Noam Chumpsky

New Yorkers have called their boy "Donald Chump" since at least the MAD parody of Gremlins 2. He's now getting grumblings of "pdf protector" due to his Jeffrey Epstein / Ghislaine Maxwell canoodling up to 2003, when - they say - Trump kicked him and (I assume) her out of his Florida properties. Now we hear that in 2006, Trump ratted Epstein out.

Well, maybe [h/t Carrier, who unfortunately is also laundering Raskin]. We might fault Trump as "Chump" at least for not noticing until 2003. MAD was generally good in the 1980s-90s; I bought it whenever I saw it on the rack. But. We are here for the Chomsky chumps.

Apparently the 2008 court was so lenient that nobody knew about it until Cernovich got the files unsealed. So claims Valeria Chomsky, on Noam's behalf. The Chomskys were canoodling with the Epstein/Maxwell crew in and after 2015. Chris Hedges gives a f-u to that.

I should point out here that I believe Valeria - inasmuch as that she speaks for Noam. She is the Ghislaine to Noam-as-Jeffery. You don't hang out with a creep for this long unless you are a creep yourself; so I learnt from all the "muh pdf" commenters plaguing X and 4chan.

And boy-oh-boy did Noam ever put out some disgusting content over his too-many years roaming this Earth. Let's float up here, those Khmer Rouge apologetics. Noam always was a weasel too, as when he subsequently denied ever running cover for those maniacs (I got yo' pdf right here).

So maybe let's not pay attention to the Chumpskys at all.

Archaic poetry in a classical time

In Qumran, the Yahad deemed Habakkuk 1-2 only as worthy of tafsirpesher, famously; despite that all traditions, including the Greek, relate three chapters. In 2021, one Joshua Bryan Henson submitted a PhD thesis on all three chapters. He concluded that the same author composed all of it. Excepting the poems in Habakkuk 3 which are ... older, not younger. So those are cited by the author, which is how they survive.

The language of Habbakuk is, overall, classical "CBH": think, the prosaic frame of MT Deuteronomy and Judges-through-Reigns - once corrected. Theodore Hiebert argued Habakkuk's poetic inclusiones are by contrast archaic "ABH". Henson agrees, on assumption for ABH of this corpus: Gen 49, Exod 15:1–18, Num 23:7–10, 23:18–24, 24:3–9, 24:16–19, Deut 32:1–43 and 33:1–29, Judg 5:1–30, 1 Sam 2:1–10, 2 Sam 22:2–51=Ps 18 and Ps 68. Not any of the Prophets, even Amos or Hosea.

...and not Ps[alm] 78. For Henson, this is a CBH composition affecting ABH style. One imagines such might hold of certain other preëxilic Psalms beside 18 and 68. This blog has endorsed Esther as a late production aping CBH; Henson rolls this into "LBH". So as you see Henson does not distinguish between the Temple cant of core "LBH" from other stuff which just happens to fall at the same time. Since Henson nails Habakkuk as CBH, I assume he takes its "Babylon" as Babylon.

By the way this shows that Psalm 78's composer in the CBH era, presumably ~700 BC, owned a library of ABH work. That library, says Henson, would have included the two poems now in Habbakuk 3. Habbakuk himself of course would have done his work after all that, the Hebrew scriptoria now being under Babylonian control.

Freebird!

A Cath/Orth history buff "Blasphemer1054" wants to know why Jews like Eric Weinstein like to pose giving The Finger to the Arch. Glad you asked! here is some torah for you, no shekels required.

Titus princeps and his dad Vespasian in that office - and before - both did some fine things for Rome and for her subjects. Both are role models for leaders. Titus in his Imperial capacity can especially be praised for his response to Vesuvius. Even Jews appreciate the good they did; Josephus got himself into the Flavius gens, partly because he'd disavowed the nuts who dragged the Revolt longer than it needed to run. Some call Josephus a traitor; most - I think - are (now) willing to hear him out. We can let bygones-be-bygones even for the looting, as I am sure Stacy McGaugh will agree.

Where we part ways with Flavius Titus Caesar is how he raised ... That Arch. Yeah: we screwed up, we lost. The man didn't have to teabag us a decade later. That's how revolts get fomented for the future; as our historians should know by now. So, to Eric: if you need another finger, I have two to spare.

Also I do not denounce the Talmud. Whilst we're at it.

The Buddha comes to Berenice

Romans at Berenice did more than just play with the monkey; they had Indian people there too.

I can fault the editors for letting slip about this "Roman" port named after the Macedonian queens and founded in the 200s BC. It's Greek, morons. Although, yes; imports from the Satavahana would indeed correlate with this port's Roman era.

With that date in mind, also posted to the Roman era is the Vrishni religion now (and certainly then) filed under Hinduism. This is northern India specifically, not Dravidian. Which interests me because usually it's south India that traded this sea, at least on the receiving-end. Of interest to the authors this stele ... isn't an import. It was carved in local plaster.

Also certainly northern are the Buddhas here; at least one is of Gandhara. This is late-antique, probably in the time of the Constantii Eunomian emperors but possibly Julian. That workshop mostly did Isis eidola. I see no ::eff::ing way this is fifth-century with Theodosius' men breathing down everyone's necks.

The article marks as most important - and I agree - the bilingual Sanskrit / Greek stele 9 September 248. (Year six of Philip.)

Phrenology doesn't work

The black hole of the Yucatan yielded up a "Naia" skeleton; Discovery Future discusses it.

Naia was a woman, and had the pelvic birth-pitting to prove it; with, unluckily, the pelvic fragility which helped kill her, when she spelunked into a lower cavern. Her head looked like the Kennewick Man's: more Ainu, or European. Luckily for our sciences, modern scientody has recourse to DNA. Since, well, woman there's no Y-DNA so we can't say much of her paternal ancestry.

We can say instead for her mitochondrial D lineage. This is all over South America mostly today. So nobody is calling her a "Solutrean".

At least, I hope nobody is. Beachy Head woman, for those keeping track, was deemed African by phrenology. She was not. On the other hand they did have some Yoruba or Mende DNA in Updown; this girl (whose own mtDNA was European) was probably brought to protoEngland by the Meroving Franks (which is why you don't see me buttmad over mulatta puppettrice too-tall in mediaeval-static Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

The overall message has to be: don't use skull shapes as a proxy for race or ancestry.

Uranus, blasted

More news from 34 Tauri: the 1986 readings came during a flare. I see Uranus in the news, I, uh, click.

King George III's kawkab at 20 AU was highly radioactive when Voyager zipped past the bulleye 1986. The survey planned for the polar reading they got. Off the charts suggests they got what the Russians that year might measure as 3.6 Roentgen/hour. Since then in 2019 we've seen what flares can do to Earth's Van Allens.

I'd just apply inverse-square to get 1/400 the incoming energy. But that is a lot for a region so naturally cold.

The paper is "Solving the mystery of the electron radiation belt at Uranus: Leveraging knowledge of Earth’s radiation belts in a re-examination of Voyager 2 observations", Geophysical Research Letters per the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) although only with DOI, not link. Keeping in mind that Sci-Hub at .ru doesn't have everything and that Anna's Archive is likely going offline / darkweb.

BACKDATE 2/8

Zuqnîn after Palmer

Philip Wood, whom we've met here before on the Church of the East, has content on the Church of the West. This is a draught from 2011, or earlier; it's been edited and published since. I missed this at the time, and the final version seems hard to get to online. It may or may not affect my work - or/nor Andrew Palmer's. This is "PseudoDionysius" compiled at Zuqnîn.

"PseudoDionysius" tends to be applied to the earlier volumes, which plagiarise John of Ephesus. "Zuqnîn" is what Palmer called the seventh-century in the Syrian chronicles' excerpt, up to AD 715ish / AG 1026ish. Wood was arguing the content after Palmer left off.

A chronicle existed up to 731 / 1042. Wood calls it "A". From what Palmer relays of it, it is rife with errors such that I doubt anyone went back to fix it. (I have found little utility in it.)

This "A" was then copied and revised in 748, to add content starting 718: to chronicle "the Third Fitna" (I think the Muslims' word fitna is borrowed here). If this sounds like what John Ben-Penkâyë was doing for his near-apocalypse of the Second: yeah, we do get "antichrist" memes here. John was an autistic nutcase and an antisemite... which traits "B" shares. The 'Abbâsids were coming from the east and "B" didn't like it. Which was all the Jews' fault of course, as Barbara Roggema, who might not be autistic, lately may attest.

Hither, then, the 'Abbâsids came. So we have a Phase C 742-751; and a D, 749-763.

This is (for me) a lot of "phases" to keep the track thereof. The Zuqnîn MS is, itself, an autograph. How did we get so many editors before this MS? What happened to the earlier chronicles? Did no-one drop by the monastery and copy them?

Perhaps C is a separate smaller chronicle (Palmer relates some of these) and the D guy was also the B guy, splicing the C content into the longer work. That would render suspect the earlier content from 718-763. Why would D care about Marwân as much? This content should also be earlier, like C. Also I didn't see the "distaste for Jews" in A that Wood sees in B. When a charlatan exploits the Jews in the earlier decades, Zuqnîn laments this.

So I don't think "A" and "B" were the same. I think "A" had the core, and that other people wrote their own thing, although if they were all at the monastery they at least owned the "A" basis. The "D" guy brought the "B" Marwân lore and the "C" chaos into the "A" frame. The Marwân lore came from Arabs and the "C" stuff might have been brought from some other Syrian monastery.

BACKDATE 2/6