Why is the number & arrangement of bones in the vertebrate skeleton so fixed, but their size & function so plastic?

good Schopenhauer passage on this question: "This number & arrangement of the bones, which Geoffroy de St. Hilaire called the anatomical element, continues, as he has thoroughly shown, in all essential points unchanged:

By August 1885, Nietzsche had conceived of a great work that would have been the crown of his philosophical career: The Will to Power in four volumes.

All of human psychology, organic life, & even cosmology was to be explained through a single force, the will to power. The reduction of all phenomena & events to manifestations of a single cause resembled both the pre-Socratics & Schopenhauer (in his drafts, Nietzsche would try to show that the ‘will-to-power’ was prior to & more universal than S.’s ‘will-to-live’.

On September 15, 2023, a bomb dropped:

Costin Alamariu's _Selective Breeding & the Birth of Philosophy_ appeared on Amazon.

A small group of frens decided to hold a series of spaces devoted to the initial reception, explication, & commentary on this momentous work. The first space covered the Introduction & Ch. 1: an overview of the whole project & then a phenomenological-anthropological investigation of the agrarian society ruled by ancestral nomos.

Frens, this is the canonical articulation of 'The Longhouse':

‘First to die’

There is a haunting passage from a lost play of Euripides that is only known from a heavily damaged papyrus roll found in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus in 1906,

offering consolation for the accidental death of an infant boy & instituting games in his memory. The discovery of the site, Oxyrhynchus, & the hundreds of thousands of papyri by Grenfell & Hunt is an epic story in its own right, a lost library of documents suddenly brought back to life, more than a thousand years out of time.

“Subtly [the gods] conceal the leisurely stride of time, as they hunt down the man who fails to honor them.”

/

“The gods cunningly conceal the long pace of time and hunt the impious.”

two translations of my favorite lines from The Bacchae by Euripides, ~406 BC. the line itself is spoken by the chorus, calling back to how the disguised god Dionysius is leading Pentheus, the king who was bent on suppressing his cult, to his doom:

“We will go by deserted streets; I will be your guide.”

in CR ep 134 “HOMER PART ONE” BAP discusses a certain simile from Iliad 4,

the simile of Menelaus’ wound, which compares the king’s blood-soaked legs to a dyed ivory cheekpiece for horses unlike many other Homeric similes, this one isn’t primarily describing motion (an army as a flock of birds or swarm of bees) or an excess of emotion (a raging warrior as a lion or dismay coming over a group like a black wave bearing seaweed)…

one of the burdens of being a Southerner in the 21st c is watching people become more & more retarded re: the civil war

the cultural erasure & amnesia, simplification, presentism, mobilization of ‘history’ for contemporary politics, the slander, etc takes on a tragic hue. it’s not just that progressive pundits misunderstand the Confederacy — naturally they can’t empathize with the self-sacrifice of fervent Christians defending their homes — but they don’t understood the Union, either: its economic significance or ideological motivations.

“Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings…”

-Gerhard Richter, “Notes”, 1985 I am reading this book about the German painter Gerhard Richter, written by theorycel art historian Buchloh who has nonetheless engaged with Richter’s work for a half century or more. This was published by MIT Press in 2022.

I’m working my way through a new compilation of James Shelby Downard’s unpublished texts called _Stalking the Great Whore_

Adam Gorightly quietly dropped this book on Amazon a few weeks ago—haven’t heard much about it from anyone yet. The volume itself is very nice, with a foreword by Gorightly explaining the textual history & provenance of the manuscripts… these formed a conglomerate of fragments, typed on multiple typewriters & all converted to microfiche. William Grimstad gave them to Gorightly in 2015.

The ruined city of Ephesus was the central battleground in the esoteric time war between the Catholic Church and the Anatolian earth goddess Cybele for more than a thousand years. May God have mercy on my soul for divulging this grotesque, maddening infohazard, but I am not strong enough to die with this secret. Please forgive me.

tonight’s reading is for my normie followers
-

I have no prejudices, inquisitor.”

“Yes, you have. I can taste them. You detest mind-seers. You despise the gift of the astropath. You are a blunt, Flense. A sense-dead moron. Shall I show you what you are missing?”

Flense shook. “No need, inquisitor!”
“Just a touch? Be a sport. Heldane sniggered, droplets of spittle flecking off his thick teeth.

Flense shuddered. Heldane turned his gaze away slowly and then snapped back suddenly. Impossible light flooded into Flense’s skull.

I am disturbed & shaken after learning that one of the mathematicians I revere the most,

Henri Poincaré, believed that time was slowing down & there was almost no way for us to tell.

My mind is melting & I can’t sleep. this is from _The Measure of Time_ (1898):

“History is to the Greeks and consequently to the Romans an operation against Time the all-destroying in order to save the memory of events worth being remembered.”

-Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography, 1966 “In times of persecution and of uneasy tolerance the Church had developed its idea of orthodoxy and its conception of the providential economy of history. It emerged victorious to reassert with enhanced authority the unmistakable pattern of divine intervention in history, the…

it starts with Athanasius’ suppression of decadent desert sects in the 4th century, leading to the burial & preservation of the Nag Hammadi library & demonic texts like the Hypostasis of the Archons / Reality of the Rulers.

https://twitter.com/commonsensetwo/status/1553029741007065088

In ancient Gnostic texts—Apocryphon of John especially—there is an archon who calls himself Sabaoth, ‘lord of hosts.’

But he is actually ruler of the fifth sphere, which is Mars in Ptolemaic astronomy: a red realm of blood and war.

Every 🐸 needs to read these 16 books before you get to 5K followers

it literally has nothing to do with that,

and instead everything to do with legitimacy of offspring, inheritance laws, and child-rearing

The price of our delusions will come due soon, with lots of interest.

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1602799126260973568

Homosexuals do not actually get married (because there’s no reason for them to).

But attitudes like this have accompanied the destruction of marriage in our society.

Why don’t Democrats teach black people to get married—that might actually have a positive effect

“Late Bronze Age midwinter dog sacrifices and warrior initiations at Krasnosamarskoe, Russia”

by Dorcas R Brown & David W Anthony

in _Tracing the Indo-Europeans: new evidence from archaeology and historical linnguistics_ (Oxbow, 2019).

Between 1958 and 1962, the rightist natsec wing of the U.S. government lost control of its inter-dimensional portals in the remote corners of the Pacific Ocean, allowing them to fall under archontic dominion. The Hardtack portals were supposed to be safe: they were used to sacrifice / transport the military officials & capitalists instrumental in the conquest of the Pacific through a rift in the firmament, behind the veil.

Did the Nazis know that their V-2 missile campaign against England culminated in a form of astral magic, specifically the ‘ritual of Mars’ & ‘prayer to Mars’ outlined in Book III of the Picatrix? Dropping an offering to the ground from a high place & burning human blood were critical to the ritual for summoning the spirit of the planet Mars, according to this 10th c. Arabic text.

the reason why the casting of Lawd dem Rangz is so offensive is because anyone with a passing acquaintance with Tolkien’s life & work knows that his fiction is intimately connected to his historical, literary, mythological, & linguistic research into medieval Europe. Tolkien is an artist with a profoundly sensitive ‘ethnic’ perception—he is a poet of ethnos, of folkways, of how peoples & places came together & flowered into beautiful language.

“Kill it with fire”: Pacific Rim genocides & deep imperial history, 1820-1975

esoteric - historical MEGATHREAD on the genealogy & technologies of the American Empire’s conquest of the Pacific

& what it means for Mars colonization After the brutal race war for control of the Pacific Ocean, the American empire used its new territory for its most unhinged, Faustian projects: nuclear weapons tests and Apollo splashdowns dotted the U.S. Navy’s old battlespace.