#ancestral supplements

[revivifyhealth]

Ancestral Supplements MOFO

Ancestral Supplements MOFO stands for Male Optimization Formula with Organs and contains Testicle, Prostate, Heart, Liver and Bone Marrow. They believed that nature nourished and supported all forms of life and left us clues to help us remain in optimal health. Plants that were shaped like certain organs were said to support and strengthen those organs.

[brad-kearns]

Anti-Aging Fitness: How Ancestral Living Can Help You Stay Young and Vibrant

Are you tired of feeling like you're aging faster than you should be? Do you wish you could turn back the clock and regain some of the vibrancy and energy you had in your youth? If so, you're not alone. The good news is that there are ways to slow down the aging process and improve your overall health and wellness, and it doesn't involve expensive creams or fad diets. In this blog post, we'll explore how ancestral living can help you stay young and vibrant, and provide insights from renowned health and fitness expert, Brad Kearns. By incorporating these principles into your fitness routine, you can start feeling and looking younger in no time. So, let's dive in!

Brad Kearns is an acclaimed fitness coach who has dedicated his career to helping people achieve optimal health and wellness. Kearns is also a vocal advocate for ancestral living, an approach to fitness and nutrition that emphasizes the importance of staying connected to our evolutionary roots. By adopting ancestral health principles, we can optimize our physical and mental well-being and ward off age-related decline. Kearns recommends incorporating small lifestyle changes, such as walking barefoot, limiting artificial light exposure at night, and engaging in intermittent fasting, to promote longevity and vibrant health. Ancestral living is a powerful way to stay young and healthy, and Brad Kearns is leading the charge in spreading this message to the masses.

Increase strength and flexibility through high-intensity, short-duration workouts

Develop increased resilience to stress and illness through lifestyle habits such as intermittent fasting, cold exposure, and sunshine

Improve diet by cutting out processed foods and adding natural, nutrient-dense ingredients to meals

Incorporate mindfulness and meditation into a daily routine to reduce stress, worry, and anxiety

Prioritize quality sleep and find ways to switch off for optimal rest and recovery

So, if you're feeling a little sluggish and want to get back to your roots, give ancestral living a try! Brad Kearns is a fantastic resource for all things ancestral health, and his tips and tricks for incorporating small lifestyle changes into your routine can be game-changers for your health and well-being. From walking barefoot to limiting artificial light exposure at night, there are plenty of ways to start down the path of ancestral living. So, what are you waiting for? Let's get in touch with our evolutionary roots and start thriving!

[extinctionstories]

On April 19th, 1987, a bird known as Adult Condor 9 was captured in the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, near Bakersfield, California. After decades ravaged by the threats of lead-poisoning and pesticide exposure, and intense debate over the ethics of captivity, it had been determined that captive breeding was the final hope to save a species. As his designation might suggest, AC-9 was the ninth condor to be captured for the new program; he was also the last.

As the biology team transported the seven-year-old male to the safety of the San Diego Wild Animal Park, his species, the California Condor, North America's largest bird, became extinct in its native range. It was Easter Sunday—a fitting day for the start of a resurrection.

At the time of AC-9's capture, the total world population of California condors constituted just twenty-seven birds. The majority of them represented ongoing conservation attempts: immature birds, taken from the wild as nestlings and eggs to be captive-reared in safety, with the intention of re-release into the wild. Now, efforts turned fully towards the hope of captive breeding.

Captive breeding is never a sure-fire bet, especially for sensitive, slow-reproducing species like the condor. Animals can and do go extinct even when all individuals are successfully shielded from peril and provided with ideal breeding conditions. Persistence in captivity is not the solution to habitat destruction and extirpation—but it can buy valuable time for a species that needs it.

Thankfully, for the California condor, it paid off.

The birds defied expectations, with an egg successfully hatched at the San Diego Zoo the very next year. Unlike many other birds of prey, which may produce clutches of up to 5 hatchlings, the California condor raises a single chick per breeding season, providing care for the first full year of its life, and, as a consequence, often not nesting at all in the year following the birth of a chick. This, combined with the bird's slow maturation (taking six to eight years to start breeding), presented a significant challenge. However, biologists were able to exploit another quirk of the bird's breeding cycle: its ability to double-clutch.

Raising a single offspring per year is a massive risk in a world full of threats, and the California condor's biology has provided it with a back-up plan: in years when a chick or egg has been lost, condors will often re-nest with a second egg. To take advantage of this tendency, eggs were selectively removed from birds in the captive breeding program, which would then lay a replacement, greatly increasing their reproduction rate.

And what of the eggs that were taken? The tendency of hatchlings to imprint is well-known, and the intention from the very beginning was for the birds to one day return to the wild—an impossibility for animals acclimated to humans. And so, puppets were made in the realistic likeness of adult condors, and used by members of the conservation team to feed and nurture the young birds, mitigating the risk of imprintation on the wrong species.

By 1992, the captive population had more than doubled, to 64 birds. That year, after an absence of five years, the first two captive-bred condors were released into their ancestral home. Many other releases followed, including the return of AC-9 himself in 2002. Thanks to the efforts of zoos and conservationists, as of 2024 there are 561 living California condors, over half of which fly free in the wilds of the American West.

The fight to save the California condor is far from over. The species is still listed as critically endangered. Lead poisoning (from ingesting shot/bullets from abandoned carcasses) remains the primary source of mortality for the species, with tagged birds tested and treated whenever possible. Baby condors are fed bone chips by their parents, likely as a calcium supplement—but, to a condor, bits of bone and bits of plastic can be indistinguishable, and dead nestlings have been found with stomachs full of trash.

There's hope, though. There are things we can change, things we can counteract and stop from happening in the future. It was a human hand that created this problem, and it will take a human hand to fix it. Hope is only gone when the last animal breathes its last breath—and the California condor is still here.

-

This painting is titled Puppet Rearing (California Condor), and is part of my series Conservation Pieces, which focuses on the efforts and techniques used to save critically endangered birds from extinction. It is traditional gouache, on 22x30" paper.

[diabetesknow]

Should Diabetics Use Cod Liver Oil Supplements? - Diabetes Knowledge

[dailyadventureprompts]

Looking for an alternate flavor for your dwarves to go along with Texan orcs and Bostonian goblins?

May I suggest AGGRESSIVELY CANADIAN?

Living in the hardy frost-kissed highlands scorned by less hardy folk, they supplement the usual mountain-dwarf love of stone (great Canadian shield ) mining with a fixation on forestry, with a utilitarian and resource extraction focused eye towards natural conservation. Focus the dwarven love of craft onto wood and it's encyclopedia of uses, from the hafts of tools to watermill construction to the stout beams that will keep an ancestral hall sturdy for generations. Tell me that dwarves wouldn't love hockey and curling, or drown their towering stacks of pancakes in a barrel of maple syrup.

This is the vibe:

Tell me I'm wrong

[tanadrin]

Tiamat, Hydra, and Jormungandr, three genera of extinct marine life from the oceans of Sogant Raha, with a human diver for scale.

Despite the wide variety of forms among the deinoceti, these three animals are fairly closely related.

Tiamat adapted the articlated, chelicera-like mouthparts to support a large filter-feeding jaw, and lost all the teeth on its inner mouthparts. It retained the ancestral fin arrangements of the hypheostia mostly unchanged, but supplemented the basic four-eye arrangement with additional large eyestalks, and a sensory front along the top of its cranium where each cilium is tipped with a small, underdeveloped eye.

Hydra instead developed eye clusters at the end of its eyestalks, and it used its mouthparts as grasping appendages to aid in latching on to its favored prey, other large marine animals. Its interior mouth features numerous rasping teeth, rather like a large lamprey. The dozen or more phalanges that supported its fins are reduced to just a couple of rays, and it also concentrated all its exterior defensive armor around its head.

Jormungandr adapted to a bottom-crawling lifestyle, with its pectoral fins becoming articulated rather like feet or claws, and its other fins atrophying. Its exterior mouthparts fused to form a second large jaw, and its long, powerful tail allowed it to lurk in muddy shallows and leap upward at tremendous speed to attack its prey. Its defensive hide was concentrated on its upper surface, and around its head.

[random-thought-depository]

One of the thoughts I had while writing that post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, anti-predator defense, and the origins of the male gender role is if that model is correct it implies Larry Niven got the relationship between a sapient species's diet and culture/values pegged wrong, at least as far as the Kzin are concerned. Courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights against strong opponents, and is quick to retreat from any fight in which it loses the advantage; a sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators would probably value/honor courage less than we do, so Kzin biology and implied evolutionary history is actually kind of an awkward fit with the kind of assholes the Kzin are. Asshole aliens with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore apex predators might be sneaky raiders with an unapologetic "if they outgun us, trade, avoid, or appease, if we outgun them, raid and pillage!" mindset, or something like that; they probably wouldn't have the prideful machismo, hotheaded aggression, and disdain for restraint of the Kzin (you could argue calling it machismo is an anthropomorphism because Kzintosh aren't men but lbr human machismo is very obviously what the Kzin attitude is modeled on).

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic for the Kzin to be the way they are, cause Kzin values could plausibly arise from intra-species competition and my rationalization for why the Kzin are as they are is a mix of that and "the Kzin are like that because their right-wing authoritarians won their history and got to shape their culture." But, as I said, I think the kind of assholes the Kzin are wouldn't logically flow directly from their ancestral subsistence strategy/ecological niche.

Which makes me wonder: if as a spec-bio exercise I tried to make a species which's biology would predispose them toward becoming approximately the kind of asshole Proud Warrior Race the Kzin are, what traits would they have?

Here's what I came up with:

First obvious thing is to give them a "harem" social system like gorillas, elephant seals, certain ungulates, etc.. This lends itself well to a species with a highly competitive male hierarchy in which male social and reproductive success is contingent on being able to make credible costly signals of being strong and badass.

One major obstacle to a species like that becoming a threat on the interstellar scale is control by a single dominant male is a pretty hard cap on group size. I propose that this species has overcome that by developing a social system with dominant bull coalitions, so instead of being limited to groups of one to three dozen individuals controlled by a single dominant male, they can have e.g. groups of a few thousand individuals controlled by a few hundred dominant bulls and so on; this eventually scaled up to an interstellar empire with billions of subjects and probably at least a few hundred million dominant bulls in loose coalition (that big dominant bull coalition is the empire's warrior-aristocrat class).

Unlike the Kzin, in this species the females will definitely be sapient and have lots of soft power; all the internal male social competition and external war and imperialism is largely about impressing them.

Another major point of difference from the Kzin: this species definitely should not have much evolutionary history of cooperative big game hunting. Pack hunting strongly incentivizes and rewards cooperation and solidarity (I suspect this plus the smaller group sizes of carnivores is why you see "harem" social organization more in herbivores), whereas I think to get aliens that are assholes in approximately the way the Kzin are we want a social system that's highly internally competitive. This probably implies a mostly herbivorous diet, though there might be some supplementation with small game; the important thing is this species has had basically no selection pressure for being effective predators of animals strong enough to require cooperation to take down.

Related and important point: the evolution of sapience in this species was more-or-less entirely driven by social competition and sexual selection, and they got too big to be tempting targets for the predators of their ancestral environment long before they developed sapience. So this is a species with no recent evolutionary history of being a prey species.

I guess we're maybe looking at something like a mix of gorillas and elephants here; maybe ancestrally browsers of the savanna and open woodland (though they'd gradually switch toward eating more richer food such as fruit, tubers, young shoots, meat, etc. as they developed more efficient food production). If we're doing the Mass Effect "more alien-looking than Star Trek forehead aliens but still implausibly humanoid" thing some kind of big beefy horned minotaur-looking humanoids would be a pretty appropriate look for the dominant bulls (with the subordinate males being more slender and the females being more slender and substantially smaller - this would be a species with way more sexual dimorphism than humans), not sure what I'd make them look like if I went the route of making them more realistically alien-looking.

Organized violence (i.e. war) developed in this species partly as a mating ritual. Large-scale battles gave males the same kind of opportunities to demonstrate strength and courage that fitness signalling duels did, but the much more complex tactical environment of a large-scale battle also offered opportunities for males to conspicuously demonstrate intelligence and cooperation. The switch from duels to battles as the primary arena of fitness signalling was a major selection pressure driving the evolution of sapience in this species. Originally the ultimate aim of war in this species was group fusion in which the dominant bull coalition of one group would defeat the dominant bull coalition of another group and the two groups would merge with the victorious dominant bull coalition being the dominant bull coalition of the combined group and the males in the defeated dominant bull coalition being either killed or demoted to subordinate status with their new lower rank being rubbed in by bullying and humiliation rituals. As the species developed bigger and more sedentary social groups this developed into territorial conquest with conquered communities remaining in their old homes under the rule of viceroys. But the thing where wars were partly giant mating rituals meant often neither side was particularly in a hurry to finish off their enemies as no more enemies to fight would mean diminished opportunities for social mobility and impressing females; there tended to be a "we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia" dynamic where the conflict itself was effectively treated as having social value and actively maintained and subject to various forms of ritualization that limited its destructiveness so it could be kept going longer.

So, this is a species that's gotten lots of selection pressure from intra-species competition and violence, but has no recent evolutionary history as cooperative predators of animals with comparable size and strength to themselves and has no recent evolutionary history as a prey species. This species will have instincts and intuitions about violence totally optimized for intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling rituals (and, of course, their culture will build on those instincts and intuitions and the dynamics that selected for them). I think this would lead plausibly to people who share one of the defining traits of the Kzin: being aggressive imperialist warmongering swaggering bullies who endlessly congratulate themselves on their ferocious warrior spirit and supposed mighty warrior prowess and supposed right to rule derived from that but are not actually all that good at war compared to a species like us that has been shaped by hunting and being hunted.

The thing about intra-species violence that's mostly a mix of coalition politics propaganda of the deed and male fitness signalling is it simultaneously incentivizes restraint more than inter-species predator/prey violence and incentivizes aggression more consistently than inter-species predator/prey violence.

On the restraint side, intra-species violence means potentially violence against relatives or potential mates, and in a social species violence against potential helpers. This obviously creates an incentive for restraint. Violent intra-species competition is where you get natural weapons and combat set up to probably not do too much damage (bighorn sheep knocking each other on their hard blunt horns instead of stabbing each other in the fleshy flank or face with sharp horns), notions of fair and honorable fights, "why don't you pick on someone your own size?," chivalry, rules of war, boxing gloves and rules against hitting below the belt, etc.. This post touches on some of the dynamics I'm talking about here.

I think plausible cultural development of this species might enhance this. A highly competitive "harem" social system means at least the males of this species are likely to be less cooperative than humans, and a less cooperative species will have a harder time forming effective equalizing coalitions. This species never got our probable evolutionarily significant period of living in mostly relatively egalitarian societies; compared to us their males at least are likely to be less wired for cooperative coalition-building and more wired for trying to individualistically climb their way up viciously competitive hierarchies; again, it seems likely this would make the formation of effective equalizing coalitions harder. The females are a bit of a wild card here, not sure what'd be going on with them, but considering they find aggressive, violent, domineering males sexy, I can see them not having instincts terribly promising for forming effective society-wide equalizing coalitions either. A species that's not very good at forming effective equalizing coalitions is likely to be not very good at coming up with ideologies of equality; equivalents of liberalism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, etc. may not exist at all in their philosophical tradition, or if they exist are likely to be obscure and marginal. The implication may be the political landscape of this species was a pretty dismal picture of oppressive oligarchies everywhere for pretty much the entire existence of their species. Like I said, I expect this species would develop a lot of practices to limit the destructiveness of war and focus its destructiveness on direct combatants. Defeat of a community in war would likely mean little change in the social or material conditions of most of the community's members; one oligarchic dominant bull coalition would replace another, and the only real change for most people would be a change in the names and faces (or scents or whatever they primarily recognize each other by) of their masters. Plausibly, the females of a conquered community would even approve of the change, seeing their community's new ruling dominant bull coalition as having proven themselves more desirable breeding material by winning. All of this would tend to encourage a sensibility that wars are basically social games between males and the only thing important at stake in them is the personal social and reproductive success of the direct combatants.

On the aggression side... Violent coalition politics involves lots of costly signalling, bluff, and martyrdom. The kind of violence a species like the one I'm describing here engages in is probably going to include a lot of violence that's basically an implicit statement of "I am exceptionally strong and brave and badass and would be an exceptionally good subordinate or ally, please give me a promotion!" And when it comes to male violence done as male fitness signalling to females, well, sperm is cheap and ova and wombs are expensive; in a "harem" social system demonstrating your mere viability will probably not be enough to impress females into mating with you, they are likely to require a costly signal of exceptional excellence before perceiving you as a desirable breeding partner, and if you die trying to make that costly signal, well, rolling the dice on a 65% chance of getting killed while young and a 35% chance of getting to breed might easily be selected for over contenting oneself with dying childless at a ripe old age.

Basically, I think you might plausibly end up with a species with bone-deep intuitions that:

- Violence is a performance, it is primarily communicative, using it to send a message to your opponent and/or to witnesses is at least an important secondary consideration and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome of the fight. It is not enough to simply defeat your enemy, you must do so in a way that effectively communicates what you want to communicate.

- The most consistent purposes of violence are to show off your own strength, bravery, and fighting prowess and to terrorize and humiliate your opponent into submission.

- War is basically a game played among males. It's not a trivial game, it's literally deadly serious for the males involved in it and your society is largely organized around it, but it's fundamentally a game; the only people who have really big stakes in it are the direct combatants, and having fun and displaying good sportsmanship and putting on a cool performance are important secondary considerations and may even be more important than the actual concrete outcome. If you've ever read Ian Banks's Player Of Games, Azad (the game and the institutions and culture around it) in that book is the best analogy I can think of for what war would be to these people.

- Your enemies will be basically following the same rule book you have.

When these people develop interstellar travel and meet other sapient species, they'll apply the instincts and cultural institutions they developed for intra-species competition to those other sapients. I.e. they'll turn into nasty imperialists. Conquered aliens would get incorporated into their society in about the same social position as weak males. In their society weak males with little hope of rising to dominant bull status are kept around for labor and to assist with the care and education of the offspring of their female relatives and have a social status roughly equivalent to serfs; this would be the obvious niche to put conquered aliens in, with some modifications, e.g. conquered aliens would be expected to keep reproducing with each other.

Combine what I said in the previous paragraph with how much these people's social instincts would revolve around volatile male hierarchies reinforced by bullying and humiliation rituals, and I expect being a conquered subject of them would tend to be unpleasant to horrific. Being a primarily herbivorous species, these people wouldn't occasionally eat their slaves like the Kzin, but I could totally see the dominant bulls occasionally casually caving some poor slave's skull in out of a combination of some petty irritation and wanting to remind everyone who's boss.

Let's say we want these people to get approximately the same nasty surprise when they attack humans that the Kzin did. Model favorable to that:

In this setting, the most common pathway to sapience is through social and sexual selection. Sapient species usually evolve in environments without big predators, e.g. isolated islands, because serious predation pressure tends to prevent the very strong commitment to a long-lived slow-breeding very K-selected life strategy that leads to sapience. Sapient species usually do not have recent evolutionary history as big game hunters (the typical sapient is a physically not very strong omnivore, often primarily an eater of fruit, tubers, seeds, insects, and small animals, though also a lot of sapient species started with an ecological niche roughly equivalent of fish-eating birds that nest in large rookeries). Species that evolve sapience through this pathway usually have strong social and artistic intelligence, but lack instincts and institutions of organized violence (they aren't always peaceful, but if they do have significant intra-species violence it's murder, done by individuals or very small groups, not war).

When the warmonger aliens I've spent most of this post describing meet species like this it usually goes similarly to what happened when the Maori met the Moriori, or at least like that event as described in a book I read once. The warmonger aliens will roll up and be like "Yo, what's up, losers! You are now our slaves! We're awfully fond of presents called 'tribute' which you'll be giving us regularly from now on, and you'll be obeying our orders from now on! You can start by performing these humiliating submission rituals to acknowledge our superiority!" and this will be kind of an OCP to their victims, who will usually either basically surrender immediately or try to resist but fold pretty quickly cause they aren't well-equipped for war psychologically, culturally, institutionally, or materially. The warmonger dominant bulls honestly find it kind of boring, to the point that they fight a lot of highly ritualized flower war style conflicts among themselves as a mix of oligarch class dispute resolution, bloody enrichment, and live fire training to keep their warrior skills sharp.

Basically, the galaxy is full of weedy theater kid nerds, and these warmonger aliens are the meathead jock bullies of the galaxy going around shoving those nerds into lockers and stealing their lunch money.

The exceptions to this pattern the warmonger aliens met before us were a mix of 1) other species like themselves, 2) sapient species with a long evolutionary history of being big game hunting carnivore more-or-less apex predators (who are basically sneaky raiders). The warmonger alien dominant bulls tend to hate the latter and bitch endlessly about how they "have no honor," but savor tangling with the former in a "finally, worthy opponents!" way.

Then they met humans.

Humans have a long enough evolutionary history of big game hunting that this may have subjected us to significant selection pressure for increased cooperativeness that the warmonger aliens didn't get. But that isn't special in this context, the warmonger aliens have tangled with sapients descended from big game hunting carnivores before.

The thing that makes humans relevantly special is our relatively recent evolutionary history of being a prey species that engaged in collective defense, and the instincts we have that formed in that context but can be activated in other kinds of conflict.

Going back to that "real fights" thing earlier:

"but how often are you ever going to be in a fight where you’re willing to rip the other guy’s cheek out, gouge out his eyes and so forth?"

A fight against a predator that wants to eat your child looks like that.

If you're fighting a member of your own species, the entity you're fighting might be a relative, potential mate, or potential helper, so there's an incentive for restraint.

If you're a predator hunting, well, a carnivore species needs their prey species, that's their food source; smart lions wouldn't want to wipe out their prey species, they need their prey species, they would prefer their prey species thrive and be abundant and healthy; again there is an incentive for restraint; very plausibly one of the first lessons a sapient carnivore species would have to collectively learn after becoming sapient is restraint, learning that it would be all too easy to use their new, better weapons to kill too many of their prey and that they need to consciously avoid doing that.

Prey defending themselves from predators are the ones who'd have more-or-less zero incentive for restraint. If you can hurt or kill the lioness that's trying to eat your child, there is basically no reason to not go for it except self-preservation. Predators need their prey, but that's not symmetrical; prey don't need their predators, and sapient prey smart enough to do birth control and cull any dumber competitor species would probably be unambiguously much better off if all their predators dropped dead (Pleistocene humans could have done semi-reliable birth control by abstinence, outercourse, and lactational amenorrhea).

Humans are a slow-breeding species. A pride of lions could easily gradually eat a small early human band into extinction, and would have little incentive to avoid doing so cause humans aren't even their primary prey so when they ran out of humans they could just eat more of the antelope and so on that are already most of what they're eating anyway. The warmonger aliens have no evolutionary history of conflicts so existential.

The warmonger aliens have an idea of self-sacrificial heroism, but their version is entirely oriented (in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way) toward burnishing the reputation of surviving close male relatives by association and thus increasing their reproductive success. They would have nothing in their recent evolutionary history like the experience of standing between a child and a hungry lioness. They would not grok "get away from her you bitch!" (that essay talks about the role of males in anti-predator defense but, yeah, women would have this too, who do you think would be the last line of defense for the children if a predator got past the male defensive ring?).

(The warmonger aliens definitely think it's a bit weird that we have mixed gender armies, not so much in a conventionally sexist way - they're inclined to see the size and strength differences between human men and women as obviously trivial compared to the much bigger sexual dimorphism of their species - but in that the idea of females caring enough about the outcome of a war to fight in it is alien to them. It's not that weird to them though, the big game hunter ancestry carnivore sapients they've encountered have mixed-sex armies and unwarlike sapients that try to resist conquest usually form them when they scramble to put a military together so it's got precedent in their experience.)

Like, yeah, the warmonger aliens are exactly the kind of people where some human commander would draw some of them into a clever trap they wouldn't anticipate cause prioritizing actually winning over looking heroic is alien behavior to them and then the comrades of the ones who died getting punked would bitch about how "dishonorable" it was of us to fight to win instead of obediently lining up to get slaughtered like cattle in some set-piece battle because that'd be the "honorable" thing by their definitions.

But also, something a lot like Londo Mollari's little speech about how brave the humans were in the Earth-Minbari war but it's some warmonger alien dominant bull describing the resistance we're putting up against his people and instead of admiration it's spoken with a tone of queasy puzzlement tinged with fear, irritation with our "irrational" resistance mixed with fear of the possible implications for what might happen if we start winning, it's alien behavior to him and he's admitting that it scares him.

Also, turns out species that have been strongly selected for solidarity (that's us!) are good at building equalizing coalitions and creating memes to coordinate them around, so not only are human ideologies of equality such as liberalism and communism effective at supercharging our resistance against imperialist conquest in a way that's an OCP to the warmonger aliens, they also turn out to be really disruptive to the warmonger aliens' shitty empire when some human chaos agents have fun spreading them around in it.

[pandemic-info]

Long-Term Long Covid - by Eric Topol

Unfortunately, what was seen at 6 months largely continues out to 2 years. 

... [New paper at] Nature Medicine addresses what happened 2 years later to nearly 140,000 people who had Covid, compared with almost 6 million people non-infected controls.

... in the non-hospitalized group a substantial proportion— about 30%— of the 80 sequelae, including GI and neurologic, remained significantly elevated. 

... I’d like to point out the data analyzed in this study was enormous, as I tried to capture with one of the supplemental tables below, representative of many others. The authors took on many advanced analytic approaches with weighting, conditional modeling, and sensitivity analyses that I’m not going to review here.

... While this is the first comprehensive and systematic study of Covid at 2 years, it unfortunately is within a highly skewed population. The demographics of nearly 90% men, with a mean age 61 years, is far different than the prototypic person with Long Covid who is more apt to be female and age 30-39 years. Furthermore, to get 2 year follow-up it meant studying a population who had Covid early in the pandemic, before vaccines or the marked evolution of the virus with new variants, including Delta, which was more virulent that the ancestral or Alpha strains that preceded it. So please keep this in mind—the results are important but they may well not be representative of the real world, broader population, of Covid and Long Covid. That’s already a major hole in our knowledge base since there is no other report yet to systematically address a more representative population.

...

Summary

At two years after Covid, there’s a persistent and considerable burden of symptoms and multi-system organ involvement in an important subgroup of people. It’s also unpredictable who will be afflicted with protracted symptoms and new medical diagnoses. While there still is no validated treatment (the Big Miss, as recently reviewed), Long Covid marches on, not just over time for most of those already suffering, but also among newly infected or re-infected individuals — like we are seeing now with increase in cases in the United States and many other countries. The main emphasis here, beyond the enduring and very concerning symptoms and organ dysfunction, is that we are still in the dark. It will take many years to fully know the sequelae of Covid, be it from unforeseen, delayed adverse outcomes like what occurred many years after influenza or polio, or the secondary outcomes of organ systems that are clearly affected, or via promotion of autoimmune conditions or pro-inflammatory pathways, potentially exacerbating risk of atherosclerosis. We’re going to need many more years of careful follow-up to fully understand the ways and extent Covid has hurt us. Meanwhile, beyond the known strategies for prevention of infection, we must consider finding effective ways to treat people who suffer from Long Covid as an urgent and foremost priority.

[heartandheathenry]

Book Review: Ancestral Grimoire

Ancestral Grimoire: Connect with the Wisdom of the Ancestors through Tarot, Oracles, and Magic by Nancy Hendrickson and Benebell Wen.

Available on Amazon for $15.99 (I am not getting paid for this review, I bought this on my own in February.)

Some accessories I’m using to help me work through Ancestral Grimoire: The Beloved Dead oracle by Carrie Paris and Tina Hardt (on sale for $27.49)

Rider Waite Tarot card stickers from Amazon (starts at $7.99)

Heart & Heathenry Grimoire - Tarot Reader’s Pack (on sale for $6) 

Disclosure: I created the Tarot Reader’s Pack, so I earn compensation should you choose to purchase from my Etsy shop. I do not earn compensation from posting the other links or this review. 

Read on for my review! 

Can anyone have magick in their blood? Or is ancestral witchery open to a select few?

Ancestral Grimoire by Nancy Hendrickson opens the door for a more inclusive initiation into working with magick in your family tree -whether that be nurturing those existing roots or planting the seeds yourself. 

The book starts out with an introduction to ancestral magick, and is really a workbook for building a corresponding grimoire. 

You’ll get to know some nifty tips on how to use tarot for communicating with your ancestors, as well as numerous exercises you can use to truly integrate tarot cards into your ancestral practice. 

Chapters of the book outline months of the year, with their own set of exercises and bits of info, making Ancestral Grimoire a true workbook - by the time you’re done you’ll have an entire Book of Shadows with something interesting to look forward to every month. 

My favorite parts: 

I LOVED connecting with my favorite tarot deck in a different way. I never thought I’d use my cards specifically for ancestral communication, but this book really changed the way I read, and I’ve been reading for more than two decades. 

There were super cool exercises on how to make your own oracle cards and other tools, and I truly enjoyed that process. It helped me break out of a crafting rut too! 

I was able to add so much more to my personal Book of Shadows than I ever had, pages and pages of exercises, tool kits and more that really supplement what I’ve been building on for years. I never thought of my own grimoire as a living document but this book really challenged the way I look at my craft and helped me to expand my horizons. 

I got super creative with building out my new grimoire, incorporating scrapbooking techniques and embellishments like stickers and washi tape. 

A few pain points:

I really attempted to do a full year of Ancestral work like the book recommends, since I bought the book in February, I did January and Feb.’s exercises at once, and moved on from there. I was definitely burned out by May, but that’s because I tried to go above and beyond on each chapter (literal scrapbooking!) I’ve been getting back into it with a simpler approach and it's been a breath of fresh air. 

It's a short book, but it’s $15.99, which could be out of price range for some budget-conscious witches. 

I’d love to see a companion notebook or workbook come out for this one, considering there are so many activities to do! 

The author, Nancy Hendrickson, also has another book called Ancestral Tarot. I’m thinking about picking this one up because of how impressive Hendrickson’s in-depth approach to divination was in Ancestral Grimoire. 

I have a lot of books on my list to review, but if there’s something you think I should read, let me know! ~ Ash

[hoyostans]

Operation Gekkou v3.6: Forgotten Legacy

Operation Gekkou 3.6: Forgotten Legacy is out now!

OG is a VN and translation of Houkai Gakuen 2/Guns GirlZ, to supplement the game for EN readers.

You can find it here:

Version 3.6 features about 57.3% of the recovered content for the Retrospective storyline translated.

Discover ghostly secrets in Haunted House, meet Kaguya in her world boss stories, discover Bronya's secret past, witness the ancestral legacy...

And more to discover in Lookahead Mode!!

Changelog: https://shorturl.at/zdyTG

Please help us spread the word! Your support means a lot to us. The team has expanded, and we are excited to continue expanding the app.

[revivifyhealth]

More than half of the world's population is thought to be deficient in micronutrients. This is when the ancestral supplements mofo might come in handy. All you have to do is get in touch with Revivify Health and look through our extensive line of Healing and Meditation Products. Iodine, sodium chloride, magnesium, and adaptogenic characteristics are abundant in ancestral minerals, which assist energy generation, thyroid, and adrenal health. Our stuff is completely unadulterated. This implies that none of the extras that most supplement firms provide to save time and money will be visible. It's time to give up table salt in favour of ancient sea salt. The answer to the question of how we've developed so swiftly is easy. Through technology, we have positioned ourselves to give the best and cheapest goods as well as the greatest customer service imaginable.

[brad-kearns]

Why Is Improving and Selecting More Nutrient Dense Foods to Eat

Eating more nutrient-dense foods is one of the best ways to improve your health and well-being. It’s a simple concept that can have a profound impact on your overall health. But what exactly are nutrient-dense foods and why is it so important to eat them? In this article, we’ll explore the science behind the importance of eating nutrient-dense foods and provide tips on how to select and improve your diet with such foods.

Brad Kearns is an expert in nutrition, fitness, and health, and his research has shown that improving and selecting more nutrient dense foods to eat has a direct correlation with boosting testosterone naturally. This is due to the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients found in nutrient dense foods that are essential for natural hormone production. As such, it is important to prioritize these nutrient dense foods over processed and refined foods that offer little in the way of nutrition. By increasing one’s intake of nutrient dense foods, optimal testosterone production can be maintained and boosted.

Brad Kearns, a leading expert on health and fitness, has highlighted the importance of improving and selecting more nutrient-dense foods to eat to boost testosterone levels naturally. He believes that adding nutrient-dense foods, such as fresh fruits and animal proteins, especially grass-fed red meat and organ meats, can help to significantly increase testosterone levels. Eating these foods not only provides the body with essential vitamins and minerals but also helps to maintain a healthy weight, which is vital for improving testosterone levels. Furthermore, avoiding processed food and sugar can also help, as these can hurt the body, including reducing testosterone levels. As such, taking the time to select and improve the nutrient-dense foods in one’s diet is an essential step towards boosting testosterone levels naturally.

Brad Kearns, the renowned nutrition expert, and the author is a strong advocate for improving and selecting more nutrient dense foods to eat. He emphasizes the importance of such foods to provide the body with essential vitamins and minerals it needs to maintain optimal health. According to Kearns, consuming supplements such as MOFO from Ancestral Supplements can help us achieve this goal. This freeze-dried animal organ supplement offer an abundance of nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and more. With regular use, MOFO and other high quality supplements can help us sustain healthy energy levels, improve our concentration and memory, and maintain our physical and mental well-being.

Nutrition plays a crucial role in our overall well-being. To improve our overall health and well-being, it is important to ensure that we are fueling our bodies with nutrient dense foods. With the help of healthy dietary supplements such as MOFO from Ancestral Supplements, we can make sure that we get the essential nutrients and minerals needed to boost our energy levels, cognitive functions, and physical health. Incorporating nutrient dense foods into a balanced diet can help us achieve optimal health.

[modern-inheritance]

Human Rider Changes

Brom wasn't altered the way Eragon was, but in MIC I'm gonna say even the human Riders were altered by the bond, beyond the slightly more elfish appearance and pointed ears.

Over time Humans start getting the more pointed tooth shape that unaltered elves are born with. It takes FAR longer, but they also start to grow a very thin version of the controllable tapetum lucidum, but most can't use it the way elves can at will.

Human Riders also begin to get faster reflexes, larger energy stores, slightly higher than normal strength and endurance for their physiques, increased night vision in general, and I really really want to say longer periods of high neuroplasticity (ease of learning, adaptations, etc) going further into adulthood (though neuroplasticity IS seen in adults, it's not to the extent seen in childhood, but don't quote me on that I haven't read up on it very much lately) but I don't have a reason for that really. I feel like elves naturally keep a fairly high level of neuroplasticity, maybe some effect of dragons ancestral memories (god damn i wanna explore that too and for some reason I think it would lead me to papers and fish and birds and I'm....I'm not up for that just yet).

Magic use can speed up these changes, though it's still a very gradual process. One of the risk factors, however, is that while their strength is not terribly increased, there's still a posibility that their strength can be dangerous to them. Magic use is typically restricted to practice and training while being taught by masters so that explosive use of magic won't lead to a far faster increase in strength, before the bones have adapted to it.

Elves, when they have access to it, incorporate a leafy green called Tinleaf into their diets, along with a variety of (currently unnamed, let me cook) fruits and other vegge that grow in Du Weldenvarden and were brought to the Rider's island. Tinleaf and these other foods are high in dietary titanium, nickel chloride/sulfate, and zirconium silicate, all used in their bone structure which incoperates alloys that allow them to be so resistant to their strength without shattering bones by walking and hitting things. When out of the forest/not around sources of these food/plants, elves have supplements they can take if without natural sources for too long.

wait what was i talking about

OH.

These changes are why Arya is still a bit baffled/confused when she's with the Varden and learning of all these things these humans can't do/don't have going on with their bodies. Brom's changes were still early stage, but he still had some, and she just kinda assumed they were all like that. She was practically a kid at that point, confused why the books she read didn't mention any of that stuff, and then Caleb, Sam, Simon and the rest are having to explain a LOT.

I also found it both jarring and a nice reminder when reading Murtagh (shhhh look okay I just want the fancy cover one and then I'll finish it the ADHD is not good with these things I can't just sit and read anymore it's painful and I don't know why. You know what, send me a hurricane, knock my power out for a week, and I'll finish it before the deluxe release.) that Eragon is NOT the norm for human Riders. He is not human anymore. He is more elf. His strength and energy stores are FAR beyond what human Riders were capable of, unless i just haven't reached some plot twist yet.

I would say that it made the Forsworn make so much more sense, but a VAST majority of the Forsworn we know were elves. Human Riders could have had so much resentment towards their elven counterparts, even with their partners by their side and all the gifts the bonding gave them, it could have been almost crushing to see what elf Riders could do even without formal training.

I wanted/want to put Murtagh on somewhat more even footing after the war in MIC. Without Galbatorix's spells, he's still far more human than Eragon, but he's stronger than any other human man of his size, stature and physique, he's faster, he learns faster, and he can maintain and cast spells well beyond what a regular human mage can, even with training. With more Ancient Language under his belt, more time with Thorn, more practice, he would be (and is) well beyond anything any human could accomplish even with both training for decades and a wealth of natural talent.

Maybe at some point a more significant though still gradual increase in strength, speed, ect, all the elfy things, is introduced to the Rider Bond using the Word/the Name. Resentment from the non-elven students is something I worry about if other Rider species/races are left with nothing to put them at an equal level.

this got off the rails. whoops.

[fromthedust]

Hergé (Belgian, May 22, 1907 - March 3, 1983)

Belgian author and artist, 1907-1983. Translated into over thirty languages, Hergé’s adventure stories about the brave and resourceful young reporter Tintin are popular with both children and adults throughout the world In twenty-four book-length comic strips, Tintin and his faithful fox terrier, Snowy, embark on a series of thrilling global adventures set in remarkably detailed, meticulously researched landscapes.

Hergé. whose real name is Georges Remi (he devised his pen name by inverting his initials to R.G.), pub­lished the first Tintin adventure in Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement to Le Vingtieme Siecle, in 1929. Published in book form in 1930 as Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, this primitive work is the only one of the series that was not later translated into color, with the exception of Tintin and the Alpha-Art, a work unfin­ished when Herge died and left in sketch form at his request.

The second adventure, Tintin in the Congo (1931), reflects a contemporary European view of Africa based on ignorance and portrays the African people as gullible and naive. Neither Congo nor the fanatically anti-Communist Soviets has yet been published in the United States.

In Tintin in America (1932), Tintin takes on Chicago mobster Al Capone, and Hergé’s sociopolitical satire becomes more sophisticated as he depicts the National Guard driving the Blackfoot Indians away from their ancestral lands. But it is probably The Blue Lotus (1936) that marks Hergé’s refinement of detail and concern for accuracy.

After befriending a young Chinese student who urged him to avoid common stereotypes, Hergé began to delve further into research of the physical and cultural landscape. The story is a clear protest of Japa­nese expansionism on the Chinese mainland and of the treatment of the Chinese people by many Westerners. Hergé’s friend appears as young Chang in The Blue Lotus and later in Tintin in Tibet (i960), a story of true friendship Hergé claims as his favorite.

Ostensibly a journalist, Tintin is seen reporting to his editor only once in the series and follows his sense of adventure and justice rather than any particular assign­ment. In the course of his adventures he encounters a colorful cast of characters who become his cohorts: The bumbling, ineffectual detectives Thompson and Thom­son, the rough old sea dog Captain Haddock with his legendary penchant for drinking whiskey and hurling passionate but innocent insults, and the absent-minded but ingenious Professor Cuthbert Calculus provide both help and hindrance throughout Tintin’s travels.

All of these characters find their way aboard the first manned rocket bound, for the moon in Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1954), in which Tintin, Snowy Captain Haddock, and Thompson and Thomson set foot on the moon fifteen years before Neil Armstrong landed in Apollo 11.

Hergé constructed a detailed scale model of a German U2 rocket to create the drawings, and his extensive scientific research gives the books remarkable accuracy and foresight. While most of the Tintin stories are noticeably devoid of women, opera singer Bianca Castafiore takes center stage as a strong female character in The Castafiore Emerald (1963).

Charles de Gaulle once remarked, “My only interna­tional rival is Tintin.” 

                       source: Children’s Books and their Creators by Anita Silvey.

Hergé’s Tintin books in chronological order:

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets – (Tintin au pays des Soviets) (1929–1930)

Tintin in the Congo – (Tintin au Congo) (1930–1931)

Tintin in America – (Tintin en Amérique) (1931–1932)

Cigars of the Pharaoh – (Les Cigares du Pharaon) (1932–1934)

The Blue Lotus – (Le Lotus bleu) (1934–1935)

The Broken Ear – (L’Oreille cassée) (1935–1937)

The Black Island – (L’Ile noire) (1937–1938)

King Ottokar’s Sceptre – (Le Sceptre d’Ottokar) (1938–1939)

The Crab with the Golden Claws – (Le Crabe aux pinces d’or) (1940–1941)

The Shooting Star – (L’Etoile mystérieuse) (1941–1942)

The Secret of the Unicorn – (Le Secret de la Licorne) (1942–1943)

Red Rackham’s Treasure – (Le Trésor de Rackam le Rouge) (1943)

The Seven Crystal Balls – (Les Sept boules de cristal) (1943–1946)

Prisoners of the Sun – (Le Temple du soleil) (1946–1948)

Land of Black Gold – (Tintin au pays de l’or noir) (1948–1950) 

Destination Moon – (Objectif Lune) (1950–1953)

Explorers on the Moon – (On a marché sur la Lune) (1950–1953)

The Calculus Affair – (L’Affaire Tournesol) (1954–1956)

The Red Sea Sharks – (Coke en stock) (1956–1958)

Tintin in Tibet – (Tintin au Tibet) (1958–1959)

The Castafiore Emerald – (Les Bijoux de la Castafiore) (1961–1962)

Flight 714 to Sydney – (Vol 714 pour Sydney) (1966–1967)

Tintin and the Picaros – (Tintin et les Picaros) (1975–1976)    

[signamagicae]

Perception Is Divination

Since what we experience as reality is a subjective assemblage combining predictive hallucinations and post hoc mathematical reconstructions compiled from a set of limited sensory impressions, how can we state that anything that we experience is, in fact, real?

And if all we have regarding comprehension is limited to our subjective experience and interpretation  of data received and processed in this way, can we even begin to say what reality is?

Reality is inferred, but never clearly perceived through the warped window of our senses. Science supplements our senses and makes postulations, philosophy argues its meaning and meaninglessness, and religion shackles the mind to a raft of holy assertions, yet none of them comes any closer to the truth.

Some say there is no truth, that there is no fixed reality, and that paradox is proof that truth is unstable at best and non existent at worst. This is not to say that science doesn’t work or that philosophy is without value, or that religion, or constructs like it, are without practical importance regarding social cohesion and indoctrination. But we have learned that our perceptions are predictive hallucinations showing us only what they predict should be there based on causal conditioning.

It’s all a projection and time and space have little meaning outside of our experience of it.

The interface theory of perception tells us that spacetime, and everything that we see in it, including ourselves, is a projection of our brains, like the desktop interface of an unfathomable computer.

Are then our brains, as we can see and experience them, projections of something else? Is not then all that we can experience thus? Perception’s purpose, we know, is to drive behavior according to fitness based imperatives and truth has nothing to do with it.

These projections that we experience as reality do not show us truth, nor are they meant to. They are only purposeful hallucinations. Useful mirages meant to drive optimal fitness behaviors that were developed by evolutionary pressures in the ancestral environment.

Our perceptions do not show us truth. Nor are they meant to because, in biological terms, truth isn’t useful. And studies using powerful supercomputers have demonstrated that organisms that see truth vs. organisms that perceive according to fitness behaviors have stunningly short life spans. And so all of reality as we can know it is an illusion and some think it may even be a simulation. An idea not far from gnostic cosmological conceptions if you consider this simulation a matrix-style prison of shared hallucinations and individual dreams.

We know brains only show us a prediction of a moment that has already passed. And what we see is only a post hoc reconstruction of a 3D cross section of 4D matter enfolded in approximately 7 more dimensions.

What this tells us is that perception is identical to divination and that things like Runes, Tarot, and I Ching augment our brains' predictive capabilities. In fact, many non-standard methods can be devised that behave in similar ways. They do so because our brains are hot, wet quantum computers that operate through entanglement and probability, seizing on the resonance of patterns and constantly seeking meaning in the noise of existence.

Our brains create patterns where there are none and reality behaves as if they are there. It is the basis of all magic in a sense, and it is how quantum states of superposition collapse as if the subatomic particles involved somehow know that we are going to observe them before we actually do.

It would seem that consciousness predicts the Universe while the Universe predicts us. Mind and matter are the same stuff. Soul and substance are the same thing and reality is the divination of yourself.

by ᐯ丨丂丨ㄥㄩ乂 - ©️ 2024

[platycat3]

Most oral histories of indigenous peoples around what we now call North America have been excluded from partaking in discussions around the history of the land, by western scholars. “Braiding Sweetgrass” is a novel by Robin Wall Kimmerer that includes an oral story and her interpretation. In the context of how we analyse global history, we mostly rely on material, visual and textual sources to piece together a narrative of interactions and exchanges between societies around Afro-Eurasia. This approach doesn’t quite work in the context of oral histories on Turtle Island, as not all are available in a transcribed format, due to various reasons.

Kimmerer recounts the Potawatomi creation story of Skywoman, who initiates and witnesses the creation of Turtle Island, also known as the North American continent. She states that of all the plants that Skywoman brings from the Skyworld, the first she plants is sweetgrass, which makes it of great significance to her and her people 6. Sweetgrass is used to weave baskets, adorn hair, and is  used in ceremonial processes. What makes this use of sweetgrass global, is that not only do the Potwatomi use it in the production and weaving of baskets, but so do many other indigenous peoples, including my ancestral people, the Nehijaw, or Plains Cree. This widespread use of sweetgrass implies that this shared use of the plant spread from group to group. This method of using sweetgrass establishes itself as a long-lived tradition among many indigenous peoples living on Turtle Island, making it a global occurrence. Additionally, this piece is also global in the sense that the story itself is old, as it comes from what is known as Deep Time, making its continuous retelling and reinterpretation a somewhat process, considering that it also has survived the onset (and continued operation) of colonialism in North America. This is illlustrated in the comparison that Kimmerer makes between the Christian creation story and the story of Skywoman, by juxtaposing the Garden of Eden from which Eve was banished, with the garden Skywoman planted 6. There is wisdom and knowledge to be gained by retelling and interpreting the story of Skywoman, the way Kimmerer has by sharing it with her students as well as with the readers of her piece, furthering its global significance and the way outsiders can begin to understand the perspectives of the Potwatomi people. 

In terms of bias and our interpretation, the most relevant bias to address would be the nature of oral histories in general, that being that the knowledge is often inaccessible to a general audience on the same scale as written and published accounts are. Additionally, oral histories cannot be used identically to written histories, due to them focussing on different aspects of recounting history. Furthermore, the piece isn’t biased in the same way that written histories are, as the biases are attributed to the person retelling the story, whereas written histories, where the bias originates from the author. In contrast to most of my other entries, the global significance of this entry is more abstract, as it supplements the Eurocentric narrative of “official history’.