Let the dildoes hit the floor

In theme with the Why Do They Hate Us commenting this weekend, let's speculate on why it's raining men (ay-men) on the WNBA courts. To the point there's now a dong dome.

I must throat-clear that this blog opposes the schlong. The author has one of his own which causes him more trouble than, perhaps, he deems worth keeping. I don't care to see more. Harrumph! ... but.

I used to appreciate the Girl Boss in adolescence. Relevant to WNBA, our family would go out to see the Comets in Houston. It was a passable and inexpensive way to pass the time - and a safe space to watch girls in motion, which most boys rather enjoy. If the fans in the stands were also girls with less reciprocal interest in boys, if they weren't being hostile to boys I could take it.

What has happened lately is the hostility to boys. Articles came out whispering of a lavender mafia in the cloakrooms. Lately the WNBA put out a po-faced conference where they were talking about the dildoes being yet another manifestation of "sexualizing women". They could take gaslighting lessons from Lord Roberts.

The WNBA has other issues. Garner got busted in Russia and her comments about men trickled out, also. (For whom, we traded the subject of Lord of War.) The WNBA blathered about paying them what we owe them, as if the free-market wasn't doing that already. Somewhere around here was the racism against Caitlin Clark, although that's less an issue for me I'll admit. We might also discuss all the PRIDE flags waving around, and good-luck if you're wearing a MAGA hat because that's "political" which the PRIDE isn't we're told.

As noted, I don't support throwing stuff on the court. I agree, it's dangerous. If you don't like the way the WNBA treats men or even normal women, then don't go.

Pay the WNBA what we owe them. Which - to me, right now: is nothing.

Power to Truth in the House of Lords

I had access to a printed Wall Street Journal this morn. In it was a "Review" piece by some Lord Andrew Roberts, about Churchill's legacy and those who oppose it. The Lord couched the piece as an explainer: why do certain people, clearly not the Lord's sort of people, drag down this hero.

In it was a side-swipe at David Irving as a "neo-nazi historian". Which you can just... say, in the Yookay; because Lipstadt won her libel case. The nuances don't matter, you can say things and dare anyone to come to this man's defence.

With that in mind, Roberts goes on to say the reason people "hate" Churchill on the "far" right is because they like authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno lives!

If you actually listen to the antiChurchill / altRight intersection, they aren't shy on telling everyone the real reason. It is because they feel like they've been cheated. Moldbug Yarvin used to talk about feeling "jobbed"; hoe_math is lately talking about how we tried MORE than you. hoe_math for one feels bitter about this; that his kinfolk have given over their cities to those who say you are sad, worthless individuals destined for the hellfire; unless you embrace Islam.

People like that, like William Golding in Free Fall, stuck on the outs, will ask how they lost their freedom. One answer offered to them is - Churchill took it from them. Or maybe the Jews did; whatever. That isn't the focus of this post.

The focus of this post is what should have been Roberts' focus, why Rightists out on the fringe reject Churchill to the point they feel hatred. Roberts did not answer that question. And his non-answer went to its own extreme, as a refusal. Lord Andrew Roberts is the mirror image to a Holocaust denier. Roberts is even more far gone than an Occidental Observer editor.

The question one might pose is, why does Andrew Roberts hate the Right so much. Although I suspect the real emotion he holds is fear.

BACKDATE 8/10

The American lemur

Vox Day linked University of Reading on primate origins. Ideologues like Beale never link "scientody" for its own sake; it's always about casting new discoveries as "epicycles" against "Darwin".

If you read the article for its own sake, we learn how animals evolve - through where, and when. The geography wasn't the same in the Eocene as it is now. Neither was the climate. In the elder days of the early Caenozoic, Europe was more like an island-chain, with a Pannonian Sea in what's now Hungary. It was also warmer: a common ancestor to the falcon and the parrot flitted about Denmark. There was much rejoicing among Monty Python fans.

For basis: the mammalian life that emerged after Chicxulub was dispersed and very different between South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. North America had dogs, horses, camels. South America of course was marsupial - spreading across a then-temperate Antarctica to Australia. Africa had the elephant, and hyaena/cats I think.

The paper-proper argues that primates should be listed with North America and not with Europe. North America does not benefit from the currents which keep Europe from being East Labrador. The paper argues that North America wasn't always temperate back then, either. It might even have been worse than Antarctica at the time.

The ur-primate would have been like a dwarf lemur, with hibernation properties. The primate could also migrate better than other animals at the time. I am reminded of Dinosaur (2000) with lemurs and dinosaurs witnessing the asteroid together.

Now: if the dwarf lemur originated in America, I am keen to understand how it got to Europe and then Africa (thence Malagasy) before rafting back to South America / Mesoamerica. Because the Americas nowhere have lemurs. I admit, this won't be the last time North America spawns a species as dies out at home: cf the camel.

BACKDATE 8/10

Justinian's adventure

In 2018, Peter Heather published Rome Resurgent, a military evaluation of Justinian's foreign wars mostly in the west. Academia.edu has raised Parnell's review of it.

The Greek and Slavic Orient has long hailed Justinian as "the Great" or even as a Saint, like Louis IX for the French. Secular Westerners have also tended to see Justinian positively; more so as his legal code was rediscovered in the High Middle Ages. The primary exception has been the Church, still sore about the kidnapping of Vigilius. Lately, Western scholars have asked if Justinian was right to carry on to a large war over here, rather than concentrating on the Persian front, which - as Procopius already observed at the time - was existential.

Heather splits the difference.

The Vandal kingdom, from its first African beachhead throughout the various Roman and Byzantine efforts to dislodge it, had been lucky. Its army was optimised for fending off Berber raids; its navy was a pirate flotilla. Justinian, more competent than Leo and better supplied than Majorian, tore through it handily. And then Justinian was able to hold it against those Berbers. Heather argues that the expedition paid for itself. (We might, in hindsight, ask if the East Roman Empire needed another potential base for rival Emperors.)

The problem of course was Italy (Heather adds Baetica, the province in Spain). Nobody can argue that the Italian wars were anything but a headache - well, nobody excepting star-struck mediaeval romantics.

I don't know that Heather has added much to our understanding; in 2018, a cursory flip didn't uncover any, and I didn't buy the book. Parnell's main questions concern common army life, which featured in 2010s-decade monographs Heather didn't read; and the plague. That is a burning question in scholarship which - I agree- requires an accounting in any study of the post-536 years.

BACKDATE 8/10

Metastable nitrogen

Awhile ago I was pondering metastable nuclei as a detonator. The notion is that when it releases energy, what's left isn't pollutive nor radioactive. Late June, we heard of hexanitrogen. That's N₆ in a chain; the authors call it C_2h-N₆.

The advantage of this molecule is that its decay-product becomes part of the propellant. It's not just a fast-n'-furious heat source. That makes it a rocket-fuel, perhaps in a 3D-printed ring of nozzles (I cannot see controlling much of it in one place). As the decay-product should, further, just be nitrogen (we better be keeping oxygen far from it) it should also be good for blasting at sea-level and not be a space-only thing like, oh, hydrazine.

What I don't know is if this molecule will store well. People keep talking hydrogen as fuel but it doesn't store. This fuel looks like a monster.

BACKDATE 8/4

Why Scythia failed

Fructose is considered harmful, and now we're doing something about it. This reminds me of a genetics article I should have posted last month but didn't: the Scythians didn't like it either.

On the one hand, this may explain how come Scythians (and Cimmerians) although able to conquer Anatolia, and beyond, weren't much able to keep these lands. Other Iranic groups had less trouble. (Hello? Persians?)

The deep steppe couldn't handle the wine, dates, and raisins. The genetics claim the Scythians did better among their Balto-Slavic kin, hence all those Iranic (read: not Baltic) rivers: Don and Dneiper and Danube.

I have one question remaining, given Scythians didn't eat fruit. Whence were they getting their Vitamin C? UPDATE 8/10 Fermenting the fructose into cider?

So much for K2-18

Anyone who still cares about K2-18 has, like its planet, no life.

The planet "b" still holds interest as a waterworld without, it seems, steam. They say it is a "cold trap". The abstract spots methane and carbon-dioxide, and no ammonia nor carbon-monoxide. So there may be hydrogen in that atmosphere - they say. Although they don't say they spot that hydrogen in the noise.

The molecules they do see could recombine into the "DMS" reported in earlier studies, at trace amounts - without life. But they don't replicate even that.