Phrenology doesn't work

The black hole of the Yucatan yielded up a "Naia" skeleton; Discovery Future discusses it.

Naia was a woman, and had the pelvic birth-pitting to prove it; with, unluckily, the pelvic fragility which helped kill her, when she spelunked into a lower cavern. Her head looked like the Kennewick Man's: more Ainu, or European. Luckily for our sciences, modern scientody has recourse to DNA. Since, well, woman there's no Y-DNA so we can't say much of her paternal ancestry.

We can say instead for her mitochondrial D lineage. This is all over South America mostly today. So nobody is calling her a "Solutrean".

At least, I hope nobody is. Beachy Head woman, for those keeping track, was deemed African by phrenology. She was not. On the other hand they did have some Yoruba or Mende DNA in Updown; this girl (whose own mtDNA was European) was probably brought to protoEngland by the Meroving Franks (which is why you don't see me buttmad over mulatta puppettrice too-tall in mediaeval-static Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

The overall message has to be: don't use skull shapes as a proxy for race or ancestry.

Zuqnîn after Palmer

Philip Wood, whom we've met here before on the Church of the East, has content on the Church of the West. This is a draught from 2011, or earlier; it's been edited and published since. I missed this at the time, and the final version seems hard to get to online. It may or may not affect my work - or/nor Andrew Palmer's. This is "PseudoDionysius" compiled at Zuqnîn.

"PseudoDionysius" tends to be applied to the earlier volumes, which plagiarise John of Ephesus. "Zuqnîn" is what Palmer called the seventh-century in the Syrian chronicles' excerpt, up to AD 715ish / AG 1026ish. Wood was arguing the content after Palmer left off.

A chronicle existed up to 731 / 1042. Wood calls it "A". From what Palmer relays of it, it is rife with errors such that I doubt anyone went back to fix it. (I have found little utility in it.)

This "A" was then copied and revised in 748, to add content starting 718: to chronicle "the Third Fitna" (I think the Muslims' word fitna is borrowed here). If this sounds like what John Ben-Penkâyë was doing for his near-apocalypse of the Second: yeah, we do get "antichrist" memes here. John was an autistic nutcase and an antisemite... which traits "B" shares. The 'Abbâsids were coming from the east and "B" didn't like it. Which was all the Jews' fault of course, as Barbara Roggema, who might not be autistic, lately may attest.

Hither, then, the 'Abbâsids came. So we have a Phase C 742-751; and a D, 749-763.

This is (for me) a lot of "phases" to keep the track thereof. The Zuqnîn MS is, itself, an autograph. How did we get so many editors before this MS? What happened to the earlier chronicles? Did no-one drop by the monastery and copy them?

Perhaps C is a separate smaller chronicle (Palmer relates some of these) and the D guy was also the B guy, splicing the C content into the longer work. That would render suspect the earlier content from 718-763. Why would D care about Marwân as much? This content should also be earlier, like C. Also I didn't see the "distaste for Jews" in A that Wood sees in B. When a charlatan exploits the Jews in the earlier decades, Zuqnîn laments this.

So I don't think "A" and "B" were the same. I think "A" had the core, and that other people wrote their own thing, although if they were all at the monastery they at least owned the "A" basis. The "D" guy brought the "B" Marwân lore and the "C" chaos into the "A" frame. The Marwân lore came from Arabs and the "C" stuff might have been brought from some other Syrian monastery.

BACKDATE 2/6

Zapotec

Last month we got reports of a Zapotec tomb. I was holding off but it is news now so, let's get into whatever I can tell of it.

This tomb has glyphs. They are not just pictographs [em-dash] they are blocky and stylised, like the Maya. The entry is flagged with a stone owl, like we see in the prolog to Raiders; owls were heralds of Xibalbá. The glyphs are, they say, calendrical; they don't report on when-exactly, but the claim is contemporary with the Maya after the AD 536 disaster. Of course they say "CE" but I deem that fair (Christians weren't even using "AD" much, then).

The term "Zapotec" is foisted upon them from the Mexicans. Today they call themselves Bën-za. Their civilisation at this time is best known for the White Mountain site, Monte Albán. This was contemporary with the similarly-exonymed Teotihuacan; that site had a Bën-za quarter, as also a Maya quarter. This tomb may have been cut toward the declining decades of both.

The Zapotec language, something like "Diidxazá", is related to Mixtec and more-distantly to Otomi, around the Teotihuacan region today. Jennings was fond of this language. I expect since the classical Chorti "Maya" were calling Teotihuacan something like "the place of reeds", that so did the Bën-za.

BACKDATE 2/6

Blat in Perú

Matt Stoller has a must-read on how we in the West got from winning the Cold War to creating a late-Soviet superstate based in Little Saint James. Stoller calls it "blat", due to Epstein himself being some sort of Memelite or Königbergian like, in all likelihood, my great-grandmother. Same with the Maxwells.

I wonder if we should trace this to the Americas however. Hernando de Soto in Perú was reporting on the "informal" economy in the 1980s there. You wouldn't call this country Marxist; I hold fair to tag their system Left-Wing Apartheid. South Africans were bitterly saying of their own nation it was capitalism for whites and Jews, socialism for Boers and fascism for blecks.

Listening to Epstein tee off on "goys", that's how he saw the entire planet. And why not? That's how the entire planet was behaving around him.

There were young women, and some females better classed as girls; but that was just for special. Mostly Epstein finessed conflicts-of-interest between others, on the Q.T. Every deal then became a blackmail possibility, even without it being sexy, if nothing else because all those who didn't get that special deal would certainly be angered - and either go to the courts, or find other means of vengeance.

Back to de Soto, his brief for making informal networks legal and formal got a lot of rave reviews, including from Bill Clinton. What we should have read more-carefully in de Soto's book, which got into English in 2002, is that some people like the networks staying informal. Stoller uses the word "Governance" - I think, deliberately pulling the G out of E.S.G., corporate social responsibility, corpocracy whatever you like to call it. Governance requires not just the public face of Davos.

Hedge

The Hedge Knight is on telly as Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I am here more concerned with its sequel, which we stand maybe a 65% chance of getting to watch next: The Sworn Sword. Specifically whether such a thing as a knight-errant existed.

The name is sus, as a mix of Saxon and Norman. Wiki wants me to think it is a creature of romance, like the Japanese ronin. I am unsure. If it be a trope, why is it seen across the globe wherever feudal societies crop up?

The Sworn Sword somewhat illustrates how a knight might end up errant, sleeping in hedges. Feudal lords come into border-disputes. They might reach a deal; that is somewhat the plot of this novella. Sometimes however they fall to blows; and a baron loses his lands, title, even life... but not his men.

Those knights might not have a baron anymore but they still have a king, often the same king as the other lord has. Those now-landless knights are still not traitors; or, if perhaps they were, the king might figure these men are worth some clemency, since they maintained their honour, of a sort, and the king cannot waste good men.

This is how bandits happen of course. Here we may defer to Weis' Daughter of the Empire: knights without portfolio will gladly hire under a lord, or in Weis' case a lady, who promises to restore to them their purpose. For Weis these knights formed a band, and were on their way to banditry - before the lady Acoma rescued them.

But perhaps some knights might hold to their vows ("sigma", Beale might say) to refuse that dubious company.

BACKDATE 2/4.

rOygbiv

They say that if you live long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float past you down-river. I don't know that I have much seen this in my life. But it does sometimes turn out you see an evil person sent up that river. Like Sonya Jaquez Lewis.

Coloradans know what Lewis helped make of their state. Less known, perhaps, is how she lied and how she forced others to affirm her lie, namely her "marriage" to a woman. The laws of nature and of G-d meant nothing to this state's SJL. And if the laws of man and of woman told her otherwise, she'd just change them.

But she couldn't change all of them.

Vox Popoli is a Hitlerist site

Richard Carrier argues that "Christian Nationalism" means NSDAP. To be more precise: NSDAP as ex-Catholic Hitler envisioned it post-Beer-Hall is a natural outgrowth of political Lutheranism.

The Catholics have a vision of the state as well: the pan-Christian "Christendom", backed up in dogma with the paraNestorian filioque. Obviously this vision conflicts with Luther's. As a result, Lutherans as of AD 1925 used the Catholic word "Christentum" to mock it.

When you look at Theodore Beale's site with the "voxday" URL, you often read the term "Churchian" and "Churchianity". These are Christian institutions which, in Beale's mind, are unfit for purpose. The Venn containing the "Churchianity" and "Christentum" circles is one circle.

I don't think Beale can (or should bother) argue with Carrier's finding. What he might argue is whether the NSDAP was in fact too tolerant, as to make it a poor vehicle for Christian Nationalism. Until the Long Knives the NSDAP was something of a coalition, from Röhm's brief for sodomía to Himmler's mysticism. Neither are particularly easy to count as Christian.

Beale also can't complain about Carrier's arrogant style and willingness to throw names about like PZ Myers at his worst. I might so complain.