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amer-ainu · 4 years

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Ancestral Ainu Remains Returned by Tokyo University by Noah Oskow

A long fight by Japan's indigenous Ainu results in a hard-won victory - but much more remains to be done. Resting Once Again Amongst Their People

On August 22nd, a Kamuinomi – an Ainu ceremony meant to celebrate the return of spirts to the realm of the gods – was held in Urahoro, in eastern Hokkaido. The sacrament’s purpose was that of welcoming back six sets of indigenous remains, taken long ago by Japanese researchers based out of the famed Tokyo University. The researchers first removed the Ainu remains from their gravesites in 1889, in the early Meiji Era; later, others returned in 1965, in the post-war era, for more.

The group receiving the ancestral remains was the Raporo Ainu Nation, the local Urahoro indigenous organization. For them, it was a day of quiet celebration – the culmination of a series of victories in their quest to reclaim stolen Ainu remains.

Raporo Ainu Nation had previously brought court cases against Hokkaido and Sapporo Medical Universities, both of which housed innumerable Ainu skeletons; all have now been returned to their homelands. Tokyo University, despite earlier protestations, was now also acquiescing to similar demands.

Six wooden boxes were laid out in front of a large freshly dug grave. Besides the waiting earth sat the Ainu delegation, bedecked in traditional clothing. They chanted in the Ainu tongue – one unrelated to the Japanese language which otherwise surrounded them. (Unlike the languages of the native Ryukuans, Ainu is not a Japonic language.) Libations of sake were offered to the kamuy, the spirits. Then, the remains were finally reinterred in the land from which they had so long ago been taken.

The Abduction of their Ancestors

The impetus for the veritable grave plundering of Ainu bones was ostensibly scientific: the desire by Japanese researchers to learn more about the physical and, later, genetic make-up of the indigenous ethnic minorities native to Japan’s northern borders. Indeed, at the time of the first unearthing, Hokkaido (and the native Ainu people along with them) had only recently been fully incorporated into Japan.

Previous to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Hokkaido wasn’t even “Hokkaido;” rather, it was Ezo, a frontier borderland peopled by those the Japanese considered “barbarians.” A relatively small Japanese settler colony ruled by the Matsumae clan existed on the southern tip of Oshima Penninsula, which regulated trade with the Ainu and oversaw Japanese financial control of the island.

Sadly, this led to the entire field of Ainu Studies being essentially founded on grave robbery.

Previous to Japanese encroachment and eventual control, the Ainu people lived in villages scattered across Ezo, Sakhalin Island, and the Kurils. While they had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that appeared uncivilized to the Japanese, Ainu society was in fact more complex than most interlopers perceived.

Beyond their advanced hunting and fishing techniques, the Ainu were also part of a diverse and expansive trade network that stretched from Hokkaido in the south, to Kamchatka in the far north. Ainu traders rode in dugout canoes to the Asian mainland, where they traded with the indigenous peoples of the Amur river basin. Sakhalin Ainu even made war with the Mongol-controlled Yuan dynasty of China, and later engaged in tributary trading with the Ming and Yuan dynasties.

High-quality silk brocades given to Ainu chieftains by the Chinese became prized goods for trade with encroaching Japanese from the south. It was access to these Chinese goods and Ainu-hunted pelts, furs, painted Sakhalin beads, and live falcons that made Japanese samurai desirous towards control of Ainu trade. Japanese trading pressure; exploitative and often coerced use of Ainu labor in Japanese fisheries; the ravages of newly introduced diseases; all these brought irreparable damage to the Ainu environment and society.

The Myth of a Naturally Doomed People

In 1889, in the midst of Japan’s headlong rush towards modernity, the Japanese government passed the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. The Ainu were now officially considered Japanese. In practice, this meant they were subject to forced cultural assimilation that further disrupted their society and lead, ironically, to mass discrimination.

The Ainu’s were now a periphery people scheduled to be made “Japanese,” their “aboriginal” status to be forgotten as quickly as possible. In light of the notion that the Ainu were now a “disappearing tribe,” Japanese researchers became intent on taking as many artifacts of the Ainu’s material culture as possible before the earth swallowed them up. This is part of what resulted in the initial untombing of the Ainu remains just recently returned by Tokyo University.

In these inaugural years of the field of ‘Ainu Studies” (アイヌ学), previously held ideas about Ainu “barbarians” were melded with the emerging scientific field of evolution, leading Japanese researchers to make various claims about Ainu inferiority to “more evolved” Japanese society. Researchers, although often empathetic towards the plight of the impoverished Ainu, believed the only way to “save” the object of their research was to assimilate them out of existence. As Ainu ties to their craft traditions waned and the people themselves were assumed to be on the brink of annihilation, researchers felt the need to collect and document as much as possible.

A Dark Legacy for Ainu Studies

The Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples (Hoppo Minzoku Hakubutsukan) exhibits about the culture of Ainu native people and other northern peoples of the world.

Sadly, this led to the entire field of Ainu Studies being essentially founded on grave robbery. In both 1864 and 1865, mere years before the fall of the Tokugawa dynasty, the British consul in Hakodate led a group of foreigners interested in uncovering the mystery of the Ainu’s “Caucasian” features to secretly raid Ainu gravesites. When the story broke, it became a major scandal (even resulting in the firing of the consul).

Yet subsequent Japanese researchers continued to seek out Ainu bones for well over a century. Sometimes this was done with the understanding of local Ainu. (As often happened with Ainu crafts, money was possibly exchanged). Other times, however, researchers hoping to learn more about this “disappearing tribe” engaged in acts that very much resembled the previous British consul’s.

Ancestors Unearthed

Most infamous of the grave robbers was Hokkaido University Professor Kodama Sakuzaemon, who lead various state-sanctioned raids into local boneyards throughout the 1920s to 1970s – all against Ainu protests. Sometimes police were called in to help hold off Ainu from physically preventing the unearthing of their ancestors. As is recalled in the book Beyond Ainu Studies, a 1930’s bone-collecting expedition resulted in…

…the entire village police force [being] enlisted to assist Kodama’s team and when three or four elderwomen threw their bodies over their ancestors’ grave sites they were unceremoniously removed by attending officers. The end result of decades of university researchers stealing thousands of ancestral remains was an Ainu populace who often distrusted and felt anger towards those Japanese academics and scientists who, ostensibly, wanted to understand the Ainu. Especially egregious to the Ainu was the fact that, within their tradition, bodies are to buried whole in order to maintain a tie to the spirit.

Painful Memories

Our land, Ainu Mosir, had been invaded, our language stripped, our ancestral remains robbed, the blood of living Ainu taken, and even our few remaining utensils carried away. At this rate, what would happen to the Ainu people? For Kayano Shigeru (萱野茂, 1926 – 2006), the first Ainu in Japanese parliament and a major voice for indigenous rights, the spiriting away of Ainu skeletons and artifacts by mainland researchers was a source of much shame. In his famous memoir, Our Land Was A Forest, Kayano recalled returning home to find treasured artifacts missing; his impoverished father had sold them away to researchers.

In those days I despised scholars of Ainu culture from the bottom of my heart. They used to visit my father for his extensive knowledge of the Ainu. I often railed at them and, accusing them of behavior as rude as that of waking a sleeping child, ordered them never to return. Professor K. [likely Kodama] of Hokkaido University was one at whom I snarled many times… They dug up our sacred tombs and carried away ancestral bones. Under the pretext of research, they took blood from villagers and, in order to examine how hairy we were, rolled up our sleeves, then lowered our collars to check our backs… It was this same anger and desire to recover the Ainu culture that lead Kayano to become such a major voice in the question for indigenous rights in Japan.

Seeing such self-centered conduct by shamo [Japanese] scholars, I asked myself whether matters should be left as they were: Our land, Ainu Mosir, had been invaded, our language stripped, our ancestral remains robbed, the blood of living Ainu taken, and even our few remaining utensils carried away. At this rate, what would happen to the Ainu people? What would happen to Ainu culture? From that moment on, I vowed to take them back.

The Fight to Reclaim the Ancestors

It was with the same spirit of cultural recovery that Ainu groups from around Hokkaido have set out to gain the return of their ancestor’s remains. In 2008, after centuries of denial and erasure, the Japanese government suddenly announced that the Ainu were to be legally considered the indigenous people of the north. Although by this point there remained only around 25,000 self-declared Ainu with only a few elderly native speakers still living, this signaled a huge victory for Ainu rights. In 2013, the Ainu council of Kineusu used their new indigenous status as a basis for suing Hokkaido University for the return of uninterred Ainu bones.

More lawsuits followed. Slowly, the ancestral remains and funerary artifacts sitting in collections and in storage across universities in Japan began to be returned. Hokkaido University, home to more Ainu remains than any other facility in Japan, played a major role in these skeletal repatriations. In July, Hokkaido opened the Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony – a “national center for the revival and development of Ainu culture.” The center is to host the National Ainu Museum and National Ainu Park. Importantly, it also has a space to carefully store Ainu remains. Still, the Symbolic Space itself has become controversial with Ainu, with some hoping for the return of remains more directly to Ainu communities.

The Way Forward

The return of the ancestral remains by Tokyo University on Saturday comes amidst an interesting time for the Ainu community. Recognition of the Ainu and their culture is one the rise worldwide, they finally have recognition by the Japanese government, and cultural revival movements are gaining steam. Young Ainu are engaged in reconnecting with their heritage, learning their language, and sharing their culture with others. Hokkaido schools will soon have textbooks that make multiple references to Ainu history. The field of Ainu Studies has evolved, now placing more primacy on the perceptions of the Ainu themselves and welcoming more Ainu scholars.

Yet still, Ainu face discrimination and erasure. A national survey from only four years ago revealed that a huge 74% of Japanese people had never been exposed to Ainu culture or people. The now-delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics suddenly axed an Ainu ceremony planned for the opening ceremonies. Progress is being made, but it’s not always enough.

Yet, on Saturday, as the burial of six sets of remains in Urahoro marked the complete return of a total of 103 such Ainu once held at Tokyo University, Raporo Ainu Nation honorary president Masaki Sashima found himself becoming emotional.

この瞬間を迎えられて感無量です。遺骨には『今まで待たせて申し訳ありませんでした。静かに眠ってください』とお祈りしました。I’m overcome with feeling having reached this moment. I prayed to the remains of the deceased, saying, “I’m greatly sorry for having made you wait so long. Please rest in peace.”

The earth of the Ainu Moshir, the Ainu homeland, once again embraced the ancestral remains, welcoming them home.

Sources (08月22日). 東大返還アイヌの人の遺骨を埋葬. NHK News Web.

Kayano, S. (1994). Our Land Was A Forest : An Ainu Memoir. Routledge.

Hudson, M.J., Lewallen, A., & Watson, M.K. (2014). Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Walker, B. (2001). The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion,1590-1800. University of California Press.

Kimura, K. (2015, July 25). Japan’s indigenous Ainu sue to bring their ancestors’ bones back home. The Japan Times.

#Ainu #Ainu Moshiri #Ancestors #Hokkaido #Tokyo #Tokyo University #Japan #colonialism #colonial violence #genocide #grave robbing #racism #institutional racism

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supersexystonersecretssavwlives · 4 years

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Hey! People that don't think science is neat are provably wrong. This'll probably be a bit long but I just woke up and I'm pissed off that fucking anti-science movements still exist and in some cases are gaining popularity. Seriously? All of the cool shit we have now and all of the cool shit that'll exist in the future are a direct result of a continuous chain of human curiosity dating back to our first ancestors smashing certain rocks together and finding them sharp like a big cat's claws and teeth, that cooking meat (WITH FIRE!!) is probably better than eating it raw and sharing it with the group. Okay maybe not "Science" yet, but then with tools we traveled the mudball until we figured agriculture might work more consistently (this shift from Nomadic to Settled seems likely The Pandora's Box where we over developed our ability to "Other" members of our own species.) This lead to an as yet unheard of caloric surplus! Which in turn freed up time and energy to figure out how to make better tools, clothing, and shelter which marginally improved the life expectancy which gave us room to wonder why not grow animals? Boom, pack animals further reduce the time and energy an individual would need to expend on basic survival needs and pictographs become written language(s), mathematics, and new avenues of creative expression. Some time passes and the tribes begin to commingle again and our stories are all similar but nothing seems to translate as universally as math so it's time to start figuring shit out! We now began in earnest the process of trial and error that would eventually be hammered and shaped into the most effective system for figuring out all the raw truths of the universe behind any question we could ever think to ask and many we likely would never have thought to ask where it not for the answers we'd found using it. The Scientific Method, born of the struggle of a curious species to which the challenge of knowing the unknown is purpose and each secret uncovered provides comforts for it's progeny that (hopefully) become tools to tease out further knowledge. Science is too important a tool to dull and tarnish within the hands of politicians, pundants, evangelists and tyrants though it's often too preoccupied with solving problems to effectively defend itself from those frustrating factions that demand ignorance, complete compliance and complacency. Those who would burn the tree of knowledge and starve, rather than taste of it's fruits the bittersweet idea to thrive! Infantile and petulant adults that throught the whole of our shared history have sought to selfishly hide away the tools that could craft a better world, silence those who might question, revising and erasing as is convenient to maintain their flimsy fleeting and ultimately useless beliefs of absolute superiority. However you've been given another gift, passed down from those first ancestors and with each generation refined further with the ever expanding font of knowledge, Your brain!! You can learn, adapt, form independent thoughts, and solve any problem given sufficient effort. So I guess my point is... As we face this and crisis remember that it is a familiar one, we've seen it solved before! But the best part is if we decide that solution didn't have the desired effect we can use it to devise a better one.

#Long text #Fuck flatearth #fuck antivax #Fuck paywalls for knowledge #Fuck Chairman Mao #Fuck fundamentalist religion if it denies empirical truth #Actually fuck EVERYBODY that denies empirical truth

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helloecoleglobale · 4 years

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Why You Should Adopt a Visual Learning Strategy in Your Classroom

Our brain is a miraculous organ capable of process vast amounts of information in only seconds. However, it's higher at absorbing some kinds of information than it is others.

Consider, let's say, the following: once you read a passage of text, your brain scans the text for which means, decoding an ocean of syntax, syllables, syllogisms, euphemisms, phonemes, metaphors and all manner of rules and methods to uncover the most significant units of information.

Whether you are reading a glossy magazine, the business section of a newspaper, or late-Romantic poetry – the brain will depend on its level of coaching, sift its way through a staggering quantity of material in an imposingly short amount of time.

It is unbelievable, no doubt, but not nearly as incredible because it gets.

Visual Learning Engages Learners

One of the best boarding school of India Ecole Globale says Students currently have a lot of ways of accessing and consuming visual info than ever before. Videos and pictures are more effective at winning their attention and keeping them engaged than exclusively text-based content.

But communication isn't exclusive to those media; it will extend to visual elements such as icons, colors, and even completely different font types and sizes – all of which may be very effective at simplifying challenging ideas to decrease learning time, improve comprehension, enhance retrieval, and increase retention.

Indeed, far from signaling a death knell for text, visual content works best when used with written language. This is often something that was known in "Visual language and converging Technologies in the Next 10-15 Years," a paper presented at Stanford University by Robert in 2001.

Brains are Image Processors

While the brain's capability to decipher written info is remarkable, its capability for process visual info is nothing short of phenomenal. Just think about this fact: the human brain will process visible info as much as 60,000 times quicker than it will text.

This preference for visual info is often copied back to ancient times before language introduced when humans roam the world around them directly through sight and sound.

Indeed, your sensory cortex has evolved over countless millennia to quickly method and study visual information. This evolution gave our ancient ancestors a higher chance of survival because it allowed them to spot prey swiftly and recognize predators before it was too late.

Of course, the fact that the mind is an image processor first and foremost shouldn't be too shocking. In fact, it has been recognized for several years by academics, managers, and advertisers using chalkboards, charts, and posters to communicate their messages. However, the difference between ten or twenty years ago, and these days is that we currently consume more visual information than ever before.

In India there are some boarding schools in India that have been adopted visual learning Strategy in Classroom for their students for more information.

#smart classe #learning strategy #technology in education #how to use technology in education

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prairiedust · 6 years

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The Folkloristics of Supernatural

So. Something interesting is happening in Season 14. I suspected that it was coming when they revealed in 12 that Jack’s name would be Jack. Jack as in “the Giant Killer” Jack. Jack like “Jack Tales.” Jack from all of the “Jack and the Devil” stories. This Jack. But Dabb is running a long mytharc, so last season was the set-up for this season-- priming the pump, if you will, for what the writers are doing now, and it came to fruition in the first few episodes.

As I said before, we got a hint of this theme in Jack’s name as well as in the way the season wrapped up with grieving Dean and Dead!Cas mirroring the last scene of despairing Cas and Possessed!Dean. Folklore brings with it the other thematic elements we’ve seen so far-- mirrors (oh my god the mirrors,) recursion and repetition, callbacks, sleep, and sleep-like death.

But why folklore *in particular*? And how is “folklore” as a theme in seasons 13 and 14 any different from the fact that this is a show *based* on folk tales?

This season, the writers are not only telling stories drawn from folklore, they are using folklore and folkloristics (the academic discipline) as a theme.

Andrew Dabb wrote a formulaic tale into the premiere, and I flipped my lid. A formula tale is one that relies on a set structure, such as the tale of Henny Penny, The Little Red Hen, or the Fisherman and his Wife, where challenges or episodes are repeated over and over until all the possibilities are exhausted or something breaks the chain. The story of Michael’s quest is a tale that relies on formula as well as on the structure of a “rule of three,” or two challenges that fail and one that succeeds. He asked a human and an angel what they wanted, before finding a monster whose desires he considered purest. Compare that structure to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or The Three Little Pigs. I have a much more in-depth analysis of the “rule of three” that I will post later. This and other “folklore” elements in the next three episodes established this as an official “Thing on the Show.”

For now and for those of you new to the idea of the study of folklore, I’ll summarize the history of the academic discipline of folkloristics.

More than six hundred years ago, in post-Renaissance Europe, concerned scholars and bored aristocrats started doing something strange.

They started collecting folk stories from the lower classes.

This was strange because the disdain that the “upper class” (which included not just nobility and gentry but clergy and those squirrely scholars as well) felt for the emerging middle class and the peasantry can not be overstated. But perhaps because they were fascinated with that which they looked down upon, many learned men and women during the Age of Enlightenment began to study folkways and oral tales.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “fairy tales,” “wonder tales,” “Märchen,” and “Mother Goose” stories lit up courts (and later salons) all over Europe. People recorded them from a handy peasant, wrote them down with a judicious application of upper-class refinements, and later crafted original stories inspired by them. There are works that were preserved from an oral version, like Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (which is based on a Neapolitan folk tale but is considered a literary work rather than a transcription and if you read a faithful translation you’d get why that is, he very much polished it with literary allusions and asides) as well as those found in Grimms’ first edition (1812) of collected oral stories which included the bloody version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” then there are folk tales that were cleaned up and sanitized for your comfort, like every Grimm edition since that one, ha ha, and at last there are “literary” fairy tales, or stories that are “original content” but were constructed on a folkish scaffolding like, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Authors still use fairy tales to inform and inspire-- Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited several anthologies of contemporary fairy tales or retellings of old tales by modern authors, beginning with Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and ending in 2000 with Black Heart, Ivory Bones which, if you enjoy trope subversion and walking around for days bearing a lingering sense of disquiet, are seriously worth reading.

While the Grimms’ work in collecting German folk tales is considered the “watershed” moment for European folk studies (the Chinese, in contrast, have been archiving oral poetry and stories for thousands of years and Arab Muslim scholars may have started collecting folk tales as early as the 10th century CE,) it wasn’t until about a hundred years had passed from the Grimms’ first publication that the discipline took a distinctly scientific turn.

In 1910, a Finnish folklorist named Artti Aarne published a work entitled ‘Verzeichnis der Märchentypen,” or “Types of Folktales.” He had analyzed his own extensive collection of Scandinavian folk stories and realized that these tales often shared the same plots and elements—helpful animals, daring rescues, clever wives, and more-- albeit in different configurations. He broke the stories down to their essential components-- decoded their DNA, if you will-- and asserted that these story elements were used like beads on a string to construct a myriad of tales. He called these elements “Motive,” or motifs. In 1960, an American anthropologist named Stith Thompson translated Aarne’s work from the German and expanded upon it to include stories from a broader European sampling as well as Native American traditions. This became known as the Aarne-Thompson Motif Index. It is one cog in a larger academic movement during the 50’s and 60’s wherein researchers of all stripes endeavored to unearth the earliest roots of mankind—from the search for fossils of the earliest hominids, to tracing the very first languages, to reconstituting the ur-myths that shaped human culture. Academics and field researchers were determined to pinpoint the moment in time when we became more than just a bipedal primate (if we ever even have.) The Index revolutionized folkloristics as anthropologists and other scholars realized that they could trace these story motifs through time and across geography the way linguists were already doing with sounds and words to compile Proto-Indo-European, the language of Neolithic humans who settled India and Europe, and how geneticists today can trace human migrations out of Africa by studying human genomes.

The Index is a taxonomic classification system, like meteorology or the Dewey Decimal System. There are twenty-six parent categories, with subcategories and more subcategories. The Motif Index is organized alphabetically from A-Mythological Motifs (like creation myths) to Z-Miscellaneous Motifs (such as “Z210: Brothers as Heroes.”) There is an adjacent Index of Tale Types, as well, which works similarly. In the Tale Types Index, for instance, “Tales of Magic” comprise subcategories 300 to 799; one subcategory in “Tales of Magic” is “Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives,” which covers tale types 400-459. Tale type number AT 410 is “Sleeping Beauty.” The Basile tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” by Charles Perrault, as well as Grimms’ “Little Briar Rose” fall under this category. The two indices operate in tandem-- for instance, the Basile story and the tale collected by the Grimm brothers are the same kind of story, but they have unique motifs. Both Perrault’s princess and the German Briar Rose are the subjects of a dire prophecy-- motif M340-- and fall into a magic sleep, which is motif D1960. Other motifs are not shared among all three stories, like cannibalism. Yeah, that story is buck wild once you go back a few generations.

Anyway, in 2004, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index was once again revised, this time by German scholar Hans-Jörg Uther, in an attempt to make the index more inclusive of other global folk traditions, and it was renamed the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales.

The quest to uncover the proto-stories of our ancestors continues in this very decade in the work of Julien d’Huy, who uses computer modeling to make “phylogenetic maps” of stories from around the globe. He can then create diagrams of a universal story-- for instance the “Cosmic Hunt” (D’Huy 2014).

You can also see the concept of the AT motif index in computer-generated novels and scripts, which are “written” by AIs who have ingested and digested and then assimilated whatever weird-ass shit their creators feed it and from that we get gems like “There is more Italy than necessary” from an AI-scripted Olive-Garden commercial.

The website TV Tropes works very much like the motif index, although in a much less taxonomic fashion—for instance, one trope they describe is “Room Full of Crazy,” a “motif” if you will that tv writers often use as a way of indicating quickly to the audience that a character is off their rocker (or at least obsessive to the point of near-insanity) by showing them writing or drawing something over and over in a notebook, on their bodies, on walls, etc. Supernatural used this recently to let us know how very messed up Gabriel was after his time with Assmodeus in season 13 “Bring ‘Em Back Alive.”

But it is important to remember that Kripke has used this exact trope before, in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to let us know that Anna was having visions and hearing what would later be known as “Angel Radio.”

To some extent, Room Full of Crazy was also used all the way back in season one in “Dead in the Water” to represent the little boy’s repressed trauma.

The repetition of tropes (or callbacks) that have already been used earlier in the series is another signal that telegraphed this shift into the realm of folk tales and mythology in a thematic sense.

Yes, Supernatural has always been about folk tales and myth. Native American stories like that of the wendigo, urban folklore like the story of the hook man and other perils of “parking,” shtrigas, skinwalkers, etc, have served as both monsters-of-the-week and Big Bads. The premise of the show draws, pishtaco-like, from world stories to survive. But we’re going to dig down and find not just the fairy tales of season 14, but the tale types and the motifs and discover what this kind of focused close-reading can tell us about this season’s values.

Lots of people point out that the Index is dry and strips away so much that you could literally tell a story just by listing the motifs in order (this comment from my folklore prof many, many years ago when we got into the motif index in class.) But that is not at all how the originators intended the index to be used. If anything, as evidenced by the “phenogenetic” tale typing of d’Huy, the presence of a folktale motif is more powerful than any literary allusion or pop-culture reference. If you realize that you’re watching a story that involves a “beat the Devil” premise, and you’ve read some of those tales, they should all light up like a constellation in your memory. You might even mentally replay the electric guitar riff from Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” When we learned that the nephilim was going to be named Jack, and that his mother was hanging all of her hopes on him, you may have subconsciously thought of Jack and the Beanstalk or other Jack tales and made a prediction about the kind of story that we might see Jack feature in*. All the protagonists, all the challenges, all the outcomes of those stories will spread like beacons across a plain-- which is what comparative literature is all about in the first place. It is less about reducing a story to its DNA and more about finding that story’s family tree. And writers like Jane Yolen and the aforementioned Datlow and Windling use these bits of stories to write new ones. Oh and writers like Mr. Andrew Dabb, who used a most familiar formula (to his American audience at least) to start out the season. It’s wild, y’all.

So welcome to the folkloristics of Supernatural. As my favorite professor used to say, are there any thoughts, questions, miscellaneous abuse? My asks are open.

Here’s to a fantastic mideseason.

*allusion is not allegory, meaning you bring in an allusion to another text for depth; if you want to retell the story of Jesus and Christianity you write the Narnia Chronicles. However. Just because Jack was not the one to kill Lucifer does not mean Lucifer’s death was not foretold… the point of retelling these stories in a literary setting is to find the other values that the story can reveal, or to take a trope and twist it to reveal something that had not previously been considered.

Caveat: I’m NOT a prophet. None of us meta writers are. Nothing is stopping anyone involved in the show from making a decision that runs contrary to the story’s architecture, and it’s even been done before. I even have a post about trying to predict from the subtext or even text of a serial publication, like a tv series, that I’ll fit into this series. But anyway, use these posts to “prove” that destiel will be going canon at your own peril. And also I won’t be focusing only on “destiel” subtext. There’s stuff in these episodes for everyone, it’s chock full o’ nuts.

ALSO I have been deliberately staying away from a lot of meta while I compiled this, so if there’s more going on along these lines please feel free to tag me in :)

#the folklore of supernatural #folklore meta series #introductory post #the folkloristics of supernatural #spn meta

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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A Beginning of Sorts

It was a bit of a history lesson of sorts, though from a peer and not a teacher.

“My ancestors are from Iacon, which was once called Caminus,” Orion Pax said, a long time before the Fleet was ever an actual Fleet; this was in the old days, when the great heroes of the Fleet-to-be were still growing up. This was before the beginning of the Cobalt Stingers, before the passing of the Matriatrix, before the full realization of the alchemizers.

In those days, their people were nomads, a convoy traveling from planet to planet in interstellar bus-shuttles and using ancient stargates to find new worlds to evade the enemies that constantly pursued them, and the destructive beasts they hunted to stay alive.

Their particular friend group was a chaotic one; trolls, humans, Transformers, a few Gems that had declared themselves honorary sisters, and even magical monsters were all part of it. Against the side of a parked convoy-scraper, there was a campfire, and against it, some of the kids were telling tales about the history of their people.

Not the humans, much as they would want it; they knew precious little of their homeland. They knew it had been called Earth, or Terra, in the old days. They knew that humanity was come from there, and almost died there. And they knew that Earth was, at best, a bitter memory. There was no human homeworld these days.

Just about everyone in the convoy was in the same boat; they stuck together, all their disparate peoples and families and proto-clans, because there was no one else but each other.

A small, heavily built human raised his head through a wild mane of hair. “Um,” said Greg Universe, an up and coming bard who so openly idolized the convoy heroine Rose Quartz that he had even grown his hair out to look like her’s. A larger girl, her hair violet and her build heavy, smiled romantically at the young man’s obvious crush on the heroine. “That’s from your home planet, right?”

Orion beamed, nodding brightly. He was by Transformer standards, pitifully small… even frail. Not even twenty feet high, he was slim, and most of that was made up by his transforming kibble; some vague experimenting with an ancient relic, the supposed organ of one of their people’s founders, had allowed Transformers like him to reshape their bodies more fluidly, and today he was sporting the wings and claws of a robotic bat.

It suited him, considered the girl who had smiled at Greg’s crush; she’d been provisionally identified as possibly coming from an indigenous nation of ancient Earth. Her name was a private matter, but she asked people to call her Sierra.

Orion continued. “It is said that in the oldest days, before the coming of the Decepticon tyrants, Cybertron was not one world, but many. The Functionalists who preceded the Decepticons,” and here his expression curdled. The mentors had sternly taught him about the horrors of THEIR reign; if there was any bright side to Functionalist dominion, it was that they feared organic life so much they became strictly isolationist, and did no harm to alien life… according to what they uncovered. “Well, they uncovered several worlds of our ancestors, and forced them to merge into a single planet.”

A stocky, chubby and undersized Amethyst, only about forty feet tall, raised a broad hand tipped with claws. She was older than them by thousands of years, but somehow she fit in well as one of the kids. “Uh, I ain’t too learn-inated on our people not liking each other much but I’m pretty sure you can’t just mash up a planet.”

Orion shrugged. “Legends claim the planets were pieces of the forms our goddess Primus took during her periodic adventures into the mortal planes; I think that’s just a legend attributed to great works. In theory, we carried out what we believed to be her will, so it comes out to the sense thing in a cultural sense. I think ancient Cybertronians, in a golden age, created entire planets for us to live on. They were, in a sense, giant living Transformers, down to the ability to fuse.”

Amethyst’s violet eyes glamed. “Ahhh, I get it!”

Greg raised a hand. “I don’t!” he said, rather cheerfully.

The heavy bulk of Grimlock, apparently sleeping the history debate though quite clearly paying attention, cracked a yellow optic open. In his beast mode, he was an absolute giant, big enough for everyone else to sleep against, especially the tiny humans. He adjusted himself carefully around their miniscule bodies, particularly Sierra. He watched her carefully, almost fussing over her, before clearing his synthesizer. “Some Transformers can combine,” he said roughly. “Bit like Gems, but we can’t ALL do it. We used to, I hear.” He gave Orion a questioning look; Orion nodded. Grimlock continued, “So our planets can probably mash it up too.”

Terezi Pyrope, possibly one of the largest in the group, almost as big as Grimlock and shy of a mid-teens molt, rolled her blind eyes. “Dunno why this kinda thing bothers you guys so much. Cybertron’s a long time ago.”

Trolls had learned to be pragmatic the hard way. Beforus, the troll homeworld, had been gone for a very long time, and they had endured as the multiverse’s most looked-down upon denizens ever since.

It didn’t much make it easy to deal with Terezi’s tendency to be nasty when she was uncomfortable.

Grimlock turned to look at her, as Orion and Ariel (the largely silent and imposingly broad pink mech looming behind orion), all three robots glaring at her. Terezi didn’t notice much. “We want our homeland back,” Grimlock said sullenly.

Ariel scowled. “Our ancestors were fighting for thousands of years to take back our home before the ‘Con scum ever showed up,” she said bitterly. “And we were fighting ever since, even when we fled. And still they hunted us, all the way to us being born. We’re still in that fight, Terezi, and you’re part of it now too, I guess.”

Terezi sighed. “Sorry. I just don’t see the point…”

Orion looked up to the sky and spoke softly. It was with some intensity, as though he was reciting something dark and painful, and it sounded like a quotation. “We turned to face as the spires of our ancestors burned down; as our home fled before us, we hold the tears of all who died to let us live to this day. Let us turn skyward; remember our ancestors. Remember the home that was stolen from us as we run. Even if all worlds scorn us and despise us, remember: once there was a place we could call home. Let us remember Cybertron.”

“Let us remember,” Grimlock echoed, and softly he began to sing. It was in a far older language; a deep and booming one, suited for snapping jaws and bestial clamps, and they recognized this song. It was a mourning song, a longing for a home where a Transformer would not be judged for walking on legs in their true form instead of wheels or wings. A memory of the homeland of Eukaris, of Simfur.

Once they had a home where they were free from persecution and torment. But oh, that time was so long ago.

Sierra laid a hand against the big robotic dinosaur’s side. It felt warmer at her touch.

“One day,” Orion said quietly. “Cybertron will be free from the Decepticons. We can finally come back home. And all of you would have a home there too.” His optics gleamed. “And everyone would finally be free.”

#my writing #fics #crossthicc au #queued #twitchy!sierra #twitchy!greg universe #twitchy!optimus #twitchy!grimlock #twitchy!amethyst

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rschmidth · 2 years

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Download PDF The Evolution of Obesity EBOOK -- Michael L. Power

The Evolution of Obesity - Michael L. Power

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thefederalistfreestyle · 7 years

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Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

#hamilton #meta #u.s. politics #obama #new statesman #history #shakespeare

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xtruss · 3 years

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A controversial new study claims that ancient wetlands south of the Zambezi River were the oasis from which all modern humans emerged. Today, the region is one of the world's largest salt flats known as the Makgadikgadi pans. Photograph By Beverly Joubert, National Geographic Image Collection

Controversial New Study Pinpoints Where All Modern Humans Arose

The research reignites a long-simmering debate about how and where our species emerged.

— By Maya Wei-Haas | National Geographic | October 28, 2019

A powdery white layer blankets the desiccated landscape of Botswana’s Makgadikgadi pans, one of the world's largest salt flats. But some 200,000 years ago, this blank canvas would have been painted in the blues and greens of a flourishing wetland. Set in the middle of a harsh desert in southern Africa, the lush landscape would have been an appealing place for early humans to call home.

Now, a controversial new study in Nature argues that this oasis, known as the Makgadikgadi–Okavango wetland, was not just any home, but the ancestral “homeland” for all modern humans today. The researchers studied mitochondrial DNA—genetic material stored in the powerhouse of our cells that is passed from mother to child—of current residents across southern Africa. Then they layered the genetic data with an analysis of past climate and modern linguistics, as well as cultural and geographic distributions of local populations.

The study’s results suggest that shifts in climate allowed branches of the ancient population to spread from the wetland to newly formed zones of green. Thousands of years later, a small population of these wanderers’ kin eventually would leave Africa and ultimately inhabit every corner of the world.

“We all came from the same homeland in southern Africa,” says Vanessa Hayes of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, who led the new research.

The study revives a long-simmering debate about exactly where in Africa modern humans emerged, and it has drawn sharp criticism from several scientists. They point out that although all humans alive today have mitochondrial DNA passed on from a common ancestor—a so-called Mitochondrial Eve—this is just a tiny fraction of our total genetic material. So even if the proposed founder population described in the new study is the source of our mitochondrial DNA, many others likely contributed to today’s genetic pool.

“The inferences from the mtDNA data are fundamentally flawed,” Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at the University College London, says via email, adding that in his view, the study amounted to "storytelling."

Yet Rebecca Cann, a geneticist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was a reviewer of the study and has conducted pioneering work on mitochondrial DNA, argues that the new research is innovative, crossing multiple disciplines in search of answers.

“This is going to start a lot of conversations, and it’s going to stimulate a lot of new studies,” she says. While the study is not perfect, she adds, “It’s going to get us further down the road.”

The Genetic Jigsaw

The hominin family tree has deep roots in Africa. The earliest fossil of our genus, Homo, yet found is a 2.8-million-year-old jaw fragment uncovered in East Africa. Our species, Homo sapiens, didn’t appear till fairly far up the tree, branching off at least 260,000 years ago. Where exactly in Africa that happened, however, remains up for debate.

Fossils carrying a varying mix of features from both modern humans and more ancient hominins seem to be scattered across Africa, from the 260,000-year-old Florisbad remains in South Africa and 195,000-year-old Omo remains in Ethiopia to the 315,000-year-old Jebel Irhoud remains in Morocco. But after baking in the African heat, the DNA from these ancient fossils seems to have largely degraded.

While the hunt for ancient DNA continues, many researchers have instead turned to studying the diverse genetics of populations in Africa. One of the deepest-rooted lines of mitochondrial DNA is commonly found in people living across southern African, and none more so than in the KhoeSan—foragers, herders, and hunters who speak languages that include a clicking sound for consonants. Many past studies, including some of Hayes's own work, tease apart their ancestry for clues to our species’ past.

But for this new study Hayes and her colleagues wanted to pinpoint exactly where this deep-rooted genetic line arose. To fill in some of the gaps in the genetic record, the researchers sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of 198 individuals from Namibia and South Africa—some of whom identify as KhoeSan and others who do not—and combined them with previously collected data for a total of 1,217 individuals. Next they grouped southern African populations by ethnicity and linguistics to lay out the geography of people carrying these deep-rooted lines of mitochondrial DNA today. And they crafted a tree tracing their mitochondrial genetic relationships back some 200,000 years to the early days of our species.

The analysis revealed that for some 70,000 years the early human populations remained steady. Climate analysis revealed that the massive wetlands that sprawled across Botswana could have provided a stable home for the early humans. But then about 130,000 to 110,000 years ago, something changed: “They go crazy,” says Hayes. “All these new human lineages just start popping up.”

The study suggests that green corridors likely opened during that period, first in the northeast and then to the southwest, which may have encouraged groups to spread to where some still live today. Hayes, who has long worked with people across southern Africa, discussed the results with study participants soon after the analysis.

“They were the first to hear about it, long before you guys did,” she says. “And they love these stories, they really do. It’s their story.”

Mitochondrial Eve and Company

The new study, importantly, focuses on analyzing today’s African populations, a gaping oversight in many past genetic studies. “Everyone recognizes we’ve been studying Europeans for way too long,” says Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University. “As studies go out and sample more human genomic diversity, we’ll eventually have a more deep and clear understanding of human history.”

In broad strokes, the results of the new study paint a similar picture to some past work: Today’s southern African populations harbor a deep mitochondrial genetic line. But the details of what the latest analysis revealed remain unclear, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It’s difficult to know whether the populations living in those regions today are the same as those hundreds of thousands of years ago, he says. As a result, it’s possible that the researchers are tracing mass migrations around southern Africa. But it’s also possible that there was instead something beneficial in the mitochondrial genetics, giving it a selective advantage that allowed the DNA to spread without massive population shifts.

“It’s giving you one part of the whole story of evolution at very high resolution, and that’s pretty cool,” Hawks says. “But you sort of want the rest of the story.”

Mitochondrial DNA makes up a minute fraction of our genomes: While it contains around 16,500 base pairs, nuclear DNA has more than three billion, explains Carina Schlebusch, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden. Untangling information in our complete genomes promises a more complex tale. Researchers have made similar trees for Y-chromosome DNA, which is genetic material present in men. While the details remain hazy, it hints at a very early branching genetic line in some modern humans living in western Africa’s Cameroon.

“On our other chromosomes,” she adds, “we have millions of these separate loci that segregate in populations that probably also have their own ancestors somewhere in the past.”

Tracing those other ancestors is another issue. The nuclear DNA signal is extremely complex. What we do know from full genomes of Africans is that the results of this study aren’t entirely out of line with past work that points to human origins in southern Africa, says Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who has extensively studied African population history.

Yet scientists are still discovering new ways to study nuclear DNA. They can’t simply peek into its genetic code to read it like a book. Intensive processing and modeling are required to understand what it all means, and the assumptions made during analysis can affect the outcome.

There are also some hints that there’s still more to learn. Several studies point to the presence of even earlier branching “ghost” populations that intermixed with our species, leaving behind small traces of their DNA in some African groups.

“We don’t know where they fit in, we don’t know who they were, but we do know some of them hung around until fairly recently,” Hawks says.

Cutting Down the Tree

The complexity of our evolutionary picture has led many researchers to recently move away from the idea that we emerged from a single locale that branched outward into a global family tree. Instead, they suggest our species evolved from many points across Africa, like a network or braided stream with many inputs, divergences, and some rejoining rivulets that leads to the mighty mix flowing through our veins.

“I don’t see any reason, really, to be wedded to any particular place,” says Thomas, a co-author of a recent paper that challenged a single origin for our species.

The new study’s authors acknowledge that our species could have arisen from multiple origins. But there’s not yet enough data to definitively show that’s the case, says study co-author Eva Chan, a statistical geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. And the latest work was a cross-disciplinary attempt to fill some blanks in the picture of our evolutionary history.

“That’s not to say we have the picture right now,” she says. “With more data, the picture will continue to change.”

All of this work also circles the increasingly confusing definition of a species. While humans like to put everything in boxes, nature doesn’t fit into tidy categories, Schlebusch says. There are no distinct lines between one species and the next; everything works in shades of gray.

The controversy over our origins will surely continue. Unlike many fields of study, human evolution is not something you can design experiments to test, Akey adds. But then again, perhaps scientists need to rethink the debate entirely.

“Maybe the question we’re asking isn’t the right one,” he adds. “Maybe we need a more nuanced question.”

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starsword-library · 7 years

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Chrys got what they wanted in the end. We have deemed the test a success despite the circumstances. Professor Wiz is still worried about the safety of it all, but there's not much to do. Chrys themself has consented multiple times to participate in the experiments, and there's no sign they are being harmed by them, only momentarily exhausted. By how invested they are in this, I feel they would be much more hurt if we stopped or if they failed. And although I berated them before for their carelessness, I understand how they feel, and I realize now I would probably feel the same in their place. We should not stop until we truly reach a dead end.

Professor Wiz still instructed me to wait several loops before the next experiment. I'm supposed to get used to the Defense Force and to observe Chrys' normal routine there and make sure they do not overexert themself or feel too pressured with the tests.

Those were the professor's instructions, and they make it clear how things will be from now on.

From the next loop on, I'll be overseeing most of the project. I won't be under the professor's direct supervision anymore. I'll be leaving the planet without even knowing when I'll come back.

It's exciting.

It's exciting but, I'm not sure my brain has even fully comprehended it. I fear it won't do it until everything really happens.

I never expected to leave so early, or at all. Even Professor Wiz stayed on planet for most of his life, doing work on the local ruins. It's how I expected my life to go, too.

Now, I guess I won't be seeing them anytime soon. In the end, I'm glad the professor brought us here of all places. It gave me a chance to see my birthplace for a last time before I leave. I don't know if you can or should say goodbye to a place, but that's what I felt I was doing when I went there earlier this night.

The Nest Mountains look just like I remember from all those rings ago. The metal fence covering the whole perimeter, and I could still catch glimpses of the cameras, alarms and weapons around.

Without any authorization or reason to enter, I just stood there next to the fence. As sentimental as I felt, and still feel about the visit, there wasn't anything I could do there.

Anything besides retelling the whole story, because Chrys showed up there.

"Guess I'm not the only one sightseeing then?"

"Indeed," I answered. "Have you rested well?"

"Oh yes, don't worry about it, I'm fine, even Verona could only worry so much before taking a nap given how early we woke up this morning. So I decided to take a look around and confirm that I have not wrecked up this thing during my freakout back then," they said, focusing their camera at the mountains.

"I see. Good to know it's not broken then, I admit I didn't even think of that."

"Don't worry, it survived worse." They took a picture. "Anyway, I'm guessing by the big uninviting fence that we shouldn't go inside, right? Been circling around these a while and couldn't see a way in."

"Oh yes, you need special permission to go in now. If you're curious about the inside, I have plenty of books with pictures of before but, I too have never been there, as far as I remember of course."

"Far as you remember? Then it was still open when you were a lil' kid or something?"

"Oh, right, I've been thinking about the similarities all this time, but I never actually told you. I forget that it's not obvious for outsiders."

"Huh? What do you mean, 'similarities'?"

"You're not the only one with a mysterious past. For all we know, I might have been born here. Right around the same time the Diagram Disk went missing."

"Oh." They inched forward, eyes in the mountains again. "So, this Diagram Disk going missing is what closed the place?"

"Yes. It was one of the most important artifacts of this planet, and what gave name to the island."

"This island was once home to the ancestors of the Cubit species. They didn't have the metal shells and flight capabilities we do, and lived hiding in underground nests and caves inside these mountains. The entrances to those can still be found in our age, which makes the place such an important historical site.

The Diagram Disk was a mystery, though. It was a big metal disk, half buried amidst the nests, full of diagrams and inscriptions that haven't been fully deciphered to this day, as they don't fit any other known language or style. But several researchers believed they described our flight abilities, and views of the planet, and of the stars. It might have been a record of the first Cubits to have ever lived, or even be somehow related to their emergence, as the metal was nearly the same as the one from our own bodies.

There are many hypotheses, but the point is, it was a unique relic. Being so tied to our origins, most people treated it with a sort of reverence even."

Chrys stood there a while in silence, eyes down.

"...Who would even steal such a thing?" they asked in a whisper.

"I have no idea. Anyone interested in seeing it could just visit and ask the university for deeper research. We never found a single clue of its whereabouts. In fact, we don't even have proof it was stolen. There were traces of its extraction from the ground, and just that. No sign of who or what carried it, and cameras and alarms didn't register anything either."

"What if it was, some sort of camouflaged ship? Wouldn't be caught on camera at least."

"That was suggested, but the alarms should still work, so it would have to be an even more elaborated scheme, not to mention expensive, which brings us back to why one would do it in the first place."

"Yeah, that's as far as my ideas go, sorry."

"No problem. At this point I feel that most have given up on ever finding an answer. They were already out of ideas when they brought me here, rings ago."

"They thought you could know something just because you were born here? Is it an uncommon thing then?"

"Of course. No one lives in the Uncovered Areas, much less inside the mountains."

"But you were there."

"Yes."

"It was Professor Wiz who found me. He had came to the island to research the Diagram Disk, and in his third loop here, the disk was reported missing. He went along the people investigating the situation, and found me in one of the nests.

I was just a baby, but already clearly mutant, so Professor Wiz took me as a subject, and no one ever figured out anything else about my origins. So, as I said, we're somewhat similar in that regard it seems."

"Well, yeah, didn't expect anyone to get to my level of weird, really. Never been called a mutant either but hey, doesn't sound too off the mark, I guess."

"Well, for you who knows, we don't have anyone to compare you to. But as for me, these oddities here make it pretty clear I'm not an usual Cubit."

"Uh, you mean, these aren't legs?"

"We fly and so do our hands, we have no need for limbs or feet. These here have no purpose, though they are not a bother either, just a part of me. Like the oddities in my back. They aren't even the most important parts of my condition, but the most comprehensible and apparent ones."

Chrys stared at me with an amused expression. "Weeell, I don't wanna poke too much if it's your personal stuff but, by 'comprehensible' do you mean you also have unexplained powers, because that would explain why you got all up in my case since the start, but it's also a bit too coincidental I think."

"Oh, of course no, you're showing way more potential that I ever did. I don't have any particular skills, except if you count the near-perfect memory I suppose."

Their eyes twitched as I finished my sentence. "Yeah Mag that sounds like a super thing worth noting, you know! It's got the 'perfect' right there and everything!"

"Uh, you're not wrong. I suppose I'm just used to it. It's quite useful for writing reports."

"Oh I can imagine. Still pretty funny how you all pester me when I don't care much about my regeneration but then go and skip your own stuff like that."

"Well, I still defend that you have greater potential, but you're right, it is easier to overlook our own talents than others', because of how natural they feel."

"Right, right,” they nagged, then softened up. “I was mostly just messing with you right now, don't worry. I mean, in the end you were right about everything. I am sorta learning spellcasting now." They took a deep breath. "Seriously, thanks for, all of this I guess. If you hadn't bugged me so much about it being possible I could have come and left without a clue."

"No need to thank me, I did what I should as a student. Also, you saved my life. I have even more reason to be thankful."

"Yeah, I think we all could have done without that scare. I'm..." their voice lowered a bit. "Glad I could pull that off. Still, uh, I've been meaning to ask this, for a while now, your metal still got blow up didn't it? Is it gonna be okay or...?"

I turned around a bit to show them the wound. "It's okay, it's been healing back. Oh, though I did mention I had some mutant parts here, didn't I? I have no idea if those will grow back or not, they've always been weird, even now I still feel them. It even slipped my mind they are gone."

"Uhhh," Chrys muttered, pointing to something in my back that I obviously couldn't see, "you mean the transparent things here?"

"Huh?"

<prev next> read from the start

#starsword library #a story #to be continued #mag's reports #road trip space trip #a unique student of healing #mag #odd flower of the stars #chrys #the researcher of old star paths #professor wiz

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stamml-meteora · 15 years

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globalization and nationalism

IDENTITY, and particularly religious and ethnic identity, has been at the roots of meaning since the dawn of human society. (01) Patriotism created a feeling of national cohesion (My home and my country (02)), which led to the formation of nation states.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, patriotism was increasingly replaced by nationalism. „This is our homeland, our life, and since we don‘t have another one, we will fight for it until the very end and we will never give it up.“ (03) The Second World War showed us where this development can lead to.

Assuming that with World War II humanity overcame the construction of nationalism is wrong. There are many components of our identity, but language and culture are its backbone. (04) Globalisation even intensified national feelings. In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. (…) Identity is becoming the main, and sometimes the only, source of meaning in an historical period characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions. People increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are. Meanwhile, on the other hand, global networks of instrumental exchanges selectively switch on and off individuals, groups, regions, and even countries, according to their relevance in fulfilling the goals processed in the network, in a relentless flow of strategic decisions. There follows a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. (05)

Despite the dangers of nationalism some values (…) and some notion of collective identity are probably essential to political action and social betterment. (06)

Today you are either a NATIONALIST, overwhelmed by the forces of globalization, or you are a COSMOPOLITE, unable to deal with the forces of nationalism.

A NATIONALIST or a COSMOPOLITE, but nothing inbetween.

The NATIONALIST is the AfD in Germany, the FPÖ in Austria, Catalonia, the UK, Hungary. They are, fundamentally, a cultural and political movement, defenders of the traditions of the country against cosmopolitan values, and of self rule of local people against the imposition of global order. (07)

The COSMOPOLITE does not believe in the construct of national identity. My special place is with myself or special family or friends. In the country or seaside or city or home. It is in my emotion and mind my special place. (08)

FREIHAUS does not want you to be a NATIONALIST or a COSMOPOLITE. FREIHAUS wants you to delve into, uncover, disclose, reveal, divulge, discover, unfold (…) what lies hidden or unseen, to get to the bottom of things, to plumb the depths, to see beneath the surface, behind the curtain. (09) It is not “neutral”, and it does not permit you to remain “neutral”. (10) FREIHAUS wants you to find your identity and loos it again. One would not be wrong in terming it a melting pot for all cultures. (11) It is not to create a proletarian culture, but to make a heritage available for use. (12)

FREIHAUS is a VESTRY. Fashion, hats and hairstyles… must be understood as technologies that people use to construct social identity and to produce, reproduce and transform relationships and living conditions in the changing times. (13)

FREIHAUS stands in the centre of Zurich. Up and down the city there are beautiful palaces, (14) FREIHAUS is one of them. Its façade does not scream, it just welcomes you. The gates to the vestibule are open.

FREIHAUS consists of 4 chambers: WARDROBE, FASHION DESIGN, SHOW DESIGN and RUNWAY.

WARDROBE

It lies right behind the entrance. You get rid of your outfit, you get naked, free. You are ready for the experience, to wander about through all the ages and peoples with clear vision and always strive to discover the human element in all their manifold sensations and products of sensation. (15) Naked and without prejudice you enter the next room.

FASHION DESIGN / chamber of dreams

A dream is (…) never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention, translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfill that wish. (16) Fashion … flatters the universal desire for identity together with the no less universal desire to be a multiplicity of persons. (17)

FASHION DESIGN allows you to experiment, play and dream. Even with pieces of clothing, however, it is not the case that they are merely taken on or off, but wearing them is directed toward the most diverse purposes : according to weather conditions ; as a sign of a sense of shame ; in accordance with individual taste ; in order to transmit erotic or ggressive messages ; demonstrating one‘s affiliation to certain groups ; and in order to demarcate oneself from others, etc. Beyond the use primarily assigned to them, they furthermore can be used as fetishes, as presents, as rags, as murder instruments, as models for a drawing, or as an example in a discourse. (18)

The COSMOPOLITE dreams of the world. I dream of an age of peace, harmony and justice, a true paradisiacal order. (…) It will be a just world, where the poor are protected, and a harmonious and peaceful world, where wild and dangerous beasts have become tame and harmless. (19)

The NATIONALIST dreams of home. I dream of a place of peace and harmony, where I could roam free, and breathe the air of my ancestors. (20)

Take your time, experiment, play and dream. Take your FAHION DESIGN with you and enter the next room.

SHOW DESIGN / chamber of fear

no hatred, no elation, no anger, no joy: only fear (21)

SHOW DESIGN is here to help you, discover your fears.

The COSMOPOLITE fears the past. This real fear of appearing backwards (22) nationalism, racism, but as well cultural appropriation and a sense of no belonging. “It doesn’t matter where I go. I will always be a stranger, a guest . . . who is at home everywhere he goes but still has no fatherland.” Hudec’s contradictory thrill at being a citizen of the world and concomitant fear that ultimately he belongs nowhere is the experience of modernity itself. (23)

The NATIONALIST fears the future. Globalization, new technology, complexity, change of cultural values, change of status, the unknown. Everything today is far too technical, so the home has to become a kind of refuge – something best achieved by modelling its interiors on those of our great-grandparents. (24)

Take your time, discover and accept your fears. Take your SHOW DESIGN with you and enter the next room.

RUNWAY / chamber of talk

The show begins. FASHION DESIGN meets SHOW DESIGN. The dream talks to the fear. The COSMOPOLITE talks to the NATIONALIST.

We’ll have to see whether you’ll find something that seems worth listening to, something you can take home with you, in what I have to say. (25)

The national community is constructed primarily in the minds of its members. (26)

Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street ... but if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means. (27).

Globalization would ultimately lead to a largely homogeneous global society whose logic would only be resisted by the obscure forces of traditionalists and fanatics who should be suppressed with the utmost energy so as to reach the superior state of capitalism: the achievement of world peace by enshrining the twin rules of unfettered markets and liberal democracy. (28)

Far from making violent conflicts impossible, the abolition of sovereign states and the establishment of a single world state or power would rather open up the field for new forms of violence within the „world empire,“ with no sovereign state to set limits to it: „Far from guaranteeing eternal peace, the cosmopolitan ideal would rather be the favorable condition for limitless violence.“ (29)

Would it not be better to remain at peace in your own house instead of roaming the world looking for better bread than ever came of wheat, never reflecting that many go for wool and come back shorn? (30)

But what if your beloved homeland becomes unliveable territory. Due to natural disaster, war or a collapse of the economy?

Change is inevitable.

What may go in a cosmopolitan city like Paris, London, or Cairo, will kill a village. (31)

Take your time, talk and play. Whenever you have enough, enter the next room.

WARDROBE, again

You have seen the dreams, you have seen the fears and you have talked. You now go back to the WARDROBE, undress, and put on your old clothes. You are free to leave the FREIHAUS. Or you are going for another spin. FASHION, SHOW, RUNWAY. As long as you want. Until you feel like leaving. Today, tomorrow or far in the future.

01 Castells_The Rise of the Network Society

02 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Quantum City

03 Viktor Orbán

04 Castells_ The Power of Identity

05 Castells_The Rise of the Network Society

06 Hays_Architecture Theory since 1968

07 Castells_The Power of Identity

08 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Quantum City

09 Hays_Architecture Theory since 1968

10 Hugo_Les Miserables

11 Brook_A History of Future Cities

12 Hays_Architecture Theory since 1968

13 Leventon_Kostüme Weltweit (translated)

14 Hollis_Cities Are Good For You

15 Harrison, Wood, Gaiger_Art in Theory 1648 1815

16 Zizek_Less Than Nothing

17 Barthes_The Language of Fashion

18 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Printed Physics

19 Cohn_The Pursuit of the Millennium

20 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Quantum City

21 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Quantum City

22 Brook_A History of Future Cities

23 Brook_A History of Future Cities

24 Hovestadt, Buehlmann_Quantum City

25 Bill_Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt

26 Castells_The Power of Identity

27 Theresa May

28 Castells_The Power of Identity

29 Zizek_Less Than Nothing

30 Cervantes_Don Quixote

31 Fathy_Architecture for the Poor

#stammlmeteora #text

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mulgerehircum · 5 years

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Religion(s) vs Belief(s) - Part 2 of 6

We recognize that even revere religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another on small matters – such as if we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef instead of pork or the other way around – all the way to the most central issues – such as whether there are no GODs, one GOD, or many GODs. If you lived two or three millennials ago, there was no shame holding that the cosmos was made for us; it was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew – it was what the most learned amongst us taught without qualification. But we found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence and a flight from self-knowledge.

We long to be here for a purpose even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunking of our conceits. We’re Johnny-come-latelies, we live in the cosmic boondocks, we emerged from microbes in muck, apes are our cousins, our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control, there may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere, and, on top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves. The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open, we find ourselves in bottomless freefall, we are lost in great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh reality, of course, we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome cosmos that utterly dwarfs in time in space and in potential; the tidy and throw concentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the universe shortly after the Big Bang and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse schools and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins. We invent and refine agriculture without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light and whip around the earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than 70 worlds and four spacecraft to the stars.

#religion #belief #reflection

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cramlingtono0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0-blog · 8 years

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V__--__--___---

This is not a Sci-fi novel, this is an experimental short story.

Take all notion of time or possible dating out of it!! IT should just be, time has become timeless, no more history. Fukyama.

This story is about 9/11, this story is about conspiracy, collective unconscious, genetics, memetics, humanism, nihilism, the universal, neo liberalism, primeval regression, death drive.

Add segment about the solar economy ( bataille), this is absolutely necessary, linked to the two collective unconscious segments, one relatively recent, 9/11, and one thee deepest of primeval, the sun, the universe etc.

9/11 is the main point of this story. The deep trauma, the sleep walkers, turning up outside peoples houses, realatives of those involved, relatives of victims and perpetrators. Their young menstruating daughters then taken under hypnosis, their psyches filtered and deciphered, fragments of 9/11 found in them. All of them menstruate at the same time, all try and walk to 9/11, all walk to different clues in the lie. WRT 9/11 the subconscious just knows something’s not right, because the people that perpetrated the killings are still alive and thus are still effecting the group collective consciousness. Without being able to control it a guilty partys unconscious will project it to those around him, and they in turn will know that something is not right, they will then pass this message on, until it eventually travels from human to human. The lie is known, we unconsciously know the truth. That is why we cant stop making the 9/11 memes, cant stop revisiting the trauma , the scene of the crime. The perpetrators start to try and avoid society, kill off any unnecessary members of the group, lead line their clothing, lead line their house, use special creams to interfere with the collective unconscious transferring from person to person.

This could also be linked to the collective unconscious of all people in all time and more specifically ancestors in your own lineage. My grt grt grt grt grt grt grt….. caveman grandfather was a passionate killer and his conscious will cannot stand the idea of such a bastard thing happening, so much so he causes these unconscious take overs of the self .

Perhaps people who want to uncover the truth, drug themselves, hypnotise themselves to find out what the collective is trying to tell them.

Perhaps these sleep walkers become more and more aggressive, start to have the characteristics of zombies.

Free will needs to be fully explained as in where it stands right now, peter watts. should be pushed more, Varley should be more representative of the madness of humanity, its obsession with dominance over collective unconscious, genetics, memetics and eventually even consciousness itself.

Varleys character should be unrecognisable perhaps? Unhuman, everything that we think of as human is gone, cut up, sectioned off. All that’s left is a slither of conscious thought, which is then useless on its own, what could be the purpose of life after that?

The guttering woke Varley, water spilling over the edge, louder and louder. It had been coming away from the brickwork, it spilled out onto the dustbin 2 floors below.

All the fastenings coming loose form the house, mortar now rotten, just sand, washed away by the heavy showers. 400 year old house, polymer upgrades would be expensive, and none of the tradesmen would want to touch it. The display systems flickered, audio splitting with cracks and stutters. The bricks glowed slightly, something about the clay, about the nature in them. It seemed to effect the wattage to pieces of hardware, increasing in areas, only a fraction, seemed to change the way things were processed, things take the long way round, a certain unpredictability within the cores.

Not a bad time to wake, Varley prayed, forearm fizzed, leaped out of bed, the bedding, completely shocked, flung itself across the room. Its materiality, suddenly becoming strange as it crumpled against the wall, falling to the floor it resumed its regular physical properties. Stopping in the landing, placed their hand on the wooden balustrade and felt its vibrations. There was noise, the bin room, back of the building, the sound drifted up, stillness now, right hand against the plaster board wall, resident moisture met the specks from the skin.

Varley switched on the Articles, started where they’d left off, volume 569, 4.5 billion years of natural, cosmological, cultural history shuffled and on loop.

Article 8437:3894.1 Birdsong deciphered, 17 year research programme at the U.C.L.A COMA Institute of Animal Welfare. 97% of their language is directly translated as verbal abuse (bigoted, racist, death and rape threats), 3% is used to talk about shitting and the colour of shit. Their social structures seem to be some of the most bigoted and brutal to have been discovered. The Common Sparrow inspects its young within 3 minutes of birth, checking for ‘weak’ or ‘disloyal’ features. A male with the wrong shade of brown, the father will scream ‘Faggot’, the mother will push her beak into its soft chest to crush its heart. The father will scream ‘Faggot’ again before tossing it out the nest. Females deemed ‘un-sexy’, the mother will scream ‘Cunt Faggot’, the chick’s eyes gouged, raped by father, womb ripped out by mother before being thrown out the nest. The sparrow community is enraptured by these birthing rituals, adult females are raped repeatedly, and many males are killed in a frenzy of fights.

Varley pushed off wall and banister, padded down the stairs, information was arriving, the monitor clicked on, messages piling up. Varley sat, chair towards the glass, a plane passing, 8 miles out. Its image starting and stopping.

Second monitor clicked, dimmed as they focused. 1 pending job, Governmental, Financial, Swansea Council, Welfare and Pensions, 60mb/s, a Latency of 478, CPU share of 17%, a minimum 25% partition and an hourly of £73. Accepted, share was high but money was good, sat back to adjust to the new measures, prayed to account for increased latency, skin in between fingers itched. Via Sydney took a look at the work, data transfer, 7,643 seeds, so boring it had to be legitimate, disconnected and burnt the trail through the proxy. Head lolled from side to side. Four hours was worth it, you don’t even notice.

Tingling in the groin and gut, designated a subconscious porn loop to restrain, tingling stopped, looked for nutrient levels, all fine, a spluttering hiss as the plankton paste regulated itself.

Closed eyes, shallow in the animal brain, echo of an orgasm and breakfast, barely started. Gone now, pray, face washed in basin. Ever soft features. Neat teeth, tongue soft purple, gums grey. Micro genitalia, a clitoral penis, vaginal opening, universal anus. A prayer, tingling in the belly, soft colours around the tips of the ears, left eye shaking.

The universal arsehole, the cosmic leveller, the purity of the squirting little squid in your pants, make me some putty now. Come brother come sister, stare at the sun, clean your retinas. Crouch, bend forward and shit, heels lifting out of our shoes, hands clasped to one another. The democracy of the arse hole, the point at which we can all meet, I know you a bit better because I know my own arse hole. Our best kept secret, we’re all the same, we all have a horrid little squirmer in our pants, let’s hold hands now.

Noise from the bins, swivelled towards the doorway, palm up, sends a push down the hallway. Push loped round the corner, down the passage, through the larder and hitting the back door, dissipating in ripples through it. A cat, the cat pushes back, Varley prays, the cat pushes again, this time softer, watching as its colours tumbled and died away in the hall.

Varley closed both eyes as the sun broke through the clouds, irritated at first, then thankful for the warmth and the delicate pink light making its way through the lids. Each nano second an eternity, you are here forever. An ever-dying eternity of the sun. Eternal entropic existence, warm and fuzzy. The solar economy, one way in, one way out. In between things, between states of entropic dissolvent, no fighting.

Self cauterising laser surgery. Swivelled, legs outstretched, Stood, pulled a length of tissue from the roller. Covering the mattress with it, pulled the wheely from the corner. Laying down, starting scan, 0.25% growth, minor subcutaneous tissue near hip. Awkward ruptures between Tibia and Fibula on right leg. Display stutters, showing a helix of calcium spiralling up out of the bone, Varley could suddenly feel it. Fatty growth around the liver as usual.

8.40am, a third of the way though the Swansea seeding, Varley paused the Governmental partition, always recommended full CPU when self cleansing.

Room temperature boosted 5 degrees, undressed, reached for wipes and prepped the work areas. The wipe dissolving the hair and colouring the skin bright white, white for clean and white for display pickups. Liquid gathered between the fingers, painted their calf, around the liver entry, checking the display, painted left hip also. Droplets gathered and dripped, tracing down the leg, a glowing trail, speeding down the side of the foot and staining the floor. Liver area a patchwork of bleach, the skin especially soft from all the attention would split in funny ways, elastic mesh to keep the skin together. Petroleum lubed skin, hooked up pressure pads on calf, liver and hip, hissing blood pushed out of tissue.

Article 4588:9379.6. Proven links in underground gene/meme warfare that leave the human suffering in the middle, hurt by both parties. The gene, the original replicator, the maker of the survival machine that is human, the maker of the brain. The brain, the birth place of a new, more efficient evolutionary force, the meme, each with it’s own blind agenda, each their own stubborn will to live. The human left confused between their blind squabbles, each pulling in a different direction, always towards suffering.

The genes role was to best adapt to it’s physical surroundings, this in no longer necessary. The meme has created culture and society, a new environment for evolutionary survival. The pace of adaptation and change reached dizzying speeds. The parasites that are meme and gene fighting over the body and damaging it in the meantime. The body is just the vessel, the vessels only purpose is to carry the genes , it’s purpose now is to propagate memes as well as partially genes. Consciousness and the ffeling of self, agency, is just a mistaken by product created in the conquests of meme and gene. It has been allowed to stay as long as it is behaved. Consciousness, a transitional product between gene survival and the birth of memes stuck in the middle.

Consciousness became involved in the mess, the growth of memes invading consciousness, the rejection of religion, the fear of death, the adoption of memes that tried to comfort one of that reality.

Part of the weaponry created by this mix up was cancer, a fumbled offspring of two blind, deaf and dumb mad scientists, part gene, part meme and part consciously willed. The gene losing the fight, the meme wanting immortality, the gene responding, adapting as fast at it could, started to propagate cancerous cells, cells that were in blind short term understanding immortal. Constant reproduction, constant growth, but with the unforeseen consequence of killing the host.

It began by redoubling it’s efforts to squash both, increasing violence, sex drive, selfishness in a bid to destroy culture and society. Trying to push humans back into small tribal pockets, back into the dark ages where they can forget their memetic pararsites and the plague of consciousness that had infected the brain. But memes and consciousness fought back, vying to stay alive and the cancer war began. It lead to millennia of backward stagnation, the strange hypocritical, contradictory projects, capitalism, communism etc etc. Strange societies, run on contradiction and obfuscation, fuled by memes counsness and a voracious genetic code. The war had begun and it was a foul state to witness. Memetics and genetics only know the primeval, they only know the brutality of the universe, the systems they make are ones of blunt trauma and self serving vice, this is what human society had followed for thousands of years. Society became a ritualistic place of genetic and memetic role-play, a strange stage for us to express our memetic and genetic desires, to enact our unconscious drives.

This war created conditions experienced in the 21st century, this bizarre unstable situation, 2 blind megalomaniacs and a scared confused consciousness. The ‘self’, believing it was in control of its actions, believing that free will existed, when really it had nothing, no say in anything, pulled this way and that by it’s unconscious masters. Until it was all revealed, genetic behavioural code revealed, consciousness becoming aware of what its master were. Fooling us all along, unconscious areas of the brain making decisions well in advance of any conscious process, the feeling of free will and ‘agency’ produced is a retroactive construction, protecting the mind from the feeling of helplessness. A key feature in genetic and memetic survival, the vessel must understand little to nothing of it’s actions while believing they are in full control.

Cancer was a desperate attempt for the gene to take back control of the situation. It had started to feel the presence of the invaders, consciousness and the memes. Now the genes were turning on their own creation, desperately trying to pare it back. Cancer was it’s weapon, the body need not live that long anyway, only for enough time to reproduce and protect the family. The life cycle needed to be addressed, too much time for consciousness and memetics to start interfering in matters.

Memes and genes however lacked one thing, that was foresight, the ability to imagine. This allowed humans to retake control of the body, the brain. To regulate both gene and meme and allow consciousness to take back territory. Humanity unified by consciousness, the one true leveller that is shared by all, everything else is just memetic or genetic behavioural systems, race, gender, class, sexuality.

Laying down on the bed, face to the paper towel. Turning over, best to do the calf muscle last. Scanned again, local anaesthetic injected around entry point, Varley began the clean at the liver, using hands, head to the side at wheely’s monitor, small claws pinching the skin, tension, pressure pad off, skin quickly parted, no blood. Pushing stomach out the way, fascia snipped, parted just enough to allow access to bottom of liver, 0.18mm shave, fat sucked and vaporised, liver shines, light colour of new cells, quickly pared back to the darker red. Exits, sealing partitions and skin, rearranging stomach, skin pulled together sealed, 1 inch opening when the clamps let go, final seal. Second cut at hip, cells on inside of subcutaneous tissue, more anaesthetic, pressure pad removed, small skin door opened, shaved and sealed, no longer than a minute. Unclips screen, flips over, drops pressure pad into sterilising bucket, suction skin, the layers peeling back, new pads sucking and holding. Small robotic arms from the wheely work calmly, anaesthetic, muscle split, calcium spiral bored out, bone saturated with inert solution, sealed, exits, layers back in place, sealed and finished. Varley flips over, reattaches screen, a pink droplet runs from the liver stitch, wraps midriff with surgical compress. Sits on edge of bed, flushes guts into bucket and wipes down body. Skin tingles, some potential energy. Varley prays and fingers itch.

Washes face, features so soft, nose barely rising out of skull, soft dome eyes, wide slits, tiny lashes, hairless body, micro genitalia

Article 4588:9379.6 Genetic code regulation, neurochemical inhibitors and digital brain stem attachments were now the standard. Consciousness was now the unifying factor for humanity, consciousness was the only way out of this ruinous situation that genes and memes and lead us. It was discovered that consciousness comes in and out of human society, sometimes it is necessary for both evolutionary parties, other times it is a hindrance and must be stamped out. The process of genes removing consciousness could be done in as little as 5 generations. This didn’t leave the world governments much time to act to try and save consciousness.

The understanding of our genetic sequencing enabled society to quickly back some control of the genes. Reproduction for a time became a state controlled procedure, given the circumstance people were relieved, the current position being that 38% of the population was dying before the age of 45, with the age decreasing year on year. No one wanted the genes to be in control anymore.

The memes were dealt with brain stem attachments, the aim being to overload the brain with information and then while it is distracted to try and let consciousness make unencumbered decisions. Artifical free will. Brain stem attachments developed, to confuse and hinder the animal brain, to lead it into a complete state of confusion. Just background noise. The Brain stem attachments, digital hyper loops for media projection techniques. The unit running constantly, updated remotely if more effective loops found. The loops floods the memetic holding areas of the brain, leading to saturation, this saturation temporarily dissipates the ability for memes to hijack consciousness and propagate themselves. The synthesised loop using imagery, sound, music, many different sensory devices. This part of the brain has been partitioned so they are not noticed by the user. It did cause headaches on some of the earlier models. The loops are updated and refreshed daily, the memetic receptors quickly learn the loops and began to operate outside them, refreshing them never gives them this option. The saturation of this part of the brain gives consciousness a chance to respond to reality without the constant pull of the memetic agenda.

When first experienced, users felt rather empty, especially after v.2293747 of the genetic code, with many genetic behaviours removed. People’s heads all of a sudden felt empty, this feeling was worrying for many. Used to the comforting totalitarian drives of the gene and meme, now suddenly alone, left with no one to guide. People felt empty and life became very abstract, many suicides, it took a long time to get used to. Life suddenly, became a quite bizzare experience, where as before ‘things made sense’ but for no reason apart from delusion of agency and delusion of purpose.

Artifical Free will, free will is never possible because synapses can never fire on their own. Need to stress this! One media loopto saturate the memetic ares of the brains. One part of the brain stem attachment fire synapse’ in the brain. When firing, the brain would be active and then thoughts upon this platform are slightly freeer than previously. We are reactive beings, we take information from the outside world and then respond to it, we are not proactive, we cannot create thoughts out of nothing. Our brains can only react to what we feed it, it cannot create anything of its own.

Neurochemical brain levellers, brain chemicals regulated, remove all fluctuations, to reduce the chances of acting based on genetic hormone releases. Everything was flattened out to give consciousness the best chance.

The cancer though was a continued problem, genes had seemingly become more sophisticated, something hidden to us was going on and the labs were in a constant battle to irradicate its cancer spreading, age of death had bee rescued and now stood at 85, still 45 years off what was once the average age of death, 135.

Then go into brain rape, brain stem attachments, articial free will and the conscious trying to outplay genetics and memetics to gain some sort of control over their reality, this is the purpose of genetic control and brain stem attachments, to forcibly take control. How to supress memes? Overloading the brain with ideas and then from that point of total knowing make a ‘free’ choice, not allowing any one meme to take control, not enough space for all memes, just a little taster of each to create artificial free will.

A reminder pops up as Varley is towelling the last of the pink saline droplets leaking from the incisions. All surgical rinsed at the wheely, then placed in it’s central autoclave for sterilisation. Wheely pushed under the mantle piece where a fire place would have been.

The reminder was a Rotation notification, Varley stepped into stores and found the freeze dried samples. Once every 3 months sperm and eggs samples were given, for research and also reproduction.

The door buzzed as Varley padded back down the stairs towards the front door. Opening as they neared it, the bright light pouring in, Varley moving feet to avoid it’s heat. There was an awkward whirring outside, the wheeled drone, stuck on the upturned bin lid. Taking a black umbrella from the hall, Varley slipped on some flip flops, opening the umbrella as they stepped out, the heat of the sun still making it through the shield. Being out in the sun all morning the bin lid was hot, it’s shiny surface reflecting the light back onto the pale legs, skin itching from the irritation.

Varley soon freed the wheel, unable to pick the lid up, kicked it to one side of the path. Indifferent to Varley’s presence, the buggy carried on it’s journey to the front door where it tooted it’s chirping electronic horn. The mother drone waiting in the middle of the street, the little bays opening up for its returning kids. Varley made their way back inside, scanning the packages on the front sensor then placing them into the open hatch, its cooled interior air a huge contrast to outside atmosphere. The lid closed and the buggy whirred back through the front gate, down the curb and back into its designated bay in the mother drone. Last back the mother drone now sped off, back to the regional facility. The facility will process the specimens, apply any new updates to the genetic code (normally 10-20 alterations found made a month), some samples kept for research, viable stabilised code sent on to a randomised facility, where all the worlds modified genes were kept. There the lottery would begin, the whole worlds sperm and eggs, randomly chosen to create the next generations. V.8402893 was the current genetic base, our own gene pool, now consciously controlled. No parents, no tribes apart from humanity at large. (platos republic idea?, Sparta’s societal structure). Becoming a sole agent within society.

Varley was back upstairs, already had a universal credit payment from the Reproduction centre. Sat down at the screens,

Perhaps adding something to say that games were the future of all social interaction and experience.

Sleep walker 9/11 article. The weaving of the collective conscious and unconscious into video form, film editors, the new order of priest soothsayers. Reconstructed from hive mind footage, which is exctracted from collective consciousness, sleep, hypnosis, young girls on mentrals cycles. A girls first period (girls monitored for this, as first period arrives they are examined for fresh collective memoris, passed down from generations, secrets, loves, stories, horrors.

Collective conscious starts to get heavy, get saturated, starts to obsess over traumas, over guilt. The consciousness becoming more sensitive and more powerful. Sleepwalking was the first instant, people would begin walking, end up at ground zero, massed outside people houses (guilty people).

Article 4588:9379.6. Senen Cove, 14th March 2014

Without disturbing the covers, her bare legs slipped out of the bed, her feet instinctively finding the slippers. Her husband snorted at the slight disturbance, turning over awkwardly, his t-shirt catching in such a way that would eventually lead to his arm going numb, upon waking he would realise his wife had gone.

Her feet had pushed all the way into the faux fur slippers, her night gown falling to just below the knee. She was now seated on the side of the bed, hands massaging the mattress, all the muscles in the face relaxed, eyes shut, still sleeping. She stood and made her way across the room, she crossed the landing, walked slowly down the stairs, hand on the bannister, at the bottom she slowly unlocked the door.

Senen Cove was a small village, deep south west, Lands End, England, it was 4.12am and dark. The wind was blowing bitterly as Claire walked down the central road through the village. She turned sharply, through the pub car park, over the knee high timber bar and down the shingle embankment.

Halfway down the slope she twisted her ankle, falling head first into the loose rocks. An automatic groan as the wind was knocked out of her, rolled onto her back and stood, carrying on her journey towards the sea. She hobbled down the rest of the embankment, clearing the shingle and out onto the sandy beach.

The sun was just pushing up over the land behind her as her slippers touched the cold water. Her pace unchanged as she proceeded into the sea. The blue black darkness calling her forward, her head held transfixed on the horizon, her eyes shut, still sleeping.

The dark water was now chest height, breathing now short, her footing lost where the sea bed fell abruptly away. Her head underwater, she breathed in, filling her lungs, the cold salty sea funnelled into her lungs. Chest convulsed, partly retching the water back up, with her head still under the next breath drew in more water, this continued until she was unconscious, each convulsion gentler than the last.

Were part of the unearthing of the 9/11 myth, through a hive mind, collective conscious investigation. Groups have started to investigate the past, freedom of information of the past, the agencies tried to disrupt this but the hive minds managed to stop this. (think of Peter Watts at the beginning of that book, the government systematically killing the hive minds, against anything that goes up against them). They were able to contact spirits within the atmosphere, or troubled spirits from the actual locations of these traumatic events, these investigations are recorded, fragments of memories stored. Different spirit perspectives brought together, edited to work out what happened, moment by moment. Video editors, are now almost soothsayers, spiritual, their practice is magical as well as technical.

The spirits are haunting the world, not being released into the cosmos where they are meant to join the flux/wind of the universal, the universal. The guilt plagues the spirit, and is spat out upon death only to travel within 8 km of where the death took place, given the size of the universe, 8km is like being stuck in a shoe. As you can imagine, in New york this was difficult, given it’s size and a human propensity to trauma and guilt.

They unearthed the memories from the people, not only could they interact with the spiritual they could also tap into relatives of the people, particularly the daughters, particularly while menstruating. They did this with the help of drug inducement and hypnotherapy, stored memories deep in their unconscious.

They also find fidden footage of the actual event, the inside of these rooms and the stair wells as they were being boarded up. Gassed, sleeping gas. They find this buried in the back garden of someone home, he never knew what his father had done in his life. He had himself always had an inexplicable fear of the garden. The package was sealed, and secured in special containers. It seems we never want to die with these things, we always want to leave some sort of trace, some way that the truth can still be got at somehow.

The hive minds and Editor Shaman have got together with surveillance to set up detection posts across the lands. To detect these restless, ‘Grounded’ spirits.

They depend on these conspiracy theories, they depend on terrorism, they depend on prejudice, cold war, racism, sexism. They depend on all forms of bigotry and self interest. All of these Narratives have helped the retainment of the status quo and the oppression of the masses for the world over, everyone has been fucked by this, everyone. Everything is a smokescreen for economic oppression, there’s no way that without these things people would put up with the lack of social mobility etc etc etc etc. The more the consciousness of the people grow, the more desperate the agencies get. Greater amounts of force is necessary, greater spectacles, the more outrageous, the more unthinkable the more believable and also the more open to conspiracy theories. They actually aim to make the false flag scenarios as complicated and outlandish as possible, of course they could have just blown up the twin towers on that day, but that would have been to easy, not enough of a spectacle, they needed the whole world to tune it, the whole world to see the fantastic display of badly masked planes supposedly hitting the towers. If it wasn’t so unbelievable no one would have believed it.

They left too many clues though, the money, the bonds, the hijackers, the drills, that amateur masking.

This was all revealed by a secret silicone valley group The Hive minds ended up unearthing all of this. Elon Musk managed to get one up on the world agencies and set up an independent bureau of investigation.

Elon Musk is himself the centre of a conspiracy theory, he tactically nuked himself apparently after writing a digital suicide note. The tactical nuke became a favourite of the authorities as it handily enough vaporised all evidence and made the crime scene un-investigable for many months. I wonder what lengths someone such as Musk must go through not to be assassinated by the authorities, how careful does he have to be not to be framed, self suicide etc. What securities does he have to build up, personal, physical, technical, governmental, international. etc etc.

There are some who say this has been planned for a long time, and that for years it has been forced into our collective conscience. Through imagery, 911 emergency, all these things, so when it does happen we’re already comfortable with the idea, we’re already halfway to believing it. ( talk about precognitional memory, the shadow government already have a deep understanding of this, they know that propaganda just needs to be maintained through ought the present and into the future to make us believe it right now, they know it’s a 300 year old plan that started yesterday.

There are now inbuilt programs that can detect possible precognition patterns, like an antivirus. Every person now has their own defences, their only checks on everything, food, water, information, everything is checked, double checked.

Need More Varley -Varley Gaming here, alternative economy, brain power used to organise economy (like bit coin harvesting). Neo liberal capitalism modelled on 3.5 billion year old genetic survival, need an economy for the future.

Conscious Rape , started with the hyperfrontality epidemic, all forms of stimulation. This brought about the unification of the sexes, the unification of gender, sexuality, classes, nations. We were all suddenly seen as one thing, one being, slight human consciousness. The forever misguided human consciousness, forced, coerced into nearly all actions. Consciousness became the unifying force in all of this, all of us,

This first led to big crack downs on all visual, audio, media stimulation that could be seen as collaborating with either genetic or memetic survival at the detriment to the human subject. For billions of years the human consciousnessn the human being had always come second, now with memes on the scene, it was trailing in third place. There needed to be a rebalancing.

The brain was deemed woefully out of date, out of touch with the new world. The Brain is a 3.5 billion year old piece of hardware, only getting a firmware update every million or so years, it could not keep up with the alter, alien devices that proliferated around the world. Consciousness Rape clauses aimed to stop companies and media preying on us. Sex, Fear, Violence, Death, all these things were part of the problem. The populations of the Centro Western States came together and agreed to try and limit the constant inseccessant attacks on the struggling consciousness. All sexualities, all genders, all classes came together for this.

Devices were developed to single out animal, or knee jerk brain responses. People were notified in real time when they were making decisions based on a limited free will or their animal instincts. There can never be free will, but the closest thing to it. Discuss free will, Peter Watts, how can there be free will when everything is a reaction, you can only ever react you can never assert yourself, you can’t make yourself think, full stop.

Genetic Code roleplaying as humans, memes also roleyplaying as humans, consciousness stuck in the middle of these blind , waring factions. Memes and Genes also trying to get rid of consciousness, it wan’t good for either of them.

Culture is a tool for genes and memes inject the illusion of agency upon a being. Culture/society as stage for us to role play within. Memes and genes needs consciousness in order to survive, it holds this consciousness, maintains it through culture. Society/ Culture is all an unconscious creation of these survival systems.

All areas of human life just a performance to enhance reproduction of these entities. Different genes and meme sets , with different skills put together different showcase areas to highlight their skills in order to impress mates and engender themselves within the social structure. Sciences, arts, government, money, banking, finances, nature, these are all tribes that are vying with each other in order to promote their gene/meme sets.

Reciepts (gang of murderers)

Gang of people murdering high ranking officials on their death bed, 40 years after their offence. The list of damned people is public, so they know it’s coming. Will kill you 5 years before your estimated death.

End on the sun, the solar exchange, varley looking again at the outside world, the hot rays, perhaps he decides to spend the rest of the day on the roof sunbathing, building up his relationship with the mother of existence, his true parent. The Sun is our immediate provider, our immediate creator, we are her offspring, she is our mum. We can only learn from her example, for ever giving like the sun, even unto our own destruction.

Perhaps elaborate on the idea that once we leave this we become part of the universal, then the universe dies and becomes a part of something else, then that dies and becomes part of something else. Where is the end point of this? Ballard, voices of time!!

Fish all fucking the wrong types of fish. Both chemical and sound pollution began interfering with fish migration and breeding patterns. The high levels of mercury inducing bouts of clinical schizophrenia and mass hysteria amongst many species of fish. Oceanic disturbances first reported off the Costa Rican coast, the Gulf of Nicoya’s beaches and inlets clogged with rotting fish carcasses. A group of marine biologists with the help of local fisherman soon found the source. A shoal of cod, 850,000 in number, a gluttonous whirlpool, its exterior surrounded by adult males, the interior a prison to females and the young. At night the shoal would surface, their furious circular swimming creating a whirlpool capable of dragging under smaller vessels.

The Cod seemed to be systematically dismantling the oceanic ecosystems. When their prey was bigger than them they’d devour it, when it was smaller than them they’d rape it. The death of 37 researchers over 4 years led to many countries not allowing scientists in the water. The swarm had developed a society of constant hysteria and manic bloodlust.

They came to have a semi religious cult following by some fringes of society. People thought it was the end of the world, hundreds sacrificed themselves to the shoal, large boats, full of sacrificials would head out after nightfall. Cutting off the engines upon approaching the shoal, the sacrificals would then enter the water, the current from the whirlpool drawing them slowly in. Satilite images of whole families sucked into the swarm of fish, the blood swirling round, in the anti-clockwise motion of the swarming fish. Simultaneously drowned and eaten alive. Underwater footage of these mass suicides were often leaked from military vessels monitoring the swarm. The fish passing the sacrifices down the walls of the shoal to the bottom of the tornado of fish, the limp bodies, clothes delicately stripped off, cartwheeling down the outside of the throbbing structure, pushed and pulled downwards. The bodies were almost completely stripped by the time they reach the bottom the structure. The flesh prepared perfectly for the young of the shoal at the bottom, meant tender, ripped into manageable strips. The fish were seen as Satanic, the coming of the apocalypse, their steely dead eyes, looking into the camera, indifferent to existence.

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