Archeologist Prophet

It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!

If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):

"I just finished the new papal encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas." I hope to do an op-ed on the piece for a major news outlet and I'd love some suggestions about where.

Some thoughts for now:

This is not quite as good (as concise or poetic) as Laudato Si. Pope Francis was one-of-a-kind. But, it does have the virtue of attempting a synthesis of all the Catholic Social Teaching (which he calls "Doctrine") since Rerum Novarum in 1891, and in most ways this synthesis is fair and even-handed.

The essay begins with a contrast between the "Tower of Babel" (which he says was a city built on a "claim to self sufficiency," and which "eliminated diversity," and the work of Nehemiah in using the practice of collaboration in rebuilding Jerusalem. His overall point is that we need to include everyone in the ownership and management of technological tools and we also should not use weaponize these technologies to extract profit, create unemployment, and thus deprive people of the human dignity of creativity and the opportunity to support themselves. (He could have said this much concisely.)

The introduction and chapter 1 are dedicated to a synthesis of previous social teaching for those who haven't been following. Here he wanders a bit from his thesis. He notes the necessity of caring for migrants and refugees, stands opposed to wiping out other nations, and acknowledges that it took the Church far too long to repudiate slavery and its own investments in systems of slavery. He reiterates previous statements on the value of ecological diversity, development of the Global South, widespread public management of essential public utilities. He especially emphasizes the importance of "subsidiarity," the idea that power should be pushed down to the lowest level and that we should not depend on "states" (ah hem, communist states) for managing welfare. Again, he could do more to connect these back to his main argument.

It's not until he is about half way through the essay that he gets to the point. His points:

1. "Work is not considered simply as a problem to be dealt with or as a means of generating income, but a fundamental good for the person, a principle of economic activity and the key to the entire societal question. Through work, human beings bring their freedom, creativity and capacity for cooperation into play, contributing to the cultural and moral elevation of society." (Paragraph 37) Yes, meaningful work is part of what makes us human.

2. The church has previously supported "private property" and free markets. But, the desire for profits should "remain subordinate to the moral law and guided by the principle of solidarity, without sacrificing the most vulnerable to the rationale of profit." (Paragraph 39) This is huge. I wish the last Leo said this in 1891. We might have had a much better twentieth century. Will this change the way we teach in "Catholic" business schools? I am not holding my breath.

3. He says that AI is not a morally neutral technology. It creates value through machine learning and many of the workers in this industry are poor people, especially women in the Global South, whose lives are not necessarily measurably improved through this work. This is a technology that, like all new technologies, should be studied and evaluated for its moral and social implications and handled well. He discourages the concentration of power through monopolization of access to the benefits of this technology.

5. He says he wants to "safeguard humanity" from "transhumanist" and "posthumanist currents," meaning that he wants to remind people that they need to make good decisions about how to use these new technologies. He supports the expansion of schools as a necessary safeguard to equip people to face the future and calls for communities to come together in support of excellent education in their communities. He says, "Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships." (paragraph 147)

6. He says that we need "an economy of dignity" that develops meaningful jobs and puts people to work. He sees forced unemployment as degrading to human community. He says, "It is important to move beyond current metrics of development--which for more than eighty years have been tied to the concept of Gross Domestic Product--since these metrics almost systematically neglect aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment." (Para 159)

hi! i can tell that you care about animals. you want to help them. thats awesome! thats so good!

this is the wrong way to do it, okay? animal agriculture is a cornerstone of human society. it existed long, long before us and it will exist long, long after. shaming people for eating cows will not end it. in fact, animal agriculture is the reason we have cows at all! and thats super special!

so, how can you help?

if you want cows to live long healthy lives, the easiest way to help is to support smaller local farmers! shaming anyone that eats meat not only does nothing to help animals, it keeps the power n money with all the big wealthy farming conglomerates that do actually mistreat animals!

cussing at people that advocate for animal welfare and humane farming practice helps no one. by behaving like this, you are harming your image, you are harming your cause, and you are harming cows. donate to the spca or something if you want to help, okay?

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Dr. Gladys West. 1930 to 2026.

Born on a Virginia farm during the Jim Crow era, Dr West became one of only four Black employees at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in 1956 and the second Black woman ever hired there.

The mathematician's calculations quietly became the backbone of GPS technology used by billions of people every single day. The world has navigated by her work for decades before it learned her name. That's the kind of legacy that doesn't need a spotlight to be real. It just is.

We honor Dr. West and the long line of Black women who built the future while the world looked the other way🤎

Well, for starters the Gosford Glyphs are not real. Not even remotely. It's laughable how fake they are. So I sincerely hope the video you were watching was Miniminuteman's debunking of them!

Ancient Aliens; miss me with this shit. Absolutely wild anyone ever thought they were real, thus, no, 'Lord Nefertiru' is not a real person.

nb or 'lord' is a title found within Egyptian texts. What you have to remember is that we're not 'horning in an European title' but are instead translating from a dead language of a different culture. Sometimes we don't have the proper equivalent word, so we use the closest one that culturally makes sense for both the Egyptian context and the modern one. nb can translate to lord/master/owner/possessor depending on context because it appears to have quite a fluid meaning for the Egyptians; one we cannot translate easily.

You'll see gods referred to as 'lord' where Osiris is referred to as the nb n AbDw 'Lord of Abydos' because that is his religious domain. He's also the nb n nHH 'lord of eternity' because of his role as the god of the dead.

You'll see people, who are paid workers and some who are not, referring to the person who is effectively their 'boss' as nb like 'Should not Merrj, my lord, cause the mistress of the servant of the funeral rites to be happy (namely, to hear a (good) speech about this associated servant?'

But outside of gods, no one is referred to as 'Lord Pyramid Guy'. That's just not a thing. People go by their job titles, not noble titles unless they are quite literally Royal, and even then they tend to go by their job titles like 'Overseer of Works, Prince Khaemwaset' rather than just a royal title. Like 'His son, the lector priest, privy councillor, scribe of the Book of God, provided for daily by his Lord, Iby' (from the Order of Wepemneferet, Old Kingdom) lists the titles before the name. The 'lord' referred to here is the King, so, again, it's a different usage.

'Lord' is a perfectly fine translation, the Ancient Aliens guys were using it in the wrong way based off a hoax that was likely done in the 1980s.

Also, Ancient Egyptian graffiti tends to be uhh...ink, because chiselling with copper was arduous and really only for big monuments. Mostly it looks like this:

3500 year old graffiti found in the Step Pyramid complex, left just over a thousand years after it was built. It's still a 'so and so was here on x date' but it also mentions that they knew the pyramid complex was for Djoser, even after a millennia had passed.

Anyway, everyone go watch Milo Rossi:

I don't remember the details but I recall how the guy had the looks of a rough life written all over him, ragged clothes in contrast to the police officer's pristine uniform - though obscured by motion blur as he was rapidly approaching with hateful intent - and the much finer burial clothes of the deceased. A small, skinny man with black hair, holding onto the bottle that's about to be confiscated like it's something precious to him.

I felt like something wasn't adding up and went to the comments to see if there was additional context that was missing from all this, and there was: The son and the father were Romani, and at least at the time it was still very much a tradition in Swedish Romani culture to bury the dead with little gifts - not necessarily extravagant or expensive, but things that the lost loved one would have liked.

Had to go find the photo, it's indeed Swedish. Taken by Åke Borglund and photo of the year 1958, apparently.

because I did not know that

What I did know is that the Neander Valley (Neanderthal in German) where the fossils were found was named for Joachim Neander, whose surname is a Greco-Romanization of Neumann, which yes, means "new man"

the New Man was found in New Man Valley in 1856

He shows a diagram and explains that, well, you share 50% genetic similarity with your parents, and 25% similarity with your grandparents... roughly 12% with your great-grandparents, and 6% with your twice-greats... 3% with your thrice-great grandparents, and 1.5% with your fourth-great grandparents

It's been ~40,000 years since the extinction of the Neanderthals and the end of any fresh influxes of genetic material from their species.

Every time in the last ~40,000 years that human chromosomes have recombined and divided into sperm and egg cells, some of our inherited Neanderthal sequences were, statistically, going to get lost. They would have ended up on a sperm or egg cell that was not used in the creation of offspring, and fall out of the lineage. And yes, lost sequences could be "added back" by someone from a different lineage who still carried them, but...

It's been, again, roughly forty thousand years since we had the chance to get new Neanderthal DNA, or get back "lost" sequences from one of them.

Assuming 20-year generations, that's two thousand generations of humans.

how utterly insane that

is to think about.

grug: but then how will grug demonstrate high level of skill? grug have art degree

thog: any caveman represent buffalo as it is. grug must represent what it means to grug

a woman is less likely to go "it's stupid that women are expected to be modest" than she is to go "there is nothing immodest about a woman going out without a chaperone" or even "i can go out without a chaperone because i am so modest"

If some Victorian dude comes across a capable female doctor, rather than going "she must be lying, or they gave her easy tests to let her through" or whatever, he'd be very likely to see her as an exception to his belief that women couldn't do medicine. She was made without feminine frailties. She has a man's mind. Oh, she's very nurturing, so nurturing that she feels she must heal people beyond the level of nursing.