

like, go hang out with a pig some time. these are intuitive, playful creatures that are considerably more intelligent than the animals we keep as pets, cats and dogs. they have individual personalities that you learn when you rear them for slaughter, will respond to names if you give one to them and can even be effectively toilet trained. they seem far too intelligent to be raised in cages for the purposes of consumption.

humans and pigs share some weird similarities as well, like brain structure and skin composition. i've even wondered if pigs may be currently phylogenetically miscategorized as ruminants when they're really descendants of a horrid lost human culture that enslaved and converted a conquered tribe into livestock; the dna may suggest otherwise, but one wonders how powerful a role the environment can play in convergence, via epigenetic expression. hey, humans can grow tails and horns; i'm sure we have the code to grow hooves, too. some back-crossing with the right mutation, and you'd get hooved homo sapiens in no time.

i've never lived on a farm myself, but i've heard from multiple people that there's an almost traumatic rite of passage involved with coming to terms with the fact that the animal friend that you've been playing with in the yard for the last two years is going away because your family is going to eat it. that's a very difficult memory that multiple people i've met have, which demonstrates the point - you feel empathy for the animal, because you've experienced it's cognition.

these issues just don't exist with a species like crickets, who have primitive neuron-like structures but do not technically have brains. it's hard to understand what the signals they experience are like, but we can state confidently that they don't have personalities, that they don't respond to names and that they have no meaningful cognition or intelligence. i wouldn't view raising and eating crickets that differently than i view plant-based agriculture; the best way to do it is probably even in a greenhouse.

i think i've seen enough to produce a ranked ballot. however, i'm not going to analyze this further. it gets a little blurry after 4 or so.

i'm not looking up spelling, and don't care if i spell their names correctly right now.

1. glen murray
2. courtney howard
3. amita kutner
4. dmitri lascaris
5. judy foote
6. miriam haddad
7. david merner
8. annamie paul
9. andrew west

while dmitri & glen may have broader disagreements about the benefits of capitalism (and i think these are likely even minimal, as glen is further left than he's projecting, and dmitri is actually a little further right than he's projecting, too), the difference between "enforcing your will on the corporate sector" and "working with the corporate sector" has more to do with language than a meaningful difference in policy.

while dimitri might perceive that an authoritarian articulation of positive law is a more effective means forward, he must certainly realize that he can't just pass a proclamation, and then it will just be. if we could all just chant a spell that emissions shalt recede, right? why stop there, though? i hereby declare that atmospheric carbon concentrations will recede to pre-industrial levels! make it so. what, in actuality does imposing one's will on the corporate sector mean? it means working with them to help them meet legislated targets.

likewise, glen is surely cognizant of the reality that any interaction with the corporate sector will require explicit legislation regulating it, as a basis for action in the first place. the regulators that he sends will be there to enforce the legislation, unless somebody pays them off between now and then, or the body overseeing it gets captured.

they're saying the same thing, they're just restating equivalent statements to emphasize different parts of a machinated process, rather than focus on the machinated process itself, as a holistic entity. it's a truly dumb argument.

as an aside, i've watched a few of these now and, while glen ought to win this thing easily, the format of these debates is not helping him get a wonkish message across and neither the moderators nor the other candidates seem to like him much. i would like to see a very data-oriented person in the leadership role, and he does strike me as the best candidate from that perspective, by a good margin. i haven't seen any polling; your guess is as good as mine. but, i'm getting the feeling that i'm going to walk out of this process with more respect for a defeated glen than the party, which is maybe moving away from climate change as a central point of concern.

but, if you're reading this, do also realize this truth:

i am the elusive educated swing voter; statistically, i don't exist, but we know i'm the ultimate arbiter of elections, when they are free. you may in the end only succeed in reducing my scorn from active to passive hate, but i am the key to victory, on all sides, and my opinion is of paramount concern.

the reality is that they're both unelectable and they're both unfit for office.

i'm not going to pretend otherwise, or trick myself into thinking differently.

so, i understand that biden people might read this blog and conclude i must be a trump supporter, but it's just the fallacy of the excluded middle at play; the idea that not(biden) = trump is a logical fallacy, and i'm happy to demonstrate it for you.

conversely, trump people might read this and conclude i must be working for biden, but they're wrong for all the same reasons.

and, in my view, if you both think i'm working for the other party, that means i'm demonstrating a proper level of impartiality.

call me post-partisan.

even if i'd really rather send a pox on both your houses.

and, i might get it.

and, no, i don't care if you don't like how i behave, because i'm not on your side, anyways - even if i endorse you, in the end.

and i don't care if you don't want my endorsement; you're getting it anyways, if i decide i hate your opponent more than i hate you.

i need to make this point very clear. i do it every election, because you people always want to take sides, and create friends and enemies, and split people apart...

i don't approach elections like they're sports tournaments, or competitive games, and consequently don't take sides or pit groups against each other in the process.

i hate the democrats
i hate conservatives
i hate the liberals
i hate the republicans
i hate the ndp
and i hate the greens, too

ok?

i hate you all to your core, from my core, all the time, in every way.

so, i may very well post the most vicious attacks you've ever seen on biden one minute, then suggest i'm endorsing him the next. if you interpret my attacks from a partisan perspective, you're going to be run astray.

no, attacking your opponent doesn't mean i'm on your side - and i might not be. and, attacking you doesn't mean i won't endorse you.

i am not a team player, i do not want to cooperate and i'm not interested in repeating party lines.

i have no party membership and don't want to join one. if i were going to join a party, it would be something more like the communist party.

and, i can't vote in this election or any other american election.

the choices in this election are truly particularly disgusting, even relative to a long series of uninspiring choices; i thought 2016 was bad, but biden really makes clinton look pretty compelling, in comparison (not enough to seriously endorse her).

so don't try to put me on a team, or assign me to a side.

i'm an independent agent, a loose canon, a free radical. and, i'll happily demonstrate all manners of bipolarism in my analysis, and not care if you think that's "inconsistent"; it's only inconsistent if you see it as a competition between two antagonistic forces, of which you have to choose a side.

when you have no intention of choosing either side, there's no process of the sort at play.

i will no doubt produce an opinion in the end, but not before ripping my endorsement to shreds, first, and perhaps no more than five minutes after i correctly and convincingly explain why they're unfit to govern.

it's the reality of existing in (or near) a system where democratic choice is really little more than an illusion.

"but, he's a decent guy."

he's really not, he's a total creep.

is gretchen whitmer a reasonable choice?

let's hope this isn't creepy joe at play, here. listen - this is a potential problem that could develop with a number of people around him. i keep saying he's the mirror reflection of trump...

trump seems to have a kind of specific hate-on for her, as well, which could work to his advantage if he's subtle (which he never is.) but could backfire if he gets desperate, or just overwhelmed with misogyny. that's a real wildcard. my impression is that she's a strong campaigner, and might be able to push the right buttons so that he self-destructs. pence is more self-disciplined, and also more hateful to his core being, so that's a weird dynamic.

it would seem to me that a whitmer pick would put her at the front of the ticket, in the sense that she would be the media front for a biden-overseen background operation. she's relatively young, comfortable in front of the camera and fairly photogenic. the fact that she's still in contention suggests that, creepy joe or not, he is valuing these qualities rather highly.

her main strike against her would be a lack of meaningful executive experience, although she has a lot of legislative experience, and a feeling that she's kind of jumping the gun. she's a bit of a black box as to what she might actually do.

her pandemic rules appear to have deeply over-reacted to the scenario and had little effect on reducing the spread of the disease, but that's a problem with all democrats, who are not interested in following the science on the issue, even when they play political games about it. so, we know she has a fascistic streak to her, which is a downside - but to the party in general, not just her.

iirc, she ran on an infrastructure mandate, and all she's really had time to do since elected is focus on disaster relief. i remember some encouraging words to the effect that queer people actually have rights coming from the attorney general's office, but that's a separate election, right? it would be helpful from an analytical standpoint to have data from less chaotic times to get a chance to see how she might govern a few years from now; as it is, and from what i can tell, she seems to be about a middle-of-the-road centre-left democrat that should check all the boxes for most of the big single-issue voters but isn't going to be very appealing to leftists, who don't really matter, anyways.

so, it's electorally reasonable, and perhaps more so than it is a reasonable governing option. but, i'd assign a wide margin of error; what i'm saying is that we don't really have the data to know.

so, i'd need to focus on the campaign to determine whether i'd want to vote for her or abstain.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/politics/gretchen-whitmer-joe-biden-meeting/index.html

remember...

when life's a waste, just run away.

i think i've got my point across - this wasn't a minority view in the punk scene, especially not after about 1982-1983. it was a dominant component of what punk was from the start, to the end.

the fans may have been less into the messaging than the bands, and i get that. but, the general perception of drug use in the punk movement was never particularly positive; they seem to have broadly seen potheads as losers, and people that did heavy drugs as giving up on themselves.

and, they made fun of them for it.

i'm not sure if dexter holland ever finished his phd in microbiology or not.

this was much later, but it's also still, to my knowledge, the highest selling indie record of all time. so, any records that sold more than this were always on major record labels.

punk as a movement didn't release many records on major labels and the only thing i can think of that sold more than this off the top of my head is actually nevermind.

that means this was the centerpiece of one of the most recognizable punk rock records ever released.

and. well...listen to it...

so, it stopped broadcasting yesterday afternoon and started broadcasting again this morning.

the missed posts are as follows:

aug 6, 2020

listen, nobody is saying the kids won't get it. if you send your kids to school, there's a good chance they're going to catch something or other - the cold, the flu, covid-19, whatever.

the point is that, as far as we can tell at this point, it's not going to affect them very much. so, as long as the kids aren't living with elderly parents...

of course, if you had children very late, or you live in a large extended family that includes old or infirm people, you might want to avoid sending your kids to school. in general, those are scenarios where families have extra responsibility to protect the people around them. in reality, great-grandma probably can't handle the regular old flu very well either, and you really want to keep her away from that, too.
so, yeah, your kids'll get sick. but, so what?

https://globalnews.ca/news/7254294/coronavirus-student-tests-positive-georgia-school/

14:44

post not broadcast:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/08/so-yes-some-fraction-of-percentage-of.html

14:45

so, yes - some fraction of a percentage of kids will die when they open the schools. if ifr for kids specifically is .05% (a high estimate), and 40% of the kids get it, then you should expect that 0.02% of the kids will die. very simple math.

but, that's a not a high number, and only the most ridiculously risk adverse people would see it as a reason to halt.

kids get sick from something they caught at school and die every year. kids are robust, but they're fragile; they die easily.

14:48

as a parent, you will not be able to tell if your kid has a cold or has covid-19.

in fact, the testing might not be able to determine that with any clarity, either.

and, when your kid does get covid (and they will.) and beats it, you won't know, in the end, if they had it, or if it was just a cold.

14:58

post not broadcast:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/08/as-parent-you-will-not-able-to-tel-if.html

15:00

they shut the broadcast down again...

see, i really don't understand what they're doing. they allow it, then stop it, then allow certain posts, etc. so, allow me to explain this yet again.

the only reason i have the broadcast set up at all is to archive the posts.
  
as it is not working, i have been archiving the posts using other means. but, ideally, i would like a copy of every post i make to this space to appear in my email, so i can eventually reconstruct it in a linear ordering, and reproduce it as a readable document.

i have no direct audience. there are two addresses that this broadcasts to - deathtokoalas and the koalacentralcommand. in both cases, it's simply intended to be back up. that's all.

so, the only audience that the pigs are stopping from getting these posts is, in fact, myself. there are no further recipients, afaik.

further, afaik, the posts are freely available at the actual blog, which is what i actually care about.
i guess i'm kind of struggling to articulate myself using concepts that i don't really understand well. i was very late to get on to social media, i never really liked it very much and i was very quick to get off. i do not interpret this space as "social media", and in fact have moved here explicitly so that i'm not interacting with a concept that i don't have a lot of interest in. i got on social media late, but i got on the internet early, so i still interpret the internet from the eyes of a 90s kid; i like simple web pages, i don't own a touch screen and i still use a mouse and keyboard. so, i'm getting the impression that i probably wouldn't even properly understand any of the accusations directed at me.

i do want people to subscribe to the feed, and get updates in their email. but, i don't want to interact with this space, or any other space that i create in, with any of the framework of "social media content". i don't see this as a "blogspot account", i see it as a personal website. and, i don't want you to log into a feed and interact with me in that way; i want you to come to the website and browse it.

so, i think they're approaching this with an intent to reduce potential virality of these posts, but in doing so they're trying to shut down an internet 1.0 site using internet 2.0 tactics. and, i'm just left confused.
i'm just trying to archive my posts, guys, and all you're really doing is just being pointlessly annoying.

15:13

but, what have i learned in sum?

1) they tend not to broadcast posts that include links, with the exceptions of links to this site and links to my commercial sites (sometimes). as they don't appear to discriminate about the kind of link to a broad degree, i'm suspecting that there is probably a filter somewhere along the way. but, this filter appears to be being monitored by a live thug/pig.

2) when i try to get around this by posting a "post not broadcast" post (which does broadcast, and thereby broadcasts the link to the post with the link that wouldn't broadcast, effectively bypassing the censors), they will shut down broadcasting altogether within a few hours. so, they don't like that.

but, they're not communicating with me. i've tried opening this channel, which is clearly being read by the people that are trying to censor the broadcasts (which are only going to me, afaik), and i've received nothing at all but enigmatic behaviour that i'm left to try to interpret.

one of the principles i use in engaging with the thugs/pigs is to try to be as transparent as possible. i'm more law-abiding than most; since they legalized pot, they're going to have to bring me in on j-walking to get me. really. there's nothing to get me on, and they've tried, clearly. so, i'm all about being as honest as i can, to eliminate any ambiguities. the most dangerous armed people in any society are always the pigs in it. i am fully cognizant of that, and want to ensure that these dangerous thugs in our midst are not confused about my nature or intentions. this is consistent with my views as a free speech activist - the best way to get your head around something is via open discourse. so, by taking this approach, i can be confident that if i'm ever found dead via suspicious suicide, or if the cops ever brazenly just shoot up my front door, that they are not acting proportionally. this is in contrast to an approach that involves hiding information from the cops, which has the potential to lead to miscommunication.
it would be useful if that communication was two-way.

at the end of the day, it is likely that i will choose to disagree with any decisions made by censors and seek to find ways to evade them; it is not very likely that i will just abide by the rules. but, it would be useful to know what these people are trying to prevent, at the least. i may project otherwise, but i'm not an oracle. i need data to process before i can react, and in the absence of it, i can only make guesses.

so, that's what i know.

but, i don't fully understand what's happening.

15:48

so, i went looking for an official ifr for kids, and it seems to be a standard practice right now to refer to the ifr for not just kids but "young adults" in general as "close to zero". here is one example:

The estimated IFR is close to zero for children and younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3 percent for ages 50-59, 1.3 percent for ages 60-69, 4.6 percent for ages 70-79, and 25 percent for ages 80 and above.  


https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v2

that appears to be about as close as i'm going to get, right now.

so, 0.05% is probably a high estimate. but, when you start pushing the ifr much lower than that, you're just competing with error for results - it's effectively 0%, statistically.

no, that doesn't mean that the odd kid won't die; so long as the ifr is non-zero, which it clearly is, at least one kid will die. and, i'm sure the cameras will be on it like vultures on a carcass.
but, it's a number, and you need to plug in numbers if you want answers.

16:08

i mean, we could plug in an epsilon, right?

but, people are going to look at you funny when they tell them that epsilon percent of the population under 40 are really just the walking dead, right now.

16:13

mathematicians don't tend to have a lot of respect for epsilons. they are the weakest members of the real field - discarded as irrelevant, and often even multiplied or even squared and set as equal. a million epsilons is no more a threat than merely one. but, they're tenacious things, too - like the virus itself, always there.

cantor was a lunatic, but at least his ideas hinted at a new mathematics. we don't have the language to properly articulate it, and the mathematics is even in it's infancy, but we realize now that when we say there's an infinite number of numbers to count to and an infinite number of points on a real line that these are two different orders of infinity. we're not really there with infinitessimals, yet; we just produce epsilons and throw them away at will.

to you, an epsilon may be a person, and that's fine.

but, i can't and won't think like that. epsilons are to be thrown away and discarded.

16:19

"We have to behave with other people as we would want them to behave with us"
  
well, i don't agree with this idea, in principle. rather, i think we need to treat people in a way that is reflective of the way they've already treated us - we should not be naive, and allow people to take advantage us, in the hopes that they may change. they probably won't.

a statement like that coming from somebody that's supposed to be a socialist is actually rather disconcerting; it's an almost literal statement of the hard-right "golden rule", as pushed by backwards idiot christians.

that said, i would want those bar staff to accommodate my request for a larger seating area. by not treating me how i want to be treated, the bar owners are opening themselves up to reciprocal behaviour. it would follow that if the bar owners want to be treated with more respect, then they should treat their customers with more respect and cater to their requests to put the tables together.

if i was in that situation, i would not blame the staff, though. the staff are just doing their job. rather, i would bring the manager over and yell at them, as it's their behaviour that is not reflecting how i'd like to be treated.

in all likelihood though, given the circumstances, i would probably choose to avoid conflict.

here's what you do if bar owners want to get pushy and enforce bullshit laws on you.

1) ask for the manager.
2) calmly and tersely explain that you are taking your business elsewhere for the precise reason that they are enforcing the rules. that way, they know the reason for their loss of revenue; they understand why they're losing business.
3) write an informative review on the company's website that this establishment is enforcing questionably valid rules and if you don't like that to go elsewhere.
4) find somewhere that is more reasonable.
5) tell your friends about the more reasonable spot.

yelling at staff, who are underpaid and overworked, doesn't help.

go after the bar owners, and go after them where it hurts.

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/b-c-premier-calls-restaurant-patrons-idiots-for-abusing-staff-over-covid-19-health-orders-1.5053892

18:08

stated differently: if you're going to treat adults like children, you shouldn't be surprised when they act like it.

18:14

decolonization means dechristianization.

it's not just about saying "they were wrong about heliocentrism and evolution and homosexuality and ..., but they had a sound moral system, and are fixing the problems".

no...

decolonization is dechristianization means overthrowing the entire order, and reversing the system at it's most critical points.

it's not just about leaving the theology behind, or filling in gaps. it has to be a total revolution in thought, to a more enlightened way of seeing reality, as driven by data and evidence.

18:23

the golden rule is garbage.

throw it away.

it's trash.

18:24

for me, as a self-identified european pagan, dechristianization means going back to the old ways, before christianity existed - which was the literal project of the renaissance, and it's flowering in the enlightenment.

for you, it might mean chanting at rocks or something.

but, the point is to throw christianity away, part and parcel, not to try to adjust it to fit modernity.

we don't put combustion engines on horses, and we shouldn't try to put science on religion.

18:28

i mean, you realize that, don't you?

that's how they really get you - that's how they colonize you: they send you to church. it's what colonization is.

and, if colonization is essentially the same thing as christianization (or islamification, in some areas, like the middle east), then decolonization is the same thing as dechristianization (or deislamification).

and, i will assert that you will never truly undo the colonization if you don't address the centrality of religion in the process.

18:36

if you're serious about decolonization, attacking organized religion should really be at the top of your agenda.

18:39

the hebrew nation has produced some great minds. don't get me wrong. some of our most important advances....

but, their religion is quite simply an abomination, and it's offshoots have been, without question, the single greatest retarding force in history.

19:41

we need to get past this.

it will ruin us, if we don't.

the biggest threat to individual liberty has, throughout history, always been religion. that's just going to get worst, until it's finally defeated.

and, in the end, we can place our martyrs in the shrine where they belong, to remind us of our victory over this great threat to our freedom.

19:43

"she sounds like...."

i sound like a socialist.

and, i'd be happy to party like it's paris, 1793.

19:46

ahahahahahahahahaha.

hope it gets him.

https://torontosun.com/news/world/former-u-of-t-prof-jordan-peterson-contracts-coronavirus

22:30

at this point, we should actually be escalating.

if trump wants to pick a stupid fight with canada before the election, make it backfire. make it hurt.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-aluminum-tariff-1.5677036

22:35

i mean, there's a pattern here.

you wanna go, donny? come at me. let's go.

22:37

there's a point where we have the right to get fed up and just bludgeon them.

22:37

how about a major tariff on softwood lumber?

22:38

you have to stand up to a bully, and this bully is currently at half strength - meaning it's a good time to pounce.

so, with the border closed and commerce down anyways, this is the time to hit them as hard as we can, in the hopes that it slaps some sense into them.

22:44

if you don't fight back, if you treat people how they want to be treated rather than how they deserve to be treated, they will just continue to push you around...

22:46

if we're going to make a statement, if we're going to push back, this is the time to do it, now.

22:47

this despotic moron really needs a date at the hague sooner than later.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/saudi-hit-squad-aljabri-1.5676650

22:50

we haven't seen this level of despotism much of anywhere in really centuries.

it's truly alarming...and he's clearly going to cause massive amounts of problems if he's not removed sooner than later.

22:52

a nice precision strike would do the job...

22:54

i mean.

what if they had offed saddam in the 80s?

it would have prevented a lot of problems.

mbs doesn't strike me as having half the brain power as saddam, but he seems to be every bit as horrible. and, when you put together stupidity, power and wealth you get nightmares in the end.

if we can get rid of him now, it's probably a good idea.

22:59

the flip side, i guess, is that if he goes full retard (and he seems to be consistently on the brink), it could put enough strain on this old anglo-saudi alliance of convenience to help break the bond in half. in the end, if what you want is to see the saudi state dismantled like iraq was (and are we not funding them for the same reasons we funded iraq?), letting it play out may be a better course of action than taking him out before it happens.

but, you'd probably save a lot of lives in the long run if you just got it over with and got rid of him now. 

23:03

as it is, it's hard to see how he avoids an eventual american bombing campaign unless he magically grows a brain, very fast.

he's a disaster waiting to happen.

23:05

well, actually, i guess he's a disaster unfolding in slow motion....

23:06

isn't it illegal to bomb a head of state?

i'd look the other way, just this time. call it an exception.

but, what legitimate grounds does the saudi monarchy have to call themselves heads of state? there's no election, no constitution - not even a pretense of democracy. the closest thing they have is a kind of "right of kings" type argument, which has been debunked as nonsense since the end of the dark ages.

so, i'd have a hard time calling mbs a "legitimate head of state"; he just isn't. he's an aristocrat that assumed power, and there's no legitimacy in that.

that's putting aside the fact, of course, that he's only an acting head of state just right now.

23:30

he's really more like a mob boss than a head of state...

23:31

i mean, what is legitimacy?

it's rooted in the ability to demonstrate the public will; that's legitimacy, that's what it means. this guy is just about the literal opposite of that.

and, if he has no legitimacy as a head of state, then removing him from power is to be seen as a part of a legitimate revolutionary process, and not an illegal assassination of a legitimate ruler.

23:34

here's the good stuff, here:
  
The Enlightenment-era British social philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) said that political legitimacy derives from popular explicit and implicit consent of the governed: "The argument of the [Second] Treatise is that the government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed."

23:47

Article 21 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".
  
well?

how do you give the house of saud crime family legitimacy as heads of state, in context?

you can't.

they aren't.

23:50

aug 7

just look at the name of the country:

saudi arabia.

saudi is not a geographic region, it's the name of the ruling family. and, arabia is a peninsula, not a country. the saudi family controls a considerable portion of that peninsula, but not all of it.

so, the actual name of the country literally translates as "the part of arabia under the control of the saud family". it's not south arabia, or central arabia, or the monarchy of arabia or anything. it's an area of land that is owned by the family, who named the fake country after it.

so, that's not a country, that's just a powerful family that owns land - and these people aren't heads of a state, they're mob bosses.

00:00

remember.

 

00:28

k is a really shit drug, and it's hard to stand up for people selling it. what was the other guy selling? was it an opiate? i do support some relaxation of laws around use, but i really don't support relaxing laws around selling dangerous or shitty drugs on the black market; k doesn't kill people directly, it just destroys them as people.

you have to work in china's unique history of westerners bringing drugs into the country into the situation as well.

i've been a little skeptical about the narrative, and it's why i'm not really paying a lot of attention to these arrests. i think that one of them was arrested on a triviality, but two of three arrests are for crimes that....i don't believe in the efficacy of punishment, but i don't have a lot of sympathy for them, and think they really belong in some kind of incarceration and/or treatment program, so long as the charges can actually be demonstrated, which is difficult in the chinese court system. it's so corrupt, that we tend to ignore the possibility of legitimate convictions.

i've been arguing that the huawei case is a legitimate process, and the chinese have no right to get pissed off about it. frankly, i'm not convinced that's not true of the other charges as well, or that the media isn't trying to game this for their own reasons.

sadly, there may also be a component in the canadian upper establishment that actually wants to talk in terms of hostage negotiations, which i find to be revolting on it's face.

so, is it possible that this guy was actually, really selling k in china and got busted? it's entirely plausible, and i'm not going to be the person standing up for him, so long as i suspect that's a likely truth.

if somebody could direct me to evidence suggesting the innocence of any of the three accused, though, that would be useful to me.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/china-sentences-third-canadian-to-death-on-drug-charges-1.5053191

0:55

i'm really ideologically straight-edge, even if i'm not actually in practice.

with the exception of mushrooms, i've actually never done any other illegal drugs. i would probably legit beat the shit out of you if you ever offered me meth or cocaine, and i very well might kill you if you ever tried to get me to do opiates - and then argue self-defence in court. i have no interest in these drugs, no desire to be around people that do them and no patience with people trying to sell it. the day that you offer me drugs of this sort is the day that you're no longer a human being, in my estimation.

i watched an old friend start doing coke in front of me, and i've talked to him maybe twice since. through mutual friends, i later learned he got hooked on it and almost got fired for it. it was just an instant delete, 'cause i'm not going to be the friend that lets you drag me through that. not for a second. not dealing with that. nope; bye.

the only exception to the mushrooms/pot/alcohol triad that i'd ever even so much as think about trying is mdma. the reason i've avoided it to this point is that i know that you can't find it; i think the general understanding on the street nowadays is that molly doesn't even mean mdma anymore, it means meth. if you could get me legit, pure mdma, i'd give it a shot. but, i have zero faith in the market to provide it, and i just don't bother with it.

k isn't going to kill you, unless you accidentally fuck up, but it's going to turn you into mush. if you want those kinds of effects, it's far safer to try lsd.

safe drugs: marijuana. actual pure mdma. mushrooms.

iffy drugs: alcohol. lsd.

stupid drugs: k, meth, cocaine, heroin.

1:30

Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated sXe or signified by XXX or X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco and other recreational drugs, in reaction to the excesses of punk subculture mainstream culture, particularly the culture around popular rock music (ed). For some, this extends to refraining from engaging in promiscuous sex, to following a vegetarian or vegan diet, and to not using caffeine or prescription drugs.

- alcohol? i drink when i'm at concerts, partly to help the bars stay open. i have drank socially for short periods in the past, but i haven't, generally. i've consumed no alcohol since march, but it's just because there aren't any shows. i expect normal alcohol consumption to resume when the shows start back up. there's a good chance that i may abstain entirely until then, however long it takes

- tobacco? i am no fan of tobacco, and have been trying to cut it out entirely for years. i have succeeded, with the caveats of various functions around marijuana, which i'm about to flip over. i could be completely tobacco-free, again, within a few weeks.

- marijuana? this year has been weird, but i generally buy once to twice a year and smoke through it in a haze. i will routinely go weeks or months without it, and i insist on it. i'd like to move to edibles, and restrict it to special occasions. i'm going to need to experiment a bit to figure out dosages, but this has mostly been a christmas thing for me for years and it's not likely to change.

- other recreational drugs? i don't touch them, anymore. at all. i'm too old for mushrooms.

- promiscuous sex? ive been straight-up celibate for years.

- vegan/vegetarian? i've been ovo-vegetarian for long periods, but i learned i need to eat a small amount of meat for iron absorption. i didn't evolve myself, it's not my fault. that said, i'm an advocate of replacing livestock production with insect production, or even test-tube meat. i'd rather get my protein from something that doesn't have a brain; i'd jump at the opportunity to switch. as it is, i mostly eat salami, partly because it doesn't seem like actual meat. i do have a no-raw rule in effect in the house; no uncooked meat is allowed in my living spaces.

- caffeine? lol. i drink a lot of caffeine, and do not want to stop.

- prescription drugs? well, i take hormones, but that's a different kind of thing. it's otherwise very, very hard to get me to take anything a dr prescribes to me. i will rarely even take aspirin, and i get vicious migraines with auras; i will suffer through them, i won't medicate.

so, as you can see, it's an ideological thing....i may not be technically straight-edge, and i wouldn't claim i am, but i am ideologically in agreement with the straight-edge mentality, and i'm about as close to it as you can get, on multiple fronts, without actually being it.

i feel i'm getting more straight-edge as i age, not less.

2:24

does ketamine have therapeutic potential to "cure depression"?

that's hilarious. really.

it seems, somewhat unsurprisingly, that when they give people the drug, they report feeling good for a little while, but, that those feelings wear off after a bit. that would appear to be because they get high and then come down. now, if your definition of a "cure for depression" is getting high to distract you from it, then i guess that fits the definition. frankly, i'm not convinced of the premise that depression is a physical disorder, or at least not up to random experiences that just reduce to reactions to natural variation in hormone levels, and the idea of treating depression with drugs at all strikes me as going about it the entirely wrong way; sure, you could just get high, and feel better for a bit, but you're not actually addressing the issues, or dealing with the problems that have led you to the state of depression.

there may be some caveats, for specific people that are specifically missing the ability to generate, regulate or reuptake certain neurochemicals, which would be the result of some kind of genetic error, and, again, probably mostly random and not inherited in construction; in these people, which would be rare in the diagnosed population, the inability to produce a specific hormone would be a function of faulty body chemistry, and the fact that the drugs are doing it for them is overcoming that particular issue. but, then, why not figure out what the actual transmitter is that they can't produce, and just give them that instead? for these cases, careful experimentation with ketamine may help pinpoint the exact faulty neurotransmitter, but the preferred treatment option in the end is going to be to key in on the actual missing chemical, rather than try to reconstruct it with ketamine by brute force. further, if you're going to do these trials, you should probably use something a little less invasive, like mdma. these drugs all operate using roughly the same pathways, even if the somewhat different results of consuming magic mushrooms is actually the result of your body attacking the delivery mechanism (the mushroom) as a pathogen (which is true, look it up).

so, i can accept some experimental use for ketamine in determining the actual problem hormone in cases where a neurotransmitter issue can actually be shown to actually, really exist.

but, is it a cure?

no.

that's absurd.

3:26

also, i just read through that wiki article on straight edge and it's predictably awful. it looks like some green day fan went through and marked it up, or something.

why did punk go straight edge? what was that about?

while the term straight edge does appear to have been invented by ian mackeye (who also invented emo), and very late (the song was written in 1984, years after the development of an anti-drug mentality in the hardcore scene), it didn't start anything but rather reflected something that already existed. there are earlier examples of jello biafra (too drunk to fuck, drug me) and roughly contemporary examples of henry rollins (drinking and driving) that are pushing broadly anti-drug messaging, and i believe that, like most things in the anarcho-punk tradition, the issue ultimately goes back to crass, who were known to reject drug use when performing, at least.

why, though?

these are the lyrics to a dead kennedys song from 1985/86 that gets the point across:

What's ripped us apart even more than drugs
Are the thieves and the goddamn liars
Ripping people off when they share their stuff
When someone falls are there any friends?

Harder-core-than-thou for a year or two
Then it's time to get a real job
Others stay home, it's no fun to go out
When the gigs are wrecked by gangs and thugs

When the thugs form bands, look who gets record deals
From New York metal labels looking to scam
Who sign the most racist, queer-bashing bands they can find
To make a buck revving kids up for war

....

That farty old rock and roll attitude's back
It's competition, man, we wanna break big
Who needs friends when the money's good?
That's right, the '70s are back

Cock-rock metal's like a bad laxative
It just don't move me, you know?
The music so okay when there's more ideas than solos
Do we really need the attitude too?

Shedding thin skin too quickly
As a fan it disappoints me
Same stupid sexist lyrıcs

Or is Satan all you can think of?

....

The more things change, the more they stay the same
We can't grow if we won't criticize ourselves
The '60s weren't all failure, it's the '70s that stunk
As the clock ticks, we dig the same hole

Music scenes ain't real life, they won't get rid of the bomb
Won't eliminate rape or bring down the banks
Any kind of real change takes more time and work
Than changing channels on a TV set

So why are we so eager to please, peer pressure decrees
So eager to please, peer pressure decrees
Make the same old mistakes again and again

Chickenshit conformist like your parents

===

what's the key line there?

Any kind of real change takes more time and work
Than changing channels on a TV set

the reason that punks attempted to clean up the rock scene is that they were social activists. they looked at the promising movements that came out of the 60s and fizzled out in the 70s and concluded that the reason that it all fell apart was the drug use. in order to reclaim rock music as a political vehicle to institute radical left-wing social change, they decided they were going to have to get the drugs down, first.

and, they mostly all knew that the drugs were coming in from the government as a placation tactic. as social activists, they watched the agents come in and drug up their foot soldiers, making them useless in the fight. and, yeah - that pissed them off.

so, what they were trying to do was take these thousands of kids at the rock concerts and turn them into an anarchist revolutionary force, a kind of industrial reserve army composed of lumpenproletariat; they wanted them to stop getting drunk and moshing at shows and go out and burn down a bank, instead. here's another gem from jello:

Punk ain't no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
If you've come to fight, get outta here
You ain't no better than the bouncers
We ain't trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Ten guys jump one, what a man
You fight each other, the police state wins
Stab your backs when you trash our halls
Trash a bank if you've got real balls
You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
Unless you think

==

that's right - trash a bank. but, put the beer down first - you'll do more damage if you're in control of yourself, and understand what you're doing.

that was the point; that was what it was about.

were they right?

well, i think that a lot of these people, who were much younger then than i am now, were maybe looking at the 60s with some flower-covered glasses; the 60s were vicious, people were getting the shit beaten out of them left and right, and nothing much really came out of it, in the end. was it the drugs that ended the movement? i think there's an argument that it got suppressed the old fashioned way. nixon didn't accidentally win, in the end; nixon won the hippie vote. there was more than drug use underlying the failure, although i'm sure it didn't really help much.

i think the idea that the 70s were such a period of stagnation and reversion is a better argument, though. disco was notorious for being an escape from reality. in that context, jello and the bunch of them were trying to hold up that mirror, to shock people into seeing that their decadence was leading to things like climate change and an eventual nuclear war. that came out of the situationist movement, and is ultimately a type of agitprop.

when punk went mainstream in the 90s, a lot of this kind of evaporated. you can hear remnants of straight-edge messaging in a number of the popular 90s punk-pop bands (offspring, bad religion, propaghandi, nofx, fugazi, etc), but the truth is that when the money started coming in they almost all fell into it, and we're now a generation removed from any memory of it.

so, what is with the narrative at wikipedia? well, that's the narrative you'll read in the history of music sociology course, that teaches you about the centrality of vivanne westwood to punk culture. in this absolute whitewashing of history, punk was not a social movement trying to rip the system down but just a fashion movement, about jewelry. and, there was a promoter named malcolm mclaren that created some fake bands, too, but it's the jewelry that's of historical significance.

that is, they're trying to write it out of history - because they realize that, unlike the hippies, the punks were actually a legit threat to the existing order, if they could have ever got the kids to put down the beer and succeeded in organizing them to fight. jewelry, and kids getting fucked up on airplane glue, are far less threatening topics.

even in the sense that that was true, the punk movement began with crass, and the hardcore scene (as centered mostly in california) was the actual real punk scene, not what happened in the uk with the sex pistols. it was in california that hardcore punk became what we call punk rock, today. there was always a dramatic disconnect between these punk-as-fashion types and the punk-as-movement types, and it manifested itself in the journalism; the punk-as-fashion types were mostly arts students with money, largely english, wrote most of the articles in the mainstream press and eventually ended up morphing into new wave fans, while the punk-as-movement types were mostly working class and self-taught, centered themselves mostly in america, fought hard to control their own means of production and produced their own writing by self-distributing zines and pamphlets, like early labour activists.

so, this idea that straight-edge culture was some kind of conservative backlash....it sounds like what the cia would tell you before they sell you lsd. and, it's probably close to the actual truth of it.

it was a reaction by labour activists trying to generate an actual movement.

what do i think about this today?

well, i'm not sure there are posts about this here, but i have mentioned repeatedly that my moderate embrace of decadence is mostly a function of a lack of activity on the ground. yes, i see the race riots; that's not useful to me. the people are useful, but the messaging needs dramatic altering before the movement becomes revolutionary. i need something class based, that's focused on more important concerns, like climate change and ... . if i show up at the anti-nuclear protest, and it's three white guys smoking a joint and listening to marley, i'd might as well hit the show and have a beer, instead - i'm not getting anywhere when there's no interest on the ground.

if i saw a movement develop, i'd be the first to put the beer down and get to work in building it. right now, it's not there. so, what's the point?

i hope that helps a little in understanding what that was about.

here's some tunes:

1979:

1980:

1981:

1984:

1985:

1986:

4:36

and, surely, if straight-edge punk was a conservative reaction to the liberal norm, the reagan republicans and clinton democrats must have loved it, right?

lol.

no. they viciously tried to shut them down; jello ended up in court on an obscenity trial, and the pmrc showed up to try to censor their lyrics and artwork.

5:02

but, i mean, the idea was always there.

here's a contribution from roger waters (a trotskyist. yeah.), who doesn't like drugs, either:

5:19

after the dissolution of the dead kennedys, jello released a series of records as a guest vocalist for prominent underground acts, perhaps most famously in lard with members of the industrial-punk band ministry.

this comes from an ep he did with a highly seminal early punk band from vancouver, canada called d.o.a. it provides another example of how the formative punk movement viewed "counter-cultural" drug use.

you could study this and write a paper on it.

5:55

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

6:18

ok, here's some lard.

next time we have sex, just pretend that i'm ed meese!

6:31

i've heard roger waters speak of drugs in various terms, but there is actually a broad theme running through pink floyd, from about 1970-1984, of...in hindsight, it almost seems like the band took 15 years to shake off the trauma of watching their best friend, and somebody who was clearly exceedingly talented, turn into a complete idiot in front of them. and, their reaction to that was actually fairly complex - they tried to honour his legacy (while he was still alive. which must have been very confusing and difficult.), they tried to write songs reflecting on the potential outcomes of heavy drug use and they tried to explore themes that, in hindsight, have been interpreted as being a part of drug culture.

but, i've heard roger ask that his music be separated from drug culture - he's not comfortable with that, clearly. and, that would no doubt have to do with the complexities around what he saw happen in front of him.

i'm not sure how roger would reflect on that now, or if he'd want to. i would press him a little. syd's dead now, and so is the keyboard player (richard wright). gilmour was syd's replacement (ok, not really, but sort of). so, roger's views, as an older person, are really of some historical value. roger was there from the start to the end.

what it seems like is that they took a very long time to process it, and you or i can only really imagine the conflicts of feelings and views that must have occurred over the period.

8:07

somebody else that i've known for years is straight-edge, or almost straight-edge, is michael stipe, the singer of rem.

for years, i assumed that was a part of his ian mackeye fetish. and, that is a known fact: michael stipe was known to be very impressed by minor threat, and the bands that came out of it.

but, i learned fairly recently that it was sort of a similar story. apparently, somebody close to him was involved in a drug related fatality, and he just stopped altogether at that point. again, i don't know how he'd reflect on that now.

but, if you look into it, it always seems to be the people most affected by drugs that are most opposed to them; that is, you generally get these pro-drug arguments from people that have never actually done drugs, or known anybody affected by them.

it's the people with the most experience that seem to be the most apprehensive.

that observation ought to count for something.

listen: i've said repeatedly that i don't think drug addicts belong in jail, and that i don't even really support the concept of jail. but, i do support means of intervention to try to get sellers into a different line of work. i'm not naive enough to think i can cut the supply, but i can't in good conscience support removing restrictions to purchase.

whatever the legal regime around the dangerous classes of drugs ends up as, it should be very hard to locate them. harder than now...

8:37

you know, if i thought that was true, i'd be more excited about voting for him.

it's been clear for a long time that trump has very little respect for his audience, which is reasonable - i don't have a lot of respect for his audience, either. but, a side story over the next few months may be how cynical he gets in his contempt.

when biden is a baby-eater, that's when you know trump knows he's in trouble.

i actually would still give trump a lead, based on my analysis of media & polling together, but i'm not going into this in detail, this year.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-says-biden-will-hurt-god-hurt-the-bible-1040799/

10:14