what do indigenous spaniards look like anyways?

history is full of a lot of biases; arab sources push the primacy of arabs in the region, whereas more rigorous sources take into account what was very large scale migration from both germans and jews. but, this actually all happened rather late into history and doesn't really help us unravel the question, much.

i'm going to tell you such a thing doesn't really exist.

the first cities in spain were largely built by one of two peoples. the earliest semites in the region that we know of were the carthaginians, the ancestors of the modern day lebanese who got into a big war with the romans, who then took over the region as a consequence of winning that war. look up hannibal and the punic wars, if you don't know this history - which i find most people don't. if people knew the extent of carthaginian settlement in the region, they'd be less inclined to assign so much influence to the arab settlement, which was in truth both sporadic outside of a small number of settlements and actually mostly berber in composition. the arabs in spain were really recreating an ancient carthaginian maritime empire, by splitting it off from the former roman hegemony, almost in tact. so, the arab influence is generally over-emphasized in the arab sources. all of those j haplotypes aren't berber; it's more likely that they're carthaginian than arab, given that most of the major cities are carthaginian in origin, including cadiz, cartagena (new carthage) and tartessos. barcelona is also thought to be potentially of carthaginian origin.

the other colonies in spain and southern france that existed at the time of the punic wars were greek, although the only one that seems to have survived is the city of marseilles.

red is greek, yellow is phoenician and grey is latin. and, these are the earliest known settlements in the region.

but, if the earliest known settlements in the region are known colonies from people on the other side of the sea, and we can see the phenotypes of these early settlers in their descendants in the major cities of the south of the peninsula today, what did the people that lived there before the colonists moved in look like?

the people that lived there before the greeks and carthaginians moved in were celts, just like the celts in britain and france. they would have spoken a language that is not very similar to but in the same broad language group as gaelic - scots & irish. and, that's vaguely what they would have looked like. the historical record indicates physical characteristics such as red hair and green eyes all the way from spain to austria and beyond, on the northern and western edge of the roman domain.

these people traded with the greeks & phoenicians in a way that wasn't that different than the way that native americans later traded with the french and english - they would bring things like animal pelts or mined metals (including tin.) to the cities, which would be exchanged for more advanced technology, which they would take back to the wilderness with them. the world was bigger then, and they could coexist in that space, and did for quite some time.

but, we know that the celts are not indigenous to the region either, having migrated in from central europe and ultimately from eastern europe and central asia. who was there before the celts?

there were the beaker folk there before the celts, and we think they would have looked something like modern georgians or armenians, given the migration from northern turkey and the southern caucusus region with the spread of farming (even if there was some indo-european admixture by the time of the actual beaker folk, themselves). and, yes - there are megaliths like stonehenge all over spain, too.

but, they weren't indigenous either.  and, we've exhausted meaningful history, and exhausted meaningful archaeology, too.

yet, there are still a people there that we believe predates even the beaker folk, and their neolithic ancestors.

the closest thing to indigenous people in spain are the basques, who are quite light-skinned but generally look a little more like armenians than they do like germans. it's really not known at all how they got there, or if they've always been there, but they must be a remnant of a very old population that survived in isolation in the mountains, much as various caucasian groups have survived in isolation in the caucasus mountains.

here's some basquey looking kids:

that said, there was also a substantive amount of gothic movement into spain near the end of the roman empire, and before the arab invasion. that lasted until 711, when they were defeated by arab forces. again: the arab sources present the situation as though there was an arab state in spain until 1492, but the truth is that it really only took a few decades before they were pushed out of the top part of the peninsula, leaving a series of coastal settlements that took centuries to slowly clean up. the carthaginians and berbers, together, left a much larger footprint.

as you can see, and i did something like this for italy earlier, at any point in time you're likely to get a mix of people in spain. in the historical record, we've always had a mix of semites, indo-europeans and north africans mixing together in this region, and so real world people would have been some kind of mix, pretty much throughout the entirety of history. the result is that spaniards throughout history would have tended towards a brown, even if it's a result of light & dark mixing, more or less perpetually.

but, the people that have been there the longest are the basques, and that's the closest thing to what we can call a native spaniard, at this time.

i once heard chomsky describe angela davis as "reasonable", and she subsequently avoided much of the criticism he'd level at a zizek or a foucault. as much of an icon as he is on the left, he seems to be more of a pragmatist than an idealist (and he'd no doubt whisper-yell at me for saying that, as true as i think it is).

so, she was reasonable enough to organize with.

he's described richard dawkins using precisely the same language.

in the context of the united states specifically, as well as in south africa, her system makes quite a bit of sense; it's a reasonable deconstruction of american or south african slavery. it's when you try to extrapolate it that you end up making a fallacy called generalizing the specific, and that's where i tend to push back.

so, yeah - that framework makes oodles of sense in the specific context of the united states, which is where it was developed, and where it was intended to be applied.

i'd just suggest that you need to be exceedingly careful about extrapolating her ideas beyond that very limited scope, because there's always a history geek around to poke holes in your argument when you try to make that specious jump to generality.

this is your face of colonialsm.

deal with it.

christopher columbus was brown.

we need to start thinking about the christianization of europe as the unwanted, violent colonization of an indigenous people by a foreign culture, in a process that has very strong parallels to the later spanish and portugese (that is, brown people) domination of africa and latin america, who themselves were following a papal regime built strongly on the caliphate, itself modeled on the roman emperors, followed later by french and english merchants (half-colonized white people) looking to control the trade of resources.

so, there's some problems with this picture. frankly, most of it is wrong, because it's following official dates. that wide swath of pink may have been officially christian by the year 600, but that doesn't reflect actual practices by real people.

as mentioned, we have evidence of paganism surviving throughout europe well into the renaissance and beyond. nowadays, when we talk about the inquisition, it is to remind people how stupid and barbaric that christian colonization was in europe, but we don't stop to think that they went on witch hunts because indigenous religion was still extant and vibrant, if underground. we imagine that they were just randomly accusing women of witchcraft, when the evidence rather suggests that in many of the formerly celtic realms at least (british isles, spain, france), they were burning witches because people were continuing their indigenous practices, outside of the sanction of the authorities, who wished to stamp it out. we have weird, choppy narratives of gatherings around groves talking place in the aftermath of the black death, and can only fill in the blanks. we have evidence of sympathetic magic and human sacrifice all the way into the enlightenment. even newton was a known alchemist.

the christians were defeated in the end, and it was a hard struggle that we should be proud about winning; we shouldn't let history assert a false narrative of "christiandom" that never actually existed on the ground. we should celebrate our independence struggle against christianity, instead.

you can add 300-500 years to most of these numbers, if you want a better picture of reality on the ground. but, it's the right way to look at this.

it is even actually more true to say that greek philosophy forms a basis for christian thinking than to suggest that christianity is in some way underlying western institutions, norms and values.

it is a historically, factually, empirically false statement to state that modern europe has substantive christian foundations in any way at all.

there really is no other candidate for an actual christian emperor in europe, besides charlemagne.

and, jesus never said to conquer in his name. that was constantine, not jesus.

in a real and meaningful sense, what conservatives like o'reilly and peterson (and i guess fake nazis like spencer) are doing when they talk about this myth of a christian europe is projecting the fantasy of leo III for a return of the empire, based on christian foundations that no emperor before 476 ever actually had. it's both a revision of a history before dec 25, 800 and a projection of a history from that vantage point of standing in rome on dec 25, 800.

the o'reilly-peterson concept of christian europe is the history of europe as leo III imagined it on that distant saturnalia feast day, but as it never actually happened.

it existed.

we fought hard against it, and we won.

but it was a couple of centuries at most, and it's legacy was not at all enduring.

it was a blip. that's all.

(note: this entry seems altered, and my memory is only able to reconstruct my initial thoughts partially. i can't prove it, but key sections of this do not read off at all like something i would have written, and i recognize i'm only able to partially succeed in reconstructing my initial thoughts. i've at least removed certain phrases that seem entirely uncharacteristic. but, if it seems fragmented, it might be because it is. i've put confusing points where i'm not sure in red.)

"christian europe" as conservatives imagine it did not exist until charlemagne, and ended at the same time as the black death.

it's a few centuries.

a blip.

before that, you had a three-way struggle involving pagans & muslims ganging up on the empire (??), which emerged from the process victorious (when the pope crowned charlemagne emperor, he wasn't fucking around. this was the full return of the empire in complete intent and total scope. it didn't work out, but that was the plan.). europe wasn't simply delivered to german civilization as christian, or something. the germans were viciously anti-christian, and largely settled upon arianism (the idea that jesus was cool and stuff, but fully human) as a compromise with the new system moving up from the south. the late romans never fully converted themselves, either, maintaining things like diana worship in france (and there's evidence of pagan child sacrifice in italy after the year 1000, presumably to ask the gods for favour in the ongoing collapse of society).

so, the first meaningful christian empire in europe was with charlemagne, about the year 800 or so. they tried to change the calendar date and everything.

then, after charlemagne, they started launching crusades to convert people by force, initially mostly against white people. this provoked a retaliation against charlemagne by vikings, who set up in the north of france, and then in the south of italy, before becoming crusaders, themselves. there was something called the saxon genocide that occurred under charlemagne, where he slaughtered the entire saxon aristocracy for refusing to convert. crusades then moved east and north around the north sea, often literally via piracy, through the medium of the hanseatic league and the teutonic knights. berlin was founded roughly the year 1200 by crusaders taking over a slavic settlement, and they just kept going, not meaningfully reaching the baltic/slavic heartland until the year 1500 or so.

by then, the black death had already reshaped the ruling structures in europe, leading to the renaissance and then the reformation and eventually the true ethnogenesis that sunk in during the enlightenment, after all of the indigenous systems had been dismantled, and all of christianity's opponents had been slaughtered. if the idea of a christian europe ever existed at all, it was after the trauma of the black death that it began to fall apart, and not during these revolutionary changes, which came as a consequence of the rejection of christianity, and not vice versa. henry VIII was hardly at the start of a process, but at the end of one.

it is this struggle against latin and roman and christian colonialism that defines an emerging white identity, not the christianity itself, which tried to absorb them and control them and stamp them out.

the parts of europe that were christian were the parts that were brown, not the parts that were white.

and, the way that white people ended up christianized is that brown people showed up with swords and forced them into it.

their concept of history is incoherent.

racists are generally stupid people, and they're wrong in a lot of ways...

that said, i think the article kind of...the argument they're presenting sounds less like richard spencer and more like bill o'reilly, or maybe jordan peterson, this idea that christianity is fundamentally white and european civilization was built on it.

it's a common trope on the regular old right, and it's absolutely wrong to it's core, in every way.

1) christianity is not white in any way. it was invented by jews, popularized by brown middle easterners and then pushed down on the north of europe by italians that were every bit as brown as the jews that came up with the whole pile of bullshit. christianity initially hit it's highest point of popularity in egypt in the late classical period; western europe wasn't christianized for hundreds of more years, and northern and eastern europe weren't christianized until the fucking renaissance. not only is it not the case that europe is christian in culture, but most of europe has no substantive history of christianity before the year 1500 at all.

2) the institutions (legal, political, etc) that exist in europe are roman & german in origin, not jewish or christian. even the papacy is a fundamentally pagan institution. this is a common argument by conservatives, this idea that christianity is at the crux of our legal system. it's just plain out, straight up fucking wrong.

3) the history of european ethnogenesis is long and complicated, but the contemporary concept of europe - human rights, democracy, etc - came out of a total reversal of christian attempts at colonial dominance in europe. the kind of white identity they're hinting at is defined in opposition to christianity, not in coordination with it. it did not exist before the renaissance, and developed largely as a result to reclaim the culture from the christian dark age.

it's not just nietzsche they don't understand, it's the movement of history, in general.

but this is a better takedown of jordan peterson or bill o'reilly than it is of richard spencer.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism

it's a grown ass man using complicated language to ask a series of questions you'd expect from a four year-old.

but, what about the exact claim that nietzsche was literally an idiot? that would require an essay, and quotes to demonstrate the point.

no, i'm not doing that right now. if i do some reviews for the site, one day...

for now, just take note of the fact that his entire ubermensch discussion is essentially wondering outloud why there are still monkeys, if we evolved from them.

he was a complete fucking buffoon.

ok, i'm going to call on monday and see if they're open.

i'm happy to see that they're working on an electronic process, as it could end-around a lot of the problems i've been dealing with around incompetent and/or malicious court staff.

https://www.ontariocourts.ca/scj/notices-and-orders-covid-19-supplementary-memo-august-6-2020/

this is one of the more eye-opening marxist texts.

it's not flattering to engels, but it demonstrates how they saw religion.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/index.htm

it's also instructive to look at what nietsczhe was writing about the potential end of christianity in europe one day, and then look at what engels was writing at very roughly the same time, documenting how christianity had already ended, centuries ago.

we should read engels, instead.

i understand that there are still people alive today that think ending religion is going to make us less moral and lead to some kind of collapse, as though religion hasn't been an irrelevant idea in western culture for over three hundred years, and that period didn't coincide with our greatest advances, socially.

this is the back of an old neubauten disc from the 80s:

they're holding on to a broken column in an already destroyed structure.

it's not even close to being over; it's been over for centuries.

my sweat appears to smell like skunk weed.

that's pretty gross.

like, we can have some subtlety about the right use of terms, sure.

but a term like "christian europe" has it's maximum end point with the french revolution, at the absolute very latest. it's entirely meaningless after napoleon, who was dead before nietzsche was even born.

nietsczhe writing about the consequences of the hypothetical death of religion from mid nineteenth century europe is like somebody standing on the moon and wondering out loud about the potential consequences of heliocentrism.

he was so ridiculously out of touch with the reality that existed around him that it's an absurd waste of time to bother with him.

if you want to have that debate, go back a few hundred years and read voltaire and swift and the lot of them instead, back when the debate actually mattered.

i want to be clear.

i'm not trying to make a declaration that nietzsche was "good" or "bad" which, despite the simplicity of the statement, is usually how this is initially approached.

i'll let you do that for machiavelli, but not with nietsczhe.

nietzsche is actually, historically, entirely irrelevant.

there's absolutely nothing that nietszche wrote about that hadn't already been resolved before the french revolution.

i'm not being facetious.

we have to remember kant, even if it's just to undo him. but, i really don't think there's any value in teaching nietzsche at all, or any place for him in the western canon.

i hate jonathan swift. truly.

i'll admit i like this quote, though:

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

given that truth, it's probably falsely attributed.

the best rebuttal to nietzsche comes from voltaire.

and, fwiw, i think nietzsche was an idiot, too.

the dude lived through the enlightenment, and wrote like he lived through the very earliest, most ignorant stages of the renaissance. everything he fear mongered about already existed 200 years before he was even born.

you'll get more of value out of jonathan swift, as he was at least contemporary to what he was reacting against.

there are actually much better reasons to argue that kant was an idiot than this.

these are euclid's five postulates, which were the very first thing that anybody studying geometry learned, for thousands of years.

1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight lines segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All Right Angles are congruent.
5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two Right Angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.

one of them is considered false in the context of the universe we inhabit, today.

don't look it up. which one is it?

so, a modern mathematician would never think she has the authority to decide if something is true or false, or if it's even decidable.

rather, they would state that if the axioms hold (including the assumptions of the rules of inference, which are usually treated as axioms) then the statement follows.

which doesn't mean it's true. it just means it's consistent.

yes.

our contemporary concepts of academic logic were defined by a handful of autistic people.

to be even clearer....

modern mathematics doesn't even tell you what rules of inference to accept. it can't; it's a limitation in the idea of math, itself. it just simply cannot argue that one rule of inferences is more valid in some imaginary objective reality than any other is, it can only tell you what rules of inference are being used in context, so you understand what is being done.

what i just said is summarized using the term hilbertian, as it is a reflection of david hilbert's dominant philosophical influence on modern mathematics. hilbert's famous catchphrase was:

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

that may be a paraphrase in translation (hilbert mostly wrote in german), but i don't think it's apocryphal.

together, hilbert & godel are the dominant influences on modern mathematical logic. godel was a weirdo that was quite plausibly on the autism spectrum along with einstein and cantor, but hilbert wrote widely and is not particularly inaccessible for arts students. i hear he makes more sense in german....

if you want to get into this more, start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem

mathematical logic can be challenging, but it doesn't require a lot of pre-requisites. i'm actually in the group of people that thinks it ought to be a more widely taken pre-requisite, itself.

to be clear....

in logic, you can't make a false assumption, so long as it's consistent. that is, you can't contradict yourself in the process of making an assumption, so something like 2 + 2 = 5 wouldn't hold (because it's just wrong). but, logic doesn't care about your opinions, it merely seeks to regulate ways that you derive results from them.

i can consequently derive a perfectly coherent logical system from entirely wrong assumptions without ever actually making a fallacious deduction. in that case, if you want to argue with me, we need to have an argument about whether the axioms are justified, not whether i'm producing a bad argument from them.

and, as i've stated repeatedly, leftists are supposed to be good at this; our superior understanding of logic is supposed to be our most powerful weapon against the forces of the right, who operate on religious assumptions of dominance and submission.

fwiw, "no true scotsman" is generally not an actual fallacy, in terms of meaningful logical analysis. it's a fake fallacy, pushed mostly by english majors; logicians aren't going to get upset about arguments of this sort, with caveats for extreme cases.

and, usually, it's the person accusing you of the fallacy that is actually committing an actual error in logic.

ideas have definitions, and there's nothing inconsistent or illogical about insisting that you hold to the core concepts of an ideology if you're going to promote yourself as adhering to it.

regarding scotsmen, you'd have to define what it means to be one, first. if you decided that a scotsman has to be a certain amount scottish, then it's not in any wrong to deny the scottishness of somebody that doesn't fit your definition, as you presented it. we can argue about the definition, and whether our arguments follow from the definition using the proper rules of propositional calculus (if we agree on that system), but we can't have a meaningful debate about an actual assumption. what english majors will generally suggest is that the definition is arbitrary, and the value of their argument may depend on context, but that's not an error in logic; it's not a fallacy, of any sort, and using these arguments is not actually wrong in any way.

with socialism, it's at least supposed to have a meaning about worker control of production, and it's supposed to come out of the writings of karl marx. while this opens a lot of space for dissent, there are certain key components of the system that champagne socialists just can't actually make actual sense of.

so, if your concern is logic and consistency, there's nothing wrong with telling them they aren't socialists; in many cases, there is something wrong with letting a person perpetuate a system that has nothing to do with the words they're using to describe it.

it's useful to take note of james madison's argument for small electoral districts when opining your support for small business over big unions.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

it's divide and conquer.

and, whether intentionally (like madison), or accidentally (like most bourgeois socialists), support for small business instead of big labor is, in truth, just a divide and conquer strategy to keep workers from organizing.

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-10/

progressivism has historically been a conservative reform movement intent on saving capitalism from itself, and has generally been exceedingly racist in the process of doing it. you're in that tradition - you're just not a socialist, and i won't let you call yourself one.

and, again, i won't criticize you if you call yourself a "progressive" and throw all this anti-socialist crap about supporting small businesses out there.

that's consistent with history. that's fine.

so, when you hear people argue in favour of small businesses and then call themselves socialists?

they don't get it.

like, at all.

that's bourgeois, champagne-style socialism, at best - and a conscious intent to subvert socialism for bourgeois aims, at worst.

but, it's mostly actually just ignorance.

those are the kinds of "socialists" that have never read a word of marx in their lives.

in the end, what breaking up big corporations does is slow down the socialization of production, and eventual transition to communism, by eliminating the vehicle in which socialism asserts itself.

that is, of course, why the smarter capitalists are all about it - it's designed to "save capitalism" and lengthen this period of late capitalism.

leftists need to see the truth for what it is and be clear about it.

they agree with me.

sort of.

jacobin does have weird liberal tendencies, too.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/nationalize-amazon-coronavirus-delivery-usps

i don't want to break up amazon to promote competition over the market. that's a liberal prescription.

what i want is to unionize and ultimately nationalize it, to eliminate competition altogether. that is a socialist prescription.

there's no such thing as small business - and certainly no such thing as a small business owner - in a socialist economy, guys.

the whole point is to do away with the bourgeoisie.

i support increases to the minimum wage, but liberals are wrong to fight against the socialization of production, and a lot of self-identified socialists are very confused about the point.

socialism is defined as a system that evolves out of the development of large corporations, not as one that maintains a system of markets driven by small businesses, who will inevitably just retard the process to a fully communist society. there's no future in the bourgeois liberalism of a society built around small businesses.

as a socialist, i support policies to reduce competition (which we call anarchy in production), eliminate markets and increase the labour bargaining power of workers by positioning them in large, industry-wide unions.

so, i'd rather see a unionized walmart (which is a socialist future) where market competition is reduced and workers get huge proportions of the profits than argue in favour of breaking it all up (which is a liberal/conservative free market vision) and telling people to compete over who can sell useless crap more effectively.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/opinion-oates-minimum-wage-1.5676264

hey, the planet will still be worth saving in twenty years.

your grandmother won't be. at all.

unless you mean "saving micro-nutrients".

it's always important to take time for the classics.

orwell & klein were/are leftists, clearly.

fwiw, atwood has historically described herself as a 'red tory', which is a peculiarly canadian term that refers to somebody that is more or less a modern democrat. in canada, it refers to somebody that is kind of an old-timey tory, and opposes the neo-liberal tendencies in the contemporary conservative party, but that would position her several buses of school children to the left of somebody like joe biden.

it's also inexact. while the premise of red toryism has a concept of social liberalism underlying it, people that call themselves red tories today are oodles more socially liberal than any historical tory ever was.

so, she's far more moderate than the other two, but her point is no less cogent.

a critical reading list right now includes

- orwell, 1984
- klein, shock doctrine
- atwood, handmaid's tale

you should have read all of these by the time you turned 15.

you still have time. turn off the fucking tv, and spend a weekend with some classics.

look at the world around you.

did all of this fascism stop the virus?

the answer is that, no, it did not.

and, in the end we will have both the virus and the fascism they're bringing in, as they capitalize on the fear that the media is spreading.

unless we stop it.

the only thing to fear, is fear itself.

they're the new mccarthyists.

and, this is the new anti-communism, and every bit as irrational.

have you no shame?

you should just all join your local police enforcement agencies.....that's basically what you're doing, anyways....

i want to see a powerful left-wing movement develop that wipes away capitalism forever.

but, these people in front of me are a bunch of fucking idiots: easily manipulated by the worst arguments you could imagine, and under total statist control in their behaviour.

when your anarchist backlash involves handing out government health propaganda, you've lost the plot entirely.

i want to see people with signs walking through the street that say things like

REASON OVER PASSION

or

SCIENCE DEFEATS FEAR

that is the movement i would support.

as it is, you're really prioritizing the profit of plastics companies over the health and wellbeing of the planet.

because, that's what's up next - dealing with all of this unneeded waste.

this idea that opposing unscientific restrictions that will fail to stop the spread of this virus is about putting profit over people is retarded, and you're a moron to talk like that. it demonstrates the deepest level of ignorance, across the issue - you don't understand anything that's happening in front of you.

i don't oppose these restrictions because i want to maximize profit, and will gain nothing financially from re-opening the economy to the full extent.

rather, i'm just frustrated that i have a government that is forcing me to do stupid things that science says have almost no chance of actually working.

the calculation is neither about profit nor is it about people, what it's about is putting reason over fear.

sorry, i want to clarify the last post.

it was initially posted as:

i guess you might experience it differently, but i'd advise rolling with a raspberry-dominated mixture if you really want a good perk with your thc.

i have changed that to:

i guess you might experience it differently, but i'd avoid rolling with a raspberry-dominated mixture if you really want a good perk with your thc.

...which is what i intended to type.

nope. slept. s'ok, i'm up now.

before i showered last night, i had one raspberry cigarette with the overpriced mix just to see what it does, and the effect was truly mild in isolation, but certainly on the "feeling a little mellower than normal' spectrum. i would not describe the feeling as being 'high', just a little relaxed.

nonetheless, it may have contributed to the sleepiness.

i should have known better, but this was supposed to be the "awake" blend, too. so, price is meaningless as a market mechanism in the marijuana era, and so are basic advertising claims, apparently.

if this was some little store full of ignorant hippies operating on the market, i'd no doubt shrug it off. but, when you take this kind of thing from a very strictly controlled government entity and combine it with some other things - like the anti-science covid response, or the brand new agrifood-industry-written food guide - it really clarifies where science and facts exist in the minds of the existing ruling party, which is really just as a way to trick people into buying garbage.

i guess you might experience it differently, but i'd avoid rolling with a raspberry-dominated mixture if you really want a good perk with your thc.

i don't know why it took so long to figure this out, though.

boris. russian spy.

like, obviously.

do you think he'd have gotten elected with a larger or smaller member if his name was boris jerkoff?

also: don't test this thing on laika.

test it on boris johnson, instead. good russian name - proper test subject.

it's easy to guess why boris' grandfather changed his last name from johnson-off.

i bet sputnik v would last longer in orbit than the previous iv, if given a chance.

then again, let's hope sputnik v isn't like rocky v - old and weak and past it's prime.

it's very silly, but it gets the point across - the russians are back to not wanting to be our friends anymore.

your cat's gonna get it from sleeping in your box of dirty clothes.

your dog's gonna get it from sniffing your crotch.

your bird is gonna get it, then call you an asshole for it.

*sqwawk*. shoulda social distanced. asshole got everyone sick. *squawk*.

your fish is gonna get it from being sneezed on, your gerbil is gonna get it from overexhaustion and your mom is gonna get it from coming over and feeding all of the animals, and, btw, you left the door open again.

i don't think it's so crazy to think the virus has gotten into the food supply, and fish seem particularly easily infected because we dump untreated sewage in waterways all around the world.

we know it gets in the sewage, and we know there's fish swimming nearby. therefore....

with chickens (who should really be called chickii in context), it seems easy enough that they'd get it from feed, or maybe somebody handling them. that's not a difficult thought; that's obvious, and you have the burden of proof to demonstrate why it can't happen, if you're convinced.

further, if the thing gets frozen quickly, it could easily, if a number of unlikely things align, thaw out on your hands, thereby getting you sick. chances are higher that the virus will actually survive the freezing process, but will dissolve as it melts.

it's another thing to think you can catch the virus by eating infected but cooked flesh, which is probably wrong.

you should be wearing gloves and taking proper precautions with uncooked chicken, regardless.

but, is it possible? i'd say it's highly likely, at this stage.

so, am i something close to normalcy?

i've eaten, cleaned and showered. i have a few loads of laundry left...

there's a background skunk odour, but i can't order the source, yet. it does not smell much like what i was smoking over the last few weeks, so i'll have to keep an eye on that.

we'll have to see if i get anything done tonight or if i just fall asleep, but i'm back in my normal naked sitting position in bed, ready to rocket through what's left of this stuff.

normal, recreational marijuana use actually increases anxiety, though, by increasing cortisol levels. that's right - smoking pot boosts the amount of stress hormones that your body produces.

look it up.

so, as i'm feeling less anxious even after smoking pot, it just demonstrates that the testosterone suppression is working quite well.

i'll get a blood test to measure it, soon.

to recap, or for those tuning in.

i was taking 100 mg of cyproterone (2x50, daily), and my testosterone levels were almost immeasurable. but, i started watching the levels tick up a little, until it got to 0.8 in the spring. now, this is still very low (your mom probably has way more testosterone than that), but i've seem it come up over the last few years from 0.1 to 0.2 to 0.4 to 0.8, so i got scared that it was wearing off.

i would not survive very long if i ever had to deal with a full return of testosterone.

my doctor tried to prescribe me a different drug, but i looked into it and realized it was less effective at suppressing testosterone, and came with increased heart complications. so, i cancelled that different drug and doubled my dosage of cyproterone instead. the doctor pushed back on this, but i did it anyways, and i'm happy about it. i could still increase the t-blockers by a good bit, but i want to see a drug test, first.

so, i'll need to get a blood test soon, bring it to the doctor and say "look, it went down, and i feel 1000x better, so i did the right thing in ignoring you. please update the rx."

what about the t-blockers?

i am indeed due to go wander out to chatham-kent to find some more estrogen fairly soon, but i've now been on double the dosage of cyproterone for two months, and how do i feel?

i have, indeed, been experiencing some of the more positive effects of testosterone suppression, including softer skin and reduced anxiety. however, marijuana tends to have a negative effect on my hygiene decisions (like many people, it tends to make me dirty and lazy), so it won't be until i clean myself up a little that i'll be able to make a more informed analysis.

i got my funding from the ministry for the orchiectomy, finally, at least. now, all i have to do is find a doctor willing to actually take them out, so i can burn them in a ritual sacrifice to demeter....

i admit that i'm susceptible to ether-like theories about some kind of medium in space, even if that structure is in the form of multiple dimensions. so, these strings might actually be intersection points. even watching the discrete number of options develop indicates some kind of underlying structure...

i don't want to exactly say that they'll prove einstein right in the end, because he clearly admitted that he was baffled and he didn't ultimately provide a pluggable answer. but, i think that einstein was right to be skeptical about what he was hearing, at least, and that the process to really understanding this properly likely lies in retracing his steps around the issue.

so, what is the deal with entanglement?

i'm going to wait to see what he says, but my fundamental position is as follows.

currently, the theory around entanglement is that distance is irrelevant. that's not quite an assumption; it's built on observation. but, it remains a giant leap to go from "we've never observed a distance great enough to break the entanglement" to "the particles are forever entangled, regardless of how far apart they end up.".

my intuition, my basic position, is that we will eventually observe a distance so great that the entanglement breaks, and we won't really understand what's happening until we get there. this could end up being a very large distance, granted, but we have to find a time lag before we can make sense of it.

it can't just happen simultaneously, that's incoherent.

bell's inequality allows for non-local solutions, and it's probably the only actual way out of this. if we've learned anything at all from the quantum physics fiasco, it's that you have to do the fucking experiment, so i'm not going to predict a breakdown in locality.

but, it's the only way out.

so, the drugs are gone and we'll be back to normalcy for a few weeks, at least. i don't see any reason to leave the house until the end of the month. and, we'll try this again when i've eradicated all of this disgusting tolerance, and with a better medium than nicotine/tobacco. let's hope it works out better on the second try.

in the end, it was the low quality of the pot that established itself, which served to clarify the point - the store has a fairly wide selection (they're selling hash now, too), but it's hard to find high dosage strains and the price doesn't seem to have much of an effect on what you actually get. i kind of got used to it, and i enjoyed the summer for what it was, but the pot is garbage, and i'm trying to mix it up like tea for a reason.

the example i used before was lettuce or peppers at the store. when you walk into a grocery store, you at least have a choice between the pre-shrink-wrapped peppers in the plastic wrapping, or the fresh peppers on the shelf. you know that the fresh pepper is better, but maybe you're cheap or lazy, which is what the shrink-wrapped pepper is for.

some people, like me, will walk out of a store if there's no fresh produce, if you're stuck with the shrink wrap. that's what this feels like.....

i want to be able to walk into a store and pick out fresh product off the shelf, and this won't survive in the long run if that isn't allowed for.

what it's done, for me, is drive me to edibles as a first option. i mean, that's at least standardized, right? there's actually 2 mg in the piece of chocolate, and you have a good idea of what you're getting and how to adjust to it.

i've been working over the summer, i don't want to claim i haven't been. but, it's been dry, and i've retraced my steps repeatedly. as mentioned, i have final final updates being worked through right now; that has been stagnant this weekend, i'll admit. so, i'll be back to that soon, and i want to push through it very quickly.

for today, i'm going to be doing laundry, tidying up loose garbage that's been building up and working on cleaning myself up substantively. which means i'm watching the quantum entanglement lecture for the first time in a while....

i just didn't eat at all for days over the summer, but i've got a bowl of pasta in front of me just right now :)

(one more left after that before the switch to a total eggs diet)

of course, the real fake leftists that are out there pushing for market liberalization in sex work are in truth always fat old men. that's the real benefactor, here.

and, they don't see anything wrong with it.

"well, what's wrong if i make a proposal? i put the money down. what's wrong with that?"

in an actual socialist society, that woman would call you a worthless piece of shit for asking, and rip you a new asshole for tarnishing her dignity as a free individual, in the process.

for, she would know that she does not need to survive by selling her labour - that she is free from that oppressive social relation.

and, freedom from that social relation is the entire point, it is why socialists struggle, why they are what they are, why they fight for what they fight for.

so, when you hear people call themselves communists or socialists, or leftists (i'll accept "progressive", because it's a fundamentally conservative and fundamentally capitalist label), and then argue for market liberalization around prostitution...

i wouldn't suggest doubting their commitment to the marketization of sexual intercourse. they seem to be making that point crystal clear.

just don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, and try to trick you into thinking this is a philosophy of the left.

look them in the eye and call them the ancaps and neo-liberals that they really are.

the whole point of socialism is to abolish prostitution, in the form it exists in wage slavery.

that's why it exists; that's why we invented it.

no, i...

i don't understand prostitution, and i don't pretend i do. i'm revolted by actual consensual sex; the idea that you could ever stimulate actual, real consent in me by waving money at me is....the idea that there are people like that out there in the world that actually live that way makes me want to vomit.

but, i understand socialism, and there's simply no room for prostitution in a socialist framework. why would anybody trade money for sex in a reality where needs are always met? it just wouldn't & couldn't exist, as there would be nobody selling. and, frankly, i'd actually lean towards the idea that people that engage in truly consensual prostitution with no need to sell their labour for necessities have mental health issues and belong in hospitals.

so, i'm not going to sit here and pretend i understand prostitution; i don't get it. i never have and i probably never will.

but, i understand socialism, i understand that facilitating prostitution is just about the literal opposite of socialism and i understand that a truly socialist reality, that is a truly free reality, would treat consensual prostitution as a mental health issue.

as a socialist, i'm consequently more concerned with how to ensure nobody is ever forced into prostitution than i am in ways to legalize it or profit from it - as a rights issue, a labour concern.

if you follow this space, i've done as best a job i can trying to separate between this fake left that exists in the american mainstream and what socialism actually is.

they can say what they want, but i remain convinced that it just wouldn't happen in a truly free society.

so, the posts are coming through, but i've been noticing weird typos that...

this is a segment of a post that i recently posted and am going to repost shortly:

so, i'm not going to sit here and pretend i understand prostitutes; i don't get it. i never have and i probably will.

that should actually say:

so, i'm not going to sit here and pretend i understand prostitutes; i don't get it. i never have and i probably never will.

these kinds of typos have been occurring frequently enough to make me wonder, but how can i prove that?

what i'm doing instead is deleting and reposting posts that look altered, rather than editing them.

the argument that prostitution is just work is fundamentally the same argument that ancaps use to argue it's fine to sell yourself into slavery.

it's the most extreme articulation of capitalism that exists.

the "sex work is work" group are not socialists, not libertarians, not anarchists, not leftists...

leftists violently oppose all forms of wage slavery.

rather, they are market fundamentalists, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists & neo-liberals.

this is one of those issues where the american "left" is rooted in a contradiction in terms; if you read marx or bakunin, they actually repeatedly attacked capitalism by comparing it to prostitution, in pretty much direct opposition to those arguing for increasing market liberalization, as championed by the contemporary bourgeoisie.

skepticism of prostitution is actually perhaps the one thing i can agree with Black Women about, and it's because i'm a leftist, rather than despite it. i really wish that people that would support normalizing sex work would identify on the libertarian right where they belong and stop pretending they come from leftist traditions, because they really don't.

that said, the smarter Black Women know that reducing participation in prostitution to cases where it is truly and sincerely consensual is not likely to be accomplished using authoritarian means. the most effective way to ensure that people do not become trapped in prostitution is not to criminalize it but to ensure that they are always offered realistic ways out.

so, i mean, it's fine to write an article like this, but it really isn't about the left or left-wing politics in any way, but is rather about a side of neo-liberalism, of market fundamentalism, of anarcho-capitalism & the libertarian right, that harris and Black Women, in general, tend to be a little skeptical of - which is something that i'm in some solidarity with, to be truthful.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kamala-harris-sex-workers-joe-biden-vice-president-1043941/

like so many other things, our concept of leadership has been so dismantled by capitalism that we barely even understand what it means anymore.

we tend to reserve this term, Leader, for people that try to control crowds by repeating what the crowd said back to them. but, such a person is really truly a follower of the crowd, just a follower that seeks to get out in front of the crowd, and let the crowd determine it's direction.

a leader is not somebody that carefully follows public opinion in an attempt to exert influence or control (and, generally, this approach suggests a desire for control for the sake of it), but rather somebody that effectively articulates positions that are unpopular, and in the process successfully changes public opinion to better align with theirs. so, leaders are always going against the crowd, rather than with it. that's something i really look for in determining who i think is worth listening to - are they leading by advancing their own agenda, or following by letting the crowd determine one?

so, do raspberry leaves "increase your high"?

i would say they will increase your drowsiness, when smoked in the mixture i purchased. but, there's reason to think it might actually work as advertised, if the caffeine in the mix was stronger - or the test subject wasn't a 110 pound transwoman.

if your bmi is a bit higher, that mix (cost aside.) might actually be what you want. i need more caffeine in it, if i want to actually enjoy that particular drug cocktail.

i want to smoke a joint and actually get high for the night, not just fall asleep like a fucking retard.

i've read some other reviews of the raspberry as being overpowering, so it's not particularly surprising that it may be knocking me out. it's more how overpowering it is that is surprising me, but, as mentioned, i don't know how much that has to do with cutting out the nicotine after an accidental two-month relapse; these feel like normal "quitting smoking" feelings, so i don't know.

i know that it's less that the raspberry is unpleasant and more that i'm having difficulty taking control of it - it's just knocking me out. so, smoke with less raspberry? that doesn't make sense. if i smoke with less raspberry, i'm using more pot. like anything else, i'll need to experiment.

but, what i've decided is that any final decisions on mixtures are going to have a much higher caffeine content. that's the other option - forget about carefully dosing the raspberry leaves with the marijuana, and just overrun it all with the caffeine from the green tea, instead. that way, any increased potency brought on by the raspberry actually gets sustained.

the mixture i bought gets it's caffeine from gotu kola, and it's just not working. the green tea will at least be more powerful.

again: i want to move to edibles for normal, infrequent use. depending on how this goes, it could mean no more head caves - or no more smoking for head caves. the december head cave may involve eating chocolate in regular intervals for three weeks, instead.

but, any future spliffs are going to need more caffeine, one way or the other. tobacco is a stimulant, and the available strains seem designed mostly to encourage sleeping; it needs to be cut with an upper, or it's just going to turn you into a useless eater.

that's my lesson from the weekend, as difficult as the data currently is to interpret.

i am, overall, exhausted right now, and looking forward to a return to normality. that was not something i would normally do, and not something i really wanted to do. but, the other choice was an impossible summer for everybody, due to these unnecessary border restrictions.

the weekend has also been weird due to sitting right on a trough, making the forecast go up and down; we didn't get to 30 yesterday (it got yucky and cold at peak afternoon, instead), we might not get there today and the summer, overall, is winding down early, with sub-30 degree temperatures across the board for the rest of the month. the forecast for monday is a chilly 24 degree high. brrr.

so, windows are going to be closing as i try to find ways to generate heat in the cooler weather. and, i'm going to be getting very aggressive about getting the smoke out of here - or launching legal action to get out  - very quickly.

that was unusual, and i'm not normalizing myself to a reality of living in saturated carcinogenic poison. i am trying to lead by example in showing people where to smoke - away from residential spaces, and in parks and other places that people don't actually live, instead.

again: i was going to sleep all weekend anyways as i cut the nicotine out. how am i feeling?

that expensive mix i bought at the store is a little heavy all around. i am repeatedly falling asleep (which i don't like) and my throat is not feeling particularly good, either. there's too many factors here to try to draw any conclusions, other than that smoking every day for two months is something i am unlikely to ever do again.

what i will say is that i very quickly started smelling the smoke, but i don't know at this point if it's second hand from upstairs or third hand from myself.

regardless, i've got a very small amount left before i stop to let my thc levels come down to zero before i try the edibles. massive laundry and cleaning run down here is inevitable.

and, if i come out of this longer-than-normal, and maybe even last-ever, headcave and realize i'm dealing with second hand smoke in my unit, i'm going to get very pissed off, very fast.

the democrats should just publicly support an amendment to the constitution that allows for citizens to run for office. that would be massively popular.

fines for not wearing hockey gear in public include two minute, five minute and ten minute penalties.

four cases today, one of them via community spread.

scary stuff, windsor. these alarming numbers should help justify the new laws requiring that hockey gear, preferably goaltending position, be worn at all times, even when sleeping.

https://windsorite.ca/2020/08/4-new-cases-of-covid-19-in-windsor-essex-as-of-friday-weekly-epidemiological-summary-presented/

when you criticize albertans for the uncaring, almost psychopathic disinterest that they have for the well-being of the planet, they give you a line about how the economy was designed this way and they're trying harder and give them a break...

it's bullshit.

and, these people need to be exposed for what they are, opposed as what they are and removed from power via a good old fashioned populist uprising.

it's 2020, alberta. coal? really?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/gina-rinehart-hancock-prospecting-grassy-mountain-1.5685824

ok, let's hope that that was the extent of the initial crash and that i can stay awake for a few hours as i do final updates of all of this stuff.

i've been sleeping almost continually since wednesday night.

i will not be wearing a mask when i am out - nor will i be wearing one in the court room after i sue you for arresting me over it.

this is a battle worth fighting in court; a disease with a negligible fatality rate and almost no local transmission can hardly be grounds to infringe upon my personal liberty, and i would expect the court to uphold the matter and compensate me for my hardships under the direction of statist tyranny.

the mayor and city council need to immediately resign; this law is of no force.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/mayor-drew-dilkens-issues-strict-new-order-for-wearing-masks-inside-public-spaces

i think a lot of liberals and leftists have been reared into a system of thought that is going to make it very difficult for them to identify who their opponents actually are, and this will result in them making foolish alliances with groups that seek to undermine and trivialize them. that's something we're going to see develop in the upcoming decades, and it's an open question how canadians react to the indigenous liberal cabinet minister that signs away treaty rights, or how americans react to the black woman that throws away roe v wade - these are just examples of how identity can be utilized against the population in ways that it currently seems to be being trained to be compliant to, rather than skeptical about.

the political alliance between white liberals and the brutally oppressed descendants of black american slaves, who needed something resembling freedom before they could join a political movement, was necessary and everybody that was involved in it should be proud about it. but, everything dies, in the end.

i want to be clear here - i'm not actually leveling any of this at kamala harris, who i'm interpreting more as an actress than as a policy maker. kamala harris is a black woman, but she is not a Black Woman and does not represent Black Women. that would have been your karen bass, who is maybe a better representation of the archetype i'm building up.

but, that also makes her particularly pliable, if it's decided that she will represent Black Women, anyways. and i don't get the impression that she's likely to push back, if it gets in the way of her personal ambition.

so, it's a perfect recipe for disaster - a token, pandery candidate that is going to run into all kinds of problems trying to represent a group that she neither understands nor represents and be pressured to do things that she doesn't actually support in order to represent that group. what kamala harris actually represents is the cosmopolitan upper class in the liberal elite, where everybody is culturally white, regardless of their genetic or geographic background. but, she's not going to stand her ground - she's going to cave, instantly. and, hence, she becomes the Black Woman without being one. and, what next? abortion may not be on the top of the list, but you may want to stock up on vodka.

black women, as a statistical grouping, also tend to hold to a lot of negative stereotyping about queer peoples - more so than in the general population.

people are individuals, of course.

but, as a statistical group, there's a lot of reasons to be very wary about putting Black Women in charge of much of anything.

there's a lot of overlap, in fact, between the political positions of white evangelicals and black women.

moving forward, the dominant opponents of abortion as a choice are not going to be white evangelicals, but rather black women.

it will not be a white man that takes away your abortion rights, in the united states.

it will probably be a black woman that signs the legislation, in the end.

so, i was always going to be sleepy this weekend, as i push through the physical nicotine addiction. i know how to do this - you sleep for five, six, seven days and then it's done. this much, i understand, and can work through. the side effects range from manageable (dehydration, sore throat) to brutal (violent, sweaty defecation events that are not quite describable as diarrhea).

but, i'm a little taken aback by just how quickly my urge to smoke a marijuana & raspberry leaf spliff absolutely crashed, indicating how right i was - i wasn't smoking 10 joints a day because i wanted the thc, i was just smoking very expensive and very unhealthy cigarettes. i've had that spliff sitting out for hours, now. if there was any tobacco in it, i'd have inhaled it hours ago.

so, that's some reinforcement that leaving pot in the cupboard won't be so hard, without the tobacco, after all, at least so long as i have some tea leaves. i was worried that even having the pot in the house at all could just be an excuse to get more cigarettes. maybe that's overreacting, or maybe i'm being naive.

was this predictable? well, i didn't really make a choice. it was around the solstice and i was headcaving, and then all of a sudden it's mid-august and i've been smoking tobacco every day for two months without stopping to think about it. oops. the answer is that, yes, this was predictable, but i didn't think it through, so i didn't make that prediction. i should have...

i'm not really taking the purgative properties of raspberry leaves very seriously, even if i am taking the estrogenic content seriously. so, this will be the mix that i leave in the cupboard - raspberry leaves & green tea. & we'll see if i can drop an 1/8th in there and forget about it, too.

for now, though, i'm going to smoke through what's left of this a little bit more slowly, as i pull myself back off the nicotine, hopefully for the last time. right now, i'm at least confident in, if not content about, what i've learned about the physical plant. when i was a smoker, the pot had no pull to it, because i'd just have a smoke whenever i wanted one. it's only been since i quit smoking that this has seemed different, and it seems to be nicotine-related; taking the nicotine out of the js entirely eliminated any craving i had for them. so, the lesson is rather clearly that i cannot have nicotine in the house, and cannot continue to use it for marijuana, as a non-smoker. i need to forget about that relationship, entirely.

that means that the next experiment will be with edibles, but i'm going to give it some time first, as i want to clear the thc out of my body to kind of normal background levels. this could take upwards of six weeks (i'll see how i feel), so those eds could be sitting there until october, and i could be on the brink of a month of approximate normality.

the medical uses of nuclear power tend to get forgotten in these discussions. they are themselves a reason to keep some small reactors online.

the easy answer to this question is actually really easy - this simply isn't a solution to the problem. the life cycle of uranium, which requires utilizing huge amounts of propane for drilling and transport from remote areas, is already actually relatively inefficient. but, the uranium we will be able to access will get less and less potent over time, making it less and less efficient. if we went full-on nuclear, the future we'd end up with is one where the oil is carefully monitored to ensure there's enough left for drilling, and the decreasing potency of the uranium leads to constant brownouts. uranium is really in the same category as hydrogen, in that it is simply not an answer to the problem. rather, uranium is a particularly vicious algorithm for dystopia.

but, we need those isotopes, amongst other things.

nobody ever talks about fusion anymore either, which is maybe reflective of the state of it. it can't be more than twenty years, right? fusion is an answer to the problem, at least, but.....

likewise, if we could find an accessible anti-matter reservoir, right?

these subtle discussion around nuclear are really last century.

the reality is that it just ain't gonna work.

it was a fool's errand to ever think you could stamp out a virus like this.

and, in the end, they all always stamp their feet on the ground and yell into the sky and cry to their advisers that their authority is not being obeyed, like the fools that they are.

fools.

https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/08/13/bc-john-horgan-enforcement-covid-19/

recent posts, including unbroadcast posts:

aug 9

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.

13:07

post not broadcast:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/08/theres-underlying-assumption-in.html

13:09

aug 10

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

5:42

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5:43

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 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 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 latin 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.

6:41

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 influence 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.

8:08

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8:09

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.

8:45

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.

8:57

interesting google search hit.

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

9:08

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9:09

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/

9:50

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9:51

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

10:35

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10:36

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

10:51

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10:52

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

10:53

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10:54

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

11:15

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11:16

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

12:32

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.

13:50

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13:51

aug 11

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

3:48

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3:49

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/

4:04

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4:05

the rate of community transmission is lower in canada because it's had less time to spread freely without restrictions.

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, 99.8% 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/

11:09

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11:10

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.

11:29

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.

15:41

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

15:42

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15:43

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.

17:44

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.

22:21

aug 12

i find that when this topic is discussed it tends to treat the melting glaciers as an infinite input.

if the concern around the shifts in the gulf stream are mostly long-term in scope, it seems reasonable to point out that greenland will eventually run out of ice, allowing the other processes that are increasing the temperature of the ocean to take control. even if the gulfstream collapses entirely, the general effects of sea temperature increases in the long run could lead to broadly warmer oceans in europe.

in theory, yes - this is something to be concerned about. where i am, the weather is often determined by a struggle between warm atlantic ocean temperatures and expanding polar air masses, the latter phenomenon being a mostly solar process. so, we also rely on warm atlantic temperatures for a lot of the heat in canada, especially during the parts of the year when we are tilted away from the sun.

but, from what i can see in front of me, what's actually happening is that the effects of global warming further south in the atlantic are dominating ocean temperatures off of the coast of florida, and it's the latter process that seems likely to be dominant, long to medium term.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/florida-current-is-weaker-than-it-has-been-in-over-100-years-oceans-climate-change

8:49

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8:50

i mean, we'll see what happens.

that's a struggle in nature playing out in the atlantic ocean in our lifetime - the cooling effect of melting glaciers vs. the warming effects of increased oceanic and atmospheric carbon concentrations. when you dump hot and cold into the atlantic at the same time, how is equilibrium eventually reached?

8:52

remember.

there's always a counterforce.

9:09

all your kids are gonna die.

(not really)

9:41

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9:42



10:03

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10:04

so, i've now done a final final final update for those published posts, which required adding many posts to the travel blog and fixing a number of typos in the other blogs.

i'm confident that i've exhausted the source, now.

so, i'm going to fight with the mocrosoft servers for a bit in updating these files and post an update when it's done...

i'm following through with a process, and it is time consuming, but it is necessary. i wll be back to recording as soon as i'm done with this round of documentation, and it is nearing an end. slowly.

10:41

so, we're coming to the end of the tobacco - i've got a few smokes left, and i'm going to need to make a choice in the next few hours about what the best way to proceed is.

so, let's recall how this happened.

in the middle of june, after they announced the border closure for the summer, i decided that i wasn't going to spend the summer inside yelling at the neighbours to stop smoking. while i have engaged in all smoking a good distance from the house, the fact that i've been smoking means i can't smell my neighbours, and i consequently haven't been pissed off about it. so, i bought a quarter with the intent of "headcaving", which is what i call my habit of biyearly marijuana use [celebrated at the summer and winster solstices, at the end of june and the end of december]. this headcave was a little different, in that i attempted to gear it around rolling tobacco rather than cigarettes, so that i'd have an understanding of what proportions we're dealing with in a legalized reality.

i learned that you can get about 3/4s of an ounce from a 50 g pouch of tobacco, which lasted me about a month. once i'd smoked through the first pouch, i decided that i'd buy another quarter along with a second pouch of tobacco and put it aside for sporadic usage.

it was partly due to the weather that i found myself smoking right through it, but in the process i started to realize that i was becoming re-accustomed to smoking tobacco, which i had quit at the start of 2016 on a habitual basis. i am confident that i will not go back to this habit, but i had to catch myself and realize i was slipping.

so, i decided that it was not a good idea to just leave it in the cupboard like i leave alcohol sitting around for months at a time because my previous habits of binge smoking marijuana combined with the extremely powerful addictive properties of nicotine meant it was increasingly unlikely that i would just leave it alone; i have no meaningful urge to randomly get drunk, and was hoping leaving marijuana sitting around would be just as easy, but it became apparent to me that if i leave something smokeble in the house, it's going to get smoked, as an excuse for the tobacco use.

at that point, i still had a lot of rolling tobacco left, so i decided that i'd smoke through it and then try and figure out some way to adjust. i've looked at tobacco replacements (i can probably get raspberry leaves at the bulk barn), but i decided to take a chance on some edibles at the beginning of august, that i have not touched yet. i've got four 2 mgs and two 5 mgs to experiment with.

i primarily went through this process to get rid of the tobacco, which is now gone, and i definitely do not want to buy anymore. but, the weather is giving me one more nice weekend, so i need to weigh whether i want to spend a weekend trying smoking pot with something else or spend it drinking a lot of coffee, instead.

three smokes left, and that's it. edibles are legal. i have alternatives to try to smoke with, and easy access down the street. there's no longer any excuse - this is it.

i've made major advances on this, but the pot was really the last thing.

i'm stoked to move on.

14:47

man, i'd trade morneau for carney in a minute. but, you'd have to throw in a shit load of draft picks if you expect the universe to give you carney for morneau, especially given that morneau's salary is so much bigger.

yes, morneau is a little out of his league; canada has some high level experts floating around out there, and this is a good time for them to step in, where they can.

if carney wants the job, morneau should graciously stand aside.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-morneau-finance-minister-future-1.5682567

22:52

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22:53

aug 13

it's still a trickle, but i'm starting to see a lot of for sale signs in the neighbourhood, suggesting the pandemic is starting to turn over into serious financial ruin for more and more people. while i don't have any desire to harm these people, their reliance on property as a wealth sink is a factor in driving up rent, and there is currently a bubble in the price of rent in windsor, which would not be anywhere close to average market rent under fair market conditions. if more people and more people are forced to sell at low prices due to the pandemic, that should burst the rent bubble and bring property values and subsequent rents back down to the level they were at a few years ago.

windsor can be a diploma mill college town for foreign students that couldn't get in anywhere else or it can be a retirement villa for people trying to escape the city without really escaping the city but it does not have enough housing supply to be both of these things, and attempts to be both of these things will just undo both of them as rising rents and property costs simultaneously repel retirees from toronto (who want to come here because it's cheap on a fixed income) and students (where high rents will undo some of the pull effects of the reality that foreign students coming into canada can enjoy some of the lowest entrance requirements in the world at the local university, which hardly appears to attract any local students at all due to it's atrocious reputation.).

i was hoping that it would be a collapsing industrial centre, ripe for revolutionary anarchism, but what once seemed like a promising epicentre has been taken over by the capitalist interests of students & seniors, and the banks funding their loans. it's disappointing, but it's what it is.

regardless, from a renter's perspective, a collapse in property values would be a godsend, right now, after so many years of unchecked increases in property values driving rent costs up to unsustainable levels, creating a bubble that needs to burst. in canada, the cmhc won't let bad assets tank the market like we saw happen in the united states in 2008; our system is structurally sound, and the regulatory safeguards to prevent the free market from running out of control and generating that kind of catastrophe are properly in place. but, all of that control at the ownership level will neither prevent a bubble in rent from developing, nor from it exploding in front of everybody.

so, if you start seeing piles of for sale signs go up, you should interpret that as a good news - it means property values are coming down as people flee the market, that supply is coming up and that decreases in market rent are imminent.

4:04

canada's often praised for not undoing policies that would have prevented the housing bubble. this is all very true.

but, what's being missed is that the bubble just shifted from ownership to rent, and consequently took longer to get to a crises point.

4:16

i've been pushing for increases in the low income housing supply for years and there hasn't been a lot of response; property owners appear to have allowed their greed to function more dominantly than their good sense.

a good, hard crash in property values is long, long overdue.

4:19

in america, the banks handed out piles of bad loans to people that couldn't pay their mortgages (and in scenarios where any due diligence at all would have made that clear).

that cannot happen here. it's impossible, structurally.

however, what that means is that instead of people that can't pay their mortgages, we have people that can't pay their rents. that issue started getting very bad all of a sudden around 2008 or so, and appears to be entering a crises point as a result of the pandemic.

lowering property costs (which didn't really happen here after 2008 due to the structurally sound system) should ease some of the bubble in rent that's developed, but we ultimately need more regulation to keep rents down and more supply to accommodate the rising population.

4:26

i started to feel the nic pulls last night and realized that when i say i let it sneak up on me...

i'm used to smoking a pack or two over the weekend, but i've been smoking pot - with tobacco - almost daily for two months. it really snuck up on me.

so, i opted to try a non-tobacco rolling option for the last nice weekend, hoping to strangely smoke myself through the detox. i've done this several times, now; the first thing is to break the physical addiction, and that actually only takes a few days. while it's uncomfortable, i actually don't find that part difficult. rather, it's the habitual part of the whole thing - having a smoke after every meal, for example - that i found so hard to smash up. and, i still crave cigarettes with alcohol, particularly.

so, this is going to be a rough weekend, regardless, and it's better to get ahead of it than let it linger further. so, i may have smoked my last ever cigarette last night on the way home from the store.

after some cursory research, i decided that what i was looking for was red raspberry leaves and the best way to find it was to looking for loose leaf raspberry tea. raspberry tea is both ancient and popular, it is no doubt a tradition passed on via family going back decades, so i did not think this would be hard; this struck me as an easy to find commodity. the bulk barn did not have raspberry tea, surprisingly. i tried some tea stores, and they had raspberry mixes...

i decided to just take a walk out to the store and stop at a few places, and i ended up spending $4.50 on 60 g of tea, in two box - a pure peppermint tea (30 g for $0.99) and a mix that includes raspberries and blueberries (30 g for the remaining price). i did not know if it was safe to smoke these teas or not, but i figured i'd have some tea, worst case...

it turns out the peppermint is safe, and i'll have to look into the other mix when it comes up.

when i was at the store, i asked the clerk if she had any filler to sell; if not raspberry leaves, then maybe even ground up hemp. she pulled out a concoction by a company called enlite that includes the following: Mullein, Red Raspberry Leaf, Yerba Mate, Gotu Kola, Marshmallow Leaf, Spearmint, Thyme. well, there's my raspberry leaf, for the night.

i've smoked a few joints using this mix now, and it smells and tastes like tea; it's mostly the raspberry that dominates, but you can get strong hints of spearmint as well, giving it a kind of menthol feel to it. this mixture also contains caffeine, so it's got a lift to the buzz that i like.

unfortunately, this mix is quite expensive; i paid $20 for 16 g, and i only did it because i didn't know the safety of the tea i'd just bought. this stuff is at least marketed to smoke, tea certainly isn't. the price of peppermint tea looks a lot more appealing, and i may be able to order raspberry leaves in bulk online. however, depending on how this goes, i suspect that i may see some attraction to green tea for the caffeine content. this is cheap and widely available.

for now, that's what i'm smoking for the weekend, and let's hope the physical pull on the nicotine is gone in a few days.

while i know that smoking herbs is not less unhealthy than smoking tobacco, i do hope it is less addictive.

potential side effects of smoking herbs like this are going to be allergies, headaches, dryness and rashes. the truth is that tobacco also has those same side effects. it's still early, but right now it seems like any such side effects would be lessened, given that the buzz is a little softer. but, we'll see what happens.

i want to move to edibles for normal (sporadic) use. but, if this works, i could maybe retain a place for the odd spliff, too.

6:06

and, then they went and changed the forecast on me - it's actually going to be kind of cold in windsor this weekend. like, not even 30. that's not summer...

so, i was right the first time - we're having a cold august, and summer really ended in mid-july.

9:25

i don't know why this is so baffling to people.

the reason i cannot be contacted by phone is that i don't want you to contact me by phone. some people get excited when somebody wants to talk to them on the phone; i tend to get anxious, and annoyed. i simply do not want to own a device that sits in my house and rings when somebody wants to talk to me; it's an invasion of privacy, and the reality is that if i actually had a phone connected to an actual live service then i'd just turn it off anyways.

i would greatly prefer written communication over verbal communication, and would rather communicate over email than over the phone.

so, i have eliminated means to contact me verbally because i do not like to engage in verbal communication and i find the premise that somebody can ring a bell and expect me to talk to them to be an invasion on my personal privacy that i am not interested in normalizing.

15:43

phones are really very weird, invasive things when you drop the advertising blitz and think about it for a minute.

why the fuck would anybody want to walk around with a device that allows anybody to bother them at any possible time?

it's a bizarre idea, on it's face.

15:48

here's the 7th-9th summary, as kept in my own records.

aug 7

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...

16:00

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16:01

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

16:05

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16:06

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.

16:32

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16:33

aug 8

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

5:15

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5:15

"but, he's a decent guy."

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

5:16

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.

5:37

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.

5:40

call me post-partisan.

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

and, i might get it.

5:41

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.

5:47

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.

5:50

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.

6:01

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.

9:44

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9:45

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

15:11

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.

21:15

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.

21:41

aug 9

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.

4:15

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

4:34

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4:35

time's just about up, justin.

4:37

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

4:42

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4:43

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.

6:15

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.

8:06

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19:38

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