Second order effects

It's been noted that African - and Italian - populations have genetic defences against the Malaria parasite. Plural: the famous one is sickle-cell, but older mutations exist. These do not lead to the anaemia. Why haven't they led to the anaemia?

Article here has a suggestion: some genetic tweaks are not allergenic, but antiallergenic.

To me this suggests a high-Eurasian pathway similar to the Saharan pathway. People move to new environments. Those environments have not mutually adapted with the newcomers. The environment resists. The newcomers mostly die - but not all. If going home is more hazardous than toughing it out, the survivors will tough it out. Those will stay - but weaker. Weaker relative to their relatives back home; but it's not like those relatives are going to follow them into the swamp, they're not idiots.

- until the body gets countermeasures. Fast-forward thousands of years. Some in the next generation innaswamp are no longer so weak. They got the original antimalarial genes, and new genes to work around all the problems the original genes had raised.

The zutt claim their own

David Wilcock passed away on the day self-destruction often occurs, the 20th. The county - Boulder, blameless here - released a few statements culminating in the family statement. That's the statement to take meaning from the man's life.

That meaning was negative.

David was born with a blessing and a curse, as the Deuteronomist says. The Wilcock family indulged the curse. Wilcock grew up preferring the "spiritual" - matters which cannot be verified, against the real, which can.

CS Lewis would have it that the demons prefer we focus on the real and disdain the spiritual. I dispute this. Demons by definition, if they exist, are spiritual. As partakers in human company, demons prefer we focus on the demonic - to join them. Wilcock could have sought help. Instead he sought company in his delusions.

To sum up, I implore my readers to seek better company.

BACKDATE 4/25

Cro-Stajnia

I think the Stajnia cave is pronounced sty-nia. Whatever the Neanders called it, they were there. The article focuses on their women (or mothers), by mitochondrial DNA.

The chart in this article is ... pretty bad, to be supplemented with this one. The two charts don't really overlap inasmuch as our topic handles a group clustering with Thorin and a couple Mesmaskaya (1 and 3; plus, lately Peshturina 3). The earlier paper was handing Goyet, primarily, products of the great MIS 3 replacement.

The Stajnia timespan is done by molecular branch shortening rather than radiocarbon or something, anyway difficult so long back. That points earlier, MIS 5 from the fabled Eemian on. Sadly we're not able to bring the Timshemet; their DNA hasn't been recovered.

The desert of Tatooines

ScienceDaily and a few other sites of poor repute are pointing to relativistic effects in binary systems. The stars are too light and too mutually-distant to be doing much in the way of gravity waves as seen here. What they can do, is what the Sun does to Mercury's orbit - but worse. So relates the presser.

They warp their planets' orbits to such degree there seem no planets at ALL at close range. Also, transits don't repro; because the orbits are shifting, once seen in one transit they might not transit the next time.

Planets and for that matter red and brown dwarfs that orbit WAY out from the barycentre remain unaffected by relativistic effects, which of course matter most in a Mercurial orbit or less. Hence Proxima which even has a planet of her own.

So what Tatooinic planets have been found - which are close to their barycentre, such we can even see 'em - formed similarly further out. Those planets have migrated inward.

One might ponder a metal-poor planet coming into the range of a double star, such that it once had water but then steadily loses it.

BACKDATE 4/25

The zutt cometh

It's always diverting to look in on Vox Popoli (sic) to see what crazed Christic nonsense will be uploaded onto us any given day. Today it's demon day. DOCTOR Heather Lynn - and don't ever forget a woman's PhD which she EARNED! - is just askin' questions. About demons.

It took very little time to dig up reviews of the book she's summarising. Here's one from Moreau Vazh, gaymer. Carl Feagan might have the best review; anyway the most-brutal, because he checks.

At least in the 2020 edition, Lynn's work was sloppy - laughably so, as she refers to a "Mount Zagrou". Zagros is, of course, a range of mountains; Zagrou is the (Greek) genitive. Feagan notes that Dr Lynn has taken this datum from a site posting essays by, we kid you not, high school teenagers. I adjudge Lynn to have disgraced her touted doctorate; I shan't use it further. What she gonna do.

Vazh, although lacking Feagan's investigative reportage, provides his readers with a different service: studying Lynn's rhetoric. He likens it to a space station orbiting a singularity, edging closer and closer to madness, and away from the sane universe. It relays plausible lore... at first. But then the zutt encroach into Lynn's circle and, if you are not careful - into yours. Remember that Lynn is cavalier with her research.

And then there's "Vox Day"... who has this day admitted to zutt in his own dreams:

not only were the dream-thoughts definitely not my own, but the characterizations of other people in the dream were intrinsically false and fundamentally different than what I absolutely know to be my true perspective on them. It was scripted to attempt to influence my thinking in a destructive direction, and the temptations offered were not of a sort that even appealed to me.

I, too, am permitted to Ask Questions. Perhaps the thoughts not "Vox Day's" own were, in fact, the thoughts of Theodore Beale. Something in his shell - something surviving in there - may be warning him not to trust the likes of Lynn. I leave for others to ponder what exactly is "Vox Day".

In happier times

Before the great [Neander] replacement, some of that parahuman community were friendlier than they'd become. Welcome to Cro-Timshemet; where, when you came for dinner, you got to leave again.

The site is in Israel, which surprised me inasmuch that t-X-t pattern reads as Tamazight. Not that Afro-Asiatic was anything like a thing then-and-there. I did know that Neanders and this branch of African (i.e. us) shared space but not that they would share a cave.

I don't know if any cave art features Neanders and Africans holding hands under a rainbow. They did share, around that cave, a religion; and hunted together.

The era went from the Eemian/MIS5e - 130kya - until 80k. The cave is 100k. These ranges look rough so I'm devolving to "kya", anchored in AD 1950, rather than kBC as I prefer. This is all certainly long enough that the postAfricans would have adapted to the Mediterranean climate as against the African. Although genetics be hard from this deep intervention of time.

I expect taboos against much racial mixing on account the genetics were going to be difficult. Possible they worked together fine however, each with their own specialties. In hunts the Neanders could crouch in the ambush position with the postAfricans running the prey down.

It all failed in the end and did not result in the two populations or their hybrids contributing much to general out-of-Africa later.

BACKDATE 4/25 with some hats to be tipped in the Bluefishcake Discord direction.

Greek manuscript shenanigans

Katie Leggett reports on Greek manuscripts of the full New Testament. Far fewer survive than are thought - the old liste claimed sixty. The real number might be twenty.

I personally wonder if the Revelation should count, here, in Greek. I'd say it should count... in Latin, and maybe Sahidic. But out east this book was questionable. And indeed several "complete" MSS have this book penned in a separate hand and later than the rest of the NT.

Leggett further finds that miniscule MS 141, if complete-with-lacuna, becomes less lacunose when 866 is restored to it. Amazing this hasn't been found until now. But then, miniscule MSS tend late and Byzantine, which might interest Byzantinists and Erasmians, but is considerably less sexy to critics.

Least sexy of all - to them - are Handschrifts from ... printed editions. Yeah, some people copied books off the printed page, by hand, and sold that. I dunno. They didn't have xerox in those days. This is like how Slavs went from relating epic tales - to retelling the epic tale, that had got to print as the official version; a famous comparandum with Homer. Or maybe how published Ethiopic literature, ended up translated and handcopied in Amharic, which "MSS" now have to be filtered from authentic mediaeval work.

But now I wonder. May one perhaps hope for handcopies of printed Shakespeare whose volumes we no longer own...?

BACKDATE 4/18