so, we didn't do a preliminary review of beethoven's 5th piano concerto.

the reason i didn't catch this earlier was that it was added at the last minute. the program was initially supposed to start with what the dso decided was specifically "black music" (and i'll have a bit to say about that when i do the review) and end with the same ravel piece i saw a few weeks ago, but the pianist had to drop due to tendinitis. so, they brought somebody else in at the last minute to do what is one of beethoven's most classic works.

i hope they didn't pick beethoven in order to buy into the urban legend that he was black. the arguments i've seen would lead to the conclusion that he might have maybe been distantly arabic - if you want to pull something out of his tonality, that's really what you pull out, and these reaching deductions about some paintings at most have him looking a little tanned, rather than black. it's supposedly due to the idea that his mother came from an area that was once under moorish control. in fact, the idea that the moors were black is itself just a eurocentric myth that should really be vigorously corrected across the literature; european art constantly depicted the moors as dark-skinned, and they of course were, but they were dark-skinned in the sense that an arab is, and not black like subsaharan africans. that is an anachronism that we've picked up fairly recently. so, shakespeare's contemporary audience would have actually known that othello was an arab. what the moors really did was create a neo-carthaginian state that was fundamentally semitic in every way, not african. but, i don't think anybody actually takes this idea seriously as it isn't based in any hard evidence, and i'll remind you that there is an urban legend that mozart was black, too. rather, this idea seems to get it's support from a strain of historical revisionism called "afrocentrism" that essentially argues that everybody was black - including historical figures like darius (iranian) and cleopatra (greek) that quite clearly were not. maybe, though, there were good reasons to pull the ravel from a concert about black music...beethoven was at least about liberty, equality and fraternity, even if his mother was actually polish and he was, actually, pretty much lily white.

this piece is perhaps beethoven at his most cliched, and you can kind of interpret that in a variety of ways. is it therefore beethoven at his peak? or does it get a little bit expected, in a sense? regardless, it's impossible to deny the sheer enjoyment of it, if you love the aspects of beethoven's work that he is still best known for all of these years later - the raucus piano parts, the sheer fucking with christian tonality and the nice, catchy melodies that he wraps all of that into. we get beethoven as barnstorming revolutionary, beethoven as purveyor of catchy tunes for the masses and beethoven as epic, brilliant troll all at once. it's hard to present an argument against such compactness.

but, it is a little predictable in terms of following his own previously established form, for better or worse.

if you ever get a chance to see this, jump at it. there's a magic to it. really. i'm glad i stayed up all night for it...

ok. 

i need to do something productive, now.

so, i'm switching back to the blog cleanup.

so, they catch the animal in the wild, put it in a cage, sell it at the market and then slaughter it in front of the customer, who takes the carcass home and eats it?

yeah. they should ban that; that's pretty barbaric. fuck.

oh, and apparently it's how this virus jumped to humans, too.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildlife-consumption-ban-intl-hnk/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/health/coronavirus-washington-spread.html

https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/united-states?utm_source=united-states&utm_medium=social-twitter-travel-eng&utm_content=2020-03-06&utm_campaign=CAAupdate#health

in fact, the canadian government has quietly issued a travel warning to the united states (along with warnings to china, iran and italy), which it claims is already experiencing community spread.

and, just to solidify the point - there are now several cases in canada of people catching the case in the united states, including one in colorado and one in las vegas. 

this would seem to provide support for the hypothesis that the virus is running wild in america, right now.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/health/2020/03/06/coronavirus-latest-testing-monitoring-numbers-in-michigan/

i'll get to this when i do the reviews.

but, i spent some time around 4:00 on friday morning helping an elderly man on woodward avenue outside of the diner, and he may still be there right now, pull a cup out of his wheelchair, so he could piss in it on the side of the road.

this man appeared to be both terminally ill and chronically homeless.

and, it didn't make me sad. it made me angry. why wasn't this man in a fucking hospital? why was he asking good samaritans passing by in the middle of the night to volunteer as nurses? 

i spend a lot of time in these areas of detroit. i see the kinds of people that can't get care, and it makes me want to fucking break something.

so, i have no delusions about the delivery system in that country, and am not hesitant in my analysis at all.

zero deaths in canada, guys. zero. 0. nada. zilch. nil.

if the administration doesn't shift away from this quarantine policy soon, it's going to wake up to an actual public health emergency that it could have and should have avoided by simply following the science.

again: compare the data in the united states to the data in canada, the uk, germany, norway, denmark ...

the closest comparison to what we're seeing in the united states is in iran - a country suffering from years of devastating sanctions that specifically target the health industry.

why is that?

is it because of the hyper-capitalist nature of the system in america?

so, let's understand this properly - this is less of a health care crisis, and more of a crisis in the economic system in the united states. it's not the virus that's killing people, it's capitalism that is killing people.

it seems like the media, and the democratic party, together, are attacking trump from the right on this - they want more backwards policies that don't work, more ignorance, more stupidity....

it's like a competition to see who can be the most retarded.

what do they need to do?

1) they need to end these counter-productive quarantines, that are just facilitating the spread of the disease.

2) they need to offer free testing to anybody who wants one.

3) they need to set up some kind of system of financial support to anybody that needs to take some time off work.

the smug attitude demonstrated in this article is not helpful, especially considering that the point that they're making is actually wrong.

it is true that mutations happen all of the time, and they're not always successful. a mutation is indeed just an error in transcription. sometimes, a mutation may have a positive effect on the organism's ability to survive and reproduce (in which case we'd say the organism is evolving), and sometimes the mutation may have a negative effect, and actually harm the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. most of the time, a mutation won't make much of a difference at all.

the reason that the issue of mutation is concerning in the united states is that the health care system is inaccessible to such a large percentage of the population, which means you're going to have thousands of people catching and spreading this disease (and probably already do.) outside of the understanding of health care professionals.

the trump administration seems to think you deal with this by quarantining people. if you just stop people with the disease from moving around, you should easily stop it, right? so that's why there's only a few deaths - the quarantine is working! but this is a retarded argument that health care professionals in every other country in the world will instantly reject as anti-science. quarantining people isn't actually likely to actually work and, worse, it generates large amounts of fear. i'd have a greater fear of getting quarantined than i would of dying of this, so if i thought i was going to end up quarantined, i'd avoid going to the doctor. so, what health care professionals everywhere else in the world will tell you is that you want to strenuously avoid policies that promote quarantine (except as an absolute last resort, with an extremely potent virus - which is not this.) because it just acts as a disincentive to get tested, which just spreads the virus even more. the argument you're hearing from the administration on this is completely backwards; the policy of quarantining is just another reason to think that the number of cases is likely dramatically under-reported, and is even probably one of the causes of that under-reporting. 

so, how do you deal with this? what you want to do is make it as easy as possible to get tested, and ensure that the disruption to people's lives is as little as possible. you want incentives to come to the hospital to get treated, not incentives to stay at home or go to work and let the thing run out of control.

how often do flu viruses mutate into different strains? well, why do you think you need a new shot every year? and, why do you keep getting it, even after your immune system has defeated it? so, the answer is fairly often - often enough that you have to keep taking flu shots.

we don't have data on how fast this thing is going to mutate, and that's really the mistake the article is making. if the inaccessibility of the american health care system means it ends up circulating in the population like the flu and ends up mutating at about the same rate as the flu (a rough guess, based on nothing.), then we could very well see the country act as an incubation area, and be in a situation where the rest of the world is playing catch up to these different strains that keep mutating in the american workforce, because it can't get access to basic care.

and, that is a real concern to look at it - regardless of how this smug article from the msm frames the issue.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/health/coronavirus-mutations-analysis/index.html

the political spectrum in the united states is just beyond absurd.

so, apparently, having a basic understanding of statistics, and insisting on following data and science, means you must be a republican, nowadays. democrats, on the other hand, insist on anti-science hysteria and conspiracy theories. talk about a party reversal.

no, i'm not actually a republican - i'm a communist. you don't listen.

but, if you want to understand my comments about the coronavirus and fear of it being used to take away people's rights, the text you want to start with was written by the most vicious right-winger of them all, naomi klein, and is called the shock doctrine.

and, what i'm actually calling on is for the forces of the left to flip the situation over, and use the coronavirus as a shock doctrine to increase coverage and reduce costs.