that took longer than i wanted to because the 90s laptop is soooo sloooow, but i downloaded all four of the blogs to usb, and will be able to cross-reference them properly tonight.

it is, counter-intuitively, exceedingly cold in here. what i've done is open the windows, but it's only half-effective because so much of the problem appears to be in the piping. it's some kind of italian cooling system, or something - it's based on the weeping tiles. i'm sure of that...

so, it's 40 degrees outside and i'm wearing a sweater :(.

i don't have screens on the windows, but if i'm stuck inside all summer then i'm going to need to find a way to get some. i can probably just get a roll of something at home hardware next time i'm out.

for now, what i've done is tape over the windows and then poke holes in them. my first attempt wasn't enough, so i poked a whole bunch more in them. it's a balancing act - i want enough holes to let the hot air in, while still keeping the bugs out. i'm hoping the tape helps.

that should be stable for the next week or so. i won't be out again until the weather cools down a little.

for now, i'm overdue on a shower, but i'm starving, so i'm going to eat first.

there is a distinct possibility that there may be some uploads before sunrise. we'll see.

listen, i'm not a park person.

but, you can expect me to come out and march in solidarity if we need to present a show of force to any government trying to restrict our freedom of assembly.

why is the air conditioning on if there hasn't been anybody home upstairs for weeks?

i don't want it on.

i guess the pig wants it on...

well, if you didn't close down the whole city and tell people to sit inside for months at a time, people wouldn't flock to the park as the only thing open when it finally warms up.

you fucking idiots.

i'm not a park person or a beach person; i'd rather sit inside and read. there aren't any bands playing....

but, my solidarity is with the maximization of freedom, not with the enforcement of draconian laws.

we've approached this completely backwards - we should have focused on protecting the weak, not on repressing the strong. and, the state only has itself to blame for it's failure to enact reasonable policies.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6979921/coronavirus-video-toronto-park/

so, the rebuild is done, and i need a nap.

i spent a lot of time with that origins project, and those files on a handful of german tribes are just a tease. there's not thousands of files, there's tens of thousands of files. i'm going to run out of time, and i'm ok with it.

i'll need to cross-reference everything, but it looks like the politics archive is coming in around 230 pages, while the music document is coming in around 175. deathtokoalas is coming in around 90 pages. and, the travel blog is very short, as will be the norm.

let's hope i can get this published in the next 24 hours.

i am in the process of publishing some genealogical/archaeological/pre-historical/paleoanthropological notes on german migrations that happened in the late empire.

this came out of a genealogical project that i started doing in the early 00s that was attempting to build a constructive proof of the existence of a north american aristocracy, something i felt was necessary at the time (and nowadays more or less think is so obvious that it isn't worth proving). these ethnic groups will fall down in the tree to historical people, whose descendants can be traced to living people. over time, the family tree became the structure in a more detailed historical site that i've largely put on hold, and in truth may never really get back to. my music is the primary priority...

these notes are in varying states of usefulness. some of it is original "research" - in fact not research at all, but careful deductive reasoning of other people's research. i tend to rather frequently argue against the deductions made in published research, which is what my actual academic purpose would be, even if i'd rather just throw this up online and let people sort through it than try and actually get it published. some of it is in a state of purgatory, where i've been waiting to more carefully source it for years. some of it is things that i would take a step back from at this point, or otherwise seek to clarify before i defended.

you will note that i have not uploaded any of this to the appspot site, and it is for the reason that i have minimal confidence in it. yet, the purpose of what i'm doing right now is to be comprehensive in documentation, and this blog is intended to be rough, as an intrinsic property. so, take this for what it is.

when i am more confident in these notes, i will publish them to the appspot site. for now, if you're particularly intrigued or upset by something, feel free to drop me an email. the contact address is on the side.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014_01_28_archive.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014_01_29_archive.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014_01_30_archive.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014_01_31_archive.html

there is apparently some suggestion in the classical literature that the persian achaemenids (cyrus, darius, xerxes, etc) took particular exception to the existence of child sacrifice in semitic religion and ordered it ended by force.

so, while modern historians need to take anything classical very carefully (any statements by classical historians need to be treated as hypotheses to be proven using archaeology, rather than accepted at face value), there is at least some consistency in deriving this story - which does not appear to be more ancient than the hebrews - from the babylonian captivity, which is where judaism as we understand it was actually invented, under heavy influence from zoroastrianism.

i'm sure i've posted about this before, but i can't find it...

what's my hyper-rationalist, atheistic take on the whole god-telling-abraham-to-kill-isaac story?

unlike much of the old testament, i don't think that this story has a known alpha source. so, for example, the flood story is thought to derive from a much older babylonian myth, and the exodus story might have something to do with the sea peoples. but, this particular story seems to be inherently and originally jewish (or canaanite) in origin - at least, as far as we know.

i've also seen some suggestions that the story may hold a memory of child sacrifice in ancient hebrew culture, and that it was changed due to changing social attitudes. i think this is close, but it perhaps reverses the causality.

my general perception of what the bible is is an elaborate ploy for the existence of the jewish state. there are still bedouins in the region, to this day; these are what the ancestral hebrew populations in the region would have been like. the bible is essentially a fairy tale to try and assert statist control over these nomadic sheep herders. this story is best understood in this context, along with the rest of the bible.

in the modern era, we reject the idea that jews are baby eaters as racist and hateful and trace the history of this exclusionism back through the christian persecution of judaism that supposedly started in the middle ages. but, if you look at the history in more depth, you realize that the roman persecution of judaism is actually largely rooted in the punic wars - and that the romans were calling the carthaginians baby killers hundreds of years before the common era. in fact, carthaginian religion does appear to have had a place for child sacrifice in it, going back to the early part of the first millennium. the carthaginians lived in modern tunisia, but they were semitic migrants from phoenicia that would have been extremely similar to the ancient jews. roman hegemony was built on the destruction of carthage in the punic wars.

carthago delenda est

...and that feeling was still going on, apparently, for quite a while after it actually was.

what i might suggest, then, is that the people that wrote this particular story were living amongst people that were sacrificing their kids to (the) god(s), for whatever reason - to ward off diseases, to maximize the harvest, so that it would rain once in a while in the fucking desert, etc - and that there was an intent underlying writing it to teach the people to stop fucking do it. it might not even have been particularly moral.

there is evidence of child sacrifice in italy fairly late into antiquity, as a consequence of the calamity that resulted from the onset of the european dark ages. these people were sacrificing their children to their pagan gods in order to stop the collapse of their society - something that was of course foolish, and ultimately would have merely led to lower population growth. it would have been hard for the romans to compete with the invading germans, let alone with the accursed christians, if they were murdering their own children to curry advantage with their imaginary gods. as terrible as the twin threats of christianity and german barbarism no doubt were on the late empire, milesian thought had clearly left these people, as well.

years later, the byzantines would open the gates to the turks because they thought jesus would come back after they did. the turks just laughed at them; that was the end of the byzantines. it's really amazing how religion can weaken and destroy a culture and lead it to cannibalize itself...

but, whether due to moral teaching, or just due to the elite trying to maximize population growth, perhaps even for war, my guess is that the intent of the story is to teach these bedouins to stop sacrificing their own kids - that if they must sacrifice something, they should kill a fucking goat instead.