Given that the Miyake event hit at AD 775ish, wouldn't that be visible in datable Maya ruins? And can we get wigglematching on wood in Maya structures? Like this Yucatec canoe.
I ask because it occurs to me that natural events disrupted constructions in Ilopango around AD 400s or 500s; and now we're hearing Teotihuacano earthquakes.
What's the holdup?
One holdout of Marcion's tongue survives: the Romayka.
Sinope was founded by Ionic Milesians. Alexander brought the Attic variant of Ionian; this "correct" Greek became the koine (not koina). Then came Paul's Church. Finally the Byzantines brought a "correct" update to all the Greeks under its sway, including Miletus and Athens herself. The Spartans kept Doric which by then was so different from Koine, and so isolated, there was no correcting that.
We're learning here that although Sinope perhaps allowed a correction to Attic, and certainly to Church Koine; Byzantine Greek was one step too far. Romayka maintained, they point out, the infinitive construction. By Latin analogy, Romayka is a "Romance" based on Roman-era Greek. (The Spartan survival would fall somewhere between Sardinian and Irish. Think, if the Faliscan community found some valley or island as a refuge against Latin.)
I looked at Marx's foil "capitalism" and Rand's attempt to make something good of the term, almost four years ago. As Hudson has made clear, perhaps clearer than Marx himself: capitalism supports capital, and capital is just numbers-on-ledger. Let's look tonight at how capitalism works against... businesses.
A privately-owned company can be heroic; for good or ill (some might mention Musk; this is not the post to discuss Musk). A publicly-traded company must answer to a board. Some of the guys on the board might care; Boeing used to care. Other board members might be ideologues more interested in the Climate or in Equity. Those guys can, perhaps, get sued for not doing their duty. But what is a company's duty?
A critique lately being mooted is the Jerry Maguire critique. Yes, a company's ledger must balance first - but not last. A company is about representing athletes' interest, or about making aeroplanes - or about search engines. At some point a Jack Welch might get into the C-suite. Engineers no longer run Boeing; or, in Google's case, a bad engineer (but diverse!) gets into management, and promoted. I'm actually a little worried about Brave these days, putting ads on the new-page dashboard, or subtle DEI nudges (I swapped that out for blankpage: brave://settings/getStarted).
"Late-stage capitalism" gets misused. It begs at least one question, about whether this stage is a late-stage, or if we have further stages. Cloud Atlas' corpocracy might actually present itself as a cure to Finance / MBA overreach. But some questions I don't think the "LSC" meme begs, is the question about whether capitalism even exists, and that about whether it is good. It does exist, and I'm not seeing the good.
Besides the Clipper, past and prospective:
Europa Clipper's coming; but it's looking much like they won't find anything to send back. "Attempt no landing there" indeed.
The assumption was that Europa's mantle would be under similar squeezes as Io's. That would depend on how stiff those rocks are. We have a few constraints on those rocks nobody can see under so much water: the mass of the world overall, and the radius of the mantle. It turns out the mantle is likely under a lot of pressure, even given the low gravity on this moon's oceanfloor. Too much pressure to allow such cracks as we see under Earth's seafloors.
No ocean venting means no nutrients get added to the ocean. Europa has had boring 4.5 billions.
Clipper is still a good mission, despite my disputes with the trajectory. The mission stands to refine parameter-space. There may be hope in the three Laplacian moons shifting in and out of eccentricity; in peak times maybe Europa did get a little subsurface rumblings. Also, I dunno, maybe some life has figured out how to cling to the surface ice - close enough to ingest Io's nutrients, not close enough for the radiation.
Bit of a stretch mayhap.
One grisly spectacle in English history, and for that matter in Catholic history, is the Cadaver Trial. Formosus was exhumed and draped in the Papal regalia for the "horrendous synod"; Lord Cromwell's Parliament put Charles I's corpse on display and, of course, Charles' heir would return the favour for the departed Lord. So: Papmalil in K'anwitznal.
K'anwitznal was a kingdom of of late Classic Choltal, now in that big panhandle of Guatemala upstream of Belize. The site we care about is that now called "Ucanal".
Some faction, 773-881 CE by radiocarbon, burned the king's bones - but not the king they'd replaced. Nah: these men dug the bones out of some king's tomb - decades gone - and publicly burned these bones in a 800°C holocaust. I use that term because the king's treasures went with him.
One suspect is Papmalil. He seems not to be of the Choltal, and never called himself Ahau. He took instead a title meaning something like "lord from the west". The region speaks Kekchi now with a smattering of Yucatec (Itza, Mopan, maybe Lacandon). That looks more like southwest to me but hey.
I tend to agree that Papmalil is my prime suspect, as well. There are many analogies with Cromwell, who also melted down the old royal paraphenalia.
Kurush Teipsides the Great King was named after his grandfather, whose name was Elamite. He did not rule as a Farsi nationalist - contrast Darius and Xerxes. Vridar is reminding those of us needing such reminder of Amelia Kuhrt: that Cyrus in Babylon posed as the new Ashurbanipal. That is: Cyrus was there to restore cosmic-order to Babylon; in the name of Anshar lord of the universe, to be associated with Marduk. (The midwittery would have that Cyrus venerated Ahura Mazda, as would Darius. Like Hanania, this blog tends midwit.)
Vridar points to Cyrus' heir Kambuzha = Cambyses, in Sais. Cambyses promoted Neith thence and there. I'll note that Cambyses could associate himself with the Saites, a favourite régime of Hudson. To the extent either shah "set captives free", a Hudson might add: this just means he nullified debts owed to the previous régime and its temples. Cyrus, ousting Nabunaid (note: not "Marduknaid"), would have hit the temples of Nabu and Sin, sparing Marduk.
All this means we have a contemporary context for Cyrus' propaganda. This context is not the Bible. In their own terms, Cyrus' decrees are not explicit about shifting Diversity back to whence it came. Vridar instead brings Judaeans by the Waters of Babylon (2022) that Yehud was happy "by the rivers of Babylon" and had no pressing desire for Zion. Yeb/Elephantine hints that Yehud may well have run a temple at Babylon. Ezekiel wanted Babylonian-style Temples for his people, maybe at Bethel.
Now: given the proCyrus propaganda in 2 Isaiah, and the Babylon-to-Zion stuff in Ezekiel, I actually do suspect there was a Judaean move back to Madinat Yehud. But maybe it wasn't the literate class. Maybe it was soldiers, with 2 Isaiah's cantillations ringing in their ears.
