i am.

soon.

all i ever said was that this was never going to work. none of it.

so, you need to take responsibility for your self, instead of telling other people what to do.

in theory, if we were all nurses, right? but, we're not. and that was obvious.

so, they forced us to wear masks because standing six feet apart wasn't working.

now, the masks aren't working, either - which is probably as much about user error as anything else. you can't expect people to use masks correctly. you just can't...

so, what's next?

mandatory hazmat suits?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/canada-s-active-covid-19-case-number-is-rising-shortly-before-most-schools-reopen-1.5085281

you need to adjust to reality, not pretend the government will keep you safe from nearly air-borne particles.

and, if that means swallowing a pill or adjusting your attitude, so be it.

it's the same basic mentality, though - when somebody tells you it's everybody else's responsibility to ensure they don't get sick, rather than their own, they are basically reflecting the lack of individual responsibility that is ruining the contemporary left.

and, you're just as likely to succeed in declaring a virus-free space as you are in declaring a safe one.

i'll let the internet run with this, and am sort of surprised that it doesn't seem like it has, up to now.

it would be extra sardonic if those kids were dressed like witch doctors, or orthodox priests, and were "cleaning" the air with sage (which is highly carcinogenic, actually) to ward the virus out of their safe space.

one of the few things i just can't do at all is draw. i've never been remotely good at it.

but, i'd like to see a cartoon with some activist kids holding up a sign that says

virus free safe space

...and some recognizable health experts looking at each other, baffled, with a bubble caption reading:

"why didn't we think of that?"

i've been saying this for months, and i'm not going to say it every day for the next two weeks.

if you put your faith in the system to protect you from the virus, and insist you have the right to be safe from it (why not just declare a safe space, a virus free area?) and everybody else needs to behave in a way to facilitate it, then somebody you love is going to die as a result of your actions and you'll have only your own stupidity to blame.

you should assume your kids will get sick, and treat them like they're diseased from day one.

responsibility for your health is your own, and if you don't accept it, you'l need to deal with the consequences.

so, stop worrying about whether there's a sink in your child's classroom or not. it doesn't matter. take the precautions you need to protect yourself, or suffer the consequences for it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7306040/coronavirus-b-c-teachers-union-back-to-school-ad/

again: there's no science underlying the idea of closing the border. testing in canada has been lower than virtually anywhere else in the developed world, and the official case loads reflect it, and it appears to have been intentionally done to manipulate the data, but the mortality rate is not substantively lower, when adjusted to population levels. we're not doing much better, at all. if it's a little better, it probably has more to do with the fact that we have unfettered access to care, at least in theory.

but, everything's canceled in michigan anyways, and the summer's over, so it's too late to matter, now.

i'm not likely going to want to go to detroit until the spring, anyways.

i'm just hunkering down for a long winter....

lol.

we get the leaders we deserve, in the end.

maybe we shouldn't have done what we did, but we did...

and, now, everybody is going to be on welfare for the next ten years - even if they remove the laws tomorrow. the damage has already been done.

the government needs to realize this and shift it's role.

they might actually save money with a ubi.

this is an artificial recession caused by draconian laws that restrict people from spending money, and it will last as long as the laws do.

what i'm going to say is that economics as a psycho-social theory needs to be approached very carefully right now.

things that would normally work might not, and things that would normally fail just might work.

but, my basic position is that the government should be less concerned about getting people to spend and more concerned about making sure they don't get evicted. the economy remains largely closed, and stimulus should not be the focus until it's fully opened.

i mean, i'll take any checks you want to give me, sure. just don't be surprised if i put the money in the bank and wait until the mask laws are overturned.

and, if they never get overturned, i may never spend that money at all - because i don't want to hang out in a room full of people with masks on.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-recession-economists-1.5704628

if you told me this is permanent would i spend more money?

on what?

even if i were to buy some clothes, there'd be nowhere to wear them.

right now, there's not any gear i can think of on the list.

i'm a concert person, but it's not just the concerts. you can't see a play, can't see a movie. can you even go swimming? what can you actually do? where can you actually go?

you can go to a restaurant, if you wear a mask and don't talk to anybody, but who wants to do that?

so, if this is permanent, i'd expect a recession. i guess we might figure out different ways to spend money, eventually. but, right now, i couldn't figure out what to even do with free money if you threw it at me.

so, the weather today is making potential fan shopping impossible. i don't want to order it online and wait a week, i want it when i want it. i'll need to wait to go tomorrow.

i spent some time this morning cleaning in here and it helped a little.

the temperature is turning over outside, so the temperature in here is going to fall quite a bit, and that's ok. i might have to put some clothes on, but i can handle that, it's more the refrigeration technology with the air that gets into my bones and drives me nuts.

i'm going to try to do some catch up, but i'm feeling myself nodding off again, so who knows.

i would guess that most money handed out for stimulus right now will just end up paying down debt.

they should wait until things are running more smoothly.

if you give me a lot of money, i'm not likely to spend it, because there's nowhere to spend it.

so, i'd be focusing less on economic recovery right now and more on ensuring that people have basic needs to survive met - which i'm ok with, due to odsp being probably the most stable check in town.

i just want to point out that i have no apprehension about going out of the house and doing things.

it's just that anything i'd want to do has been cancelled, or restricted to the point that it's not any fun.

so, i smoked too much pot (about the only thing that didn't get canceled) and burned myself out, to the point that the sight or smell of the stuff is making me sick. and, now, i'm going to sit at home and wait it out, instead. i'm basically starting my yearly winter hibernation in mid-august, out of sheer boredom.

i don't know how representative i am, but i know that nothing much is going to change with me, personally, until you actually loosen the restrictions in the economy.

https://financialpost.com/executive/posthaste-canadas-economic-recovery-is-already-flagging-it-may-be-time-for-new-finance-ministers-freeconomics

so, i dunno what the next step is at all.

it's still true that the only non-smoking housing that exists is run by the city. but, i'm losing confidence in that being a way out.

i may find myself wanting to move to a small town, but i know that opens up a lot of other problems around my gender identity. i'm more likely to get into a fight with the church than care what they think, but christians are known to kill people they don't like, and i have my safety to concern myself with.

what it means is that if i thought there was no escape before...

it's ubiquitous.

it's just the normal outside air smell, now. all day, every day, everywhere, all the time.

you walk down any street in this city nowadays, and all you can smell is low quality drugs for miles around, and carbon monoxide from the cars.

it's a truly disgusting combination.

i was guilty (for a few weeks.), but i've stopped. and i can only hope that everybody else does soon, too.

the headache is getting a little better, but i'm still overwhelmingly drained, and unable to stay awake.

am i depressed? is that possible?

it's a depressing scenario all around. i think that tuesday was the only day i've bothered to brush my hair and look presentable all summer. there's just nothing to do, no reason to get out of bed.

if i could get those testicles cut out tomorrow, it would help. really.

and the smell of smoke is not pleasant. at all.

i need to make some calls today, but am not expecting to be productive for a while, still. that fan is paramount, and i just need to make the point about it - i'm basically useless without it

....and it's the city.

i'm just a few blocks from where the 401 hits the ambassador bridge. maybe the one thing that was nice about the shutdown was the decrease in air pollution; now that it's come back, it just stinks that much worse.

my headache and sleepiness is not going to go away until i'm able to find a new fan on the weekend, and i'll probably buy two. the 31st is a monday, so i don't know if it'll clear 24 or 48 hours from now. and, that will be the end of this somewhat awful month.

i'm going to make an omelette, but i don't really expect much between now and then.

i just can't function in stagnant air like this. it's not the temperature, it's the stillness. i need constant flow.

there was a "chinese supermarket" i was in when i was looking for raspberry tea that...

i think there was a language barrier, and that's why i haven't posted about it. i told him repeatedly that i have asthma (which is a half-truth.), and he honestly didn't seem to understand. he just kept saying in broken english that i needed to have a mask.

so, i just stopped and asked him, blankly: "do you want my business or not?"

and, he looked at me like he was going to cry and shook his head.

so, i walked out.

the adjustment i made was that i carry my puffer now, so that people with language barriers can understand why i'm not wearing a mask, and can make a choice as to whether upholding the fud overpowers their bottom line, or not.

again, if you find yourself in this situation, what you need to do is the following:

1) be assertive, but stay calm.
2) ask for the manager.
3) explain to the manager that you're leaving the store because of the laws. that way, they understand why they're losing business.
4) take your business elsewhere.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/mask-restaurant-brandon-manitoba-1.5699001

i had to do a lot of running around yesterday.

i was concerned about cops sitting on the street corners with baseball bats, but almost nobody was maskless, indicating that the fear, uncertainty and doubt seems to be working. there were again two cases yesterday...

people actually seem to have been taken aback by something they saw on me that they may not have seen on anybody in quite a while, namely lipstick.

i'd bet cosmetic companies are taking it hard right now in some places, because what's the point when you're wearing a mask? but, you could see it in the eyes of random females walking by.

i remember that. i miss that, just a little. not jealous.

i managed to find another month's worth of brand name estrace, right here in windsor. is there more out there? there might be, i don't know....

this month was been awfully unproductive. i keep trying to clean up posts back to early august, and keep getting stuck, either via distraction (posts this month are twice the average) or as a consequence of migraines or oversleeping. it snuck up on me this time by accident, but quitting smoking is not fun. but, i'm inside now for a bit, and am two weeks past it, so let's hope i can get a bit of work done before i have to do groceries for september.

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

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

guinea pigs. what have we done to them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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