Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool. Maybe call him... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.

A chud rebuttal

Been a (checks) halfyear since I last checked in on Bulwark contributor and midwit extraordinaire Bret Devereaux. Last month he owned the chuds. He said the only history that we, who aren't signing up as Kristol's cabin-boys, know is Caesar and Alexander. Latter whom, Devereaux pompously styles as Alexander III.

Leave aside the truth of any of this chudbash; for Aurelian, especially, I suspect you could get a fair hearing on /pol/. Let's talk how come nobody is talking Seleucus I Nicator.

Well, yeah. Not everyone knows the full Seleucid story. (This blog has put in a good word for his calendar.) But... do they need to? The Seleucids after the eponymous founder started falling off. Antiochus III was a contender but not a permanent one. If we look further afield, we could drop several more names. But whom are we trying to impress by floating Suppiluliumas I, Trajan, Nabuchadrezzar II, Ashurbanipal, Tuthmosis III... these men although great didn't really leave much behind them.

Personally I wouldn't mind floating some of the beta people. Porcius Cato the Elder, Empress Livia or (maybe more so) Julia Domna, Agrippa, or freakin' queen-mother Olympia. Belisarius and Narses? Theodora? ...anyone?

It's not that the "chuds" can't drop names they got from skimming Wikipedia or Grok. It's that it's a waste of their/our time. We're trying to spread historical knowledge, however onesided as Devereaux might think it be. Devereaux is doing little more than dropping names and waving wingwang.

Which is a very Lincoln Project thing to do. Kinda gay tho'.

How the Internet became AOL

If you own an ancient DVD you may have seen reference, in movie teasers, to "AOL Keyword" in lieu of a website URL. This was Steve Case's bid to create his own private Internet based off his telephone-switchboard in Virginia. 16k bandwidth if you could get through. (Went up to the 50s by 1999 if you bought the bespoke phone modem but by that point, the Dot.Bomb was about to hit err'body. We now measure bandwidth in G.)

So Arctotherium's history dropped a few days back. Outgoing President Obama and his allies, in late 2016, chained the Internet. This made it close to AOL-by-cartel. The first excuse given was Russia. So we had to become Soviet. If people had any further questions they were directed to the Safe Edgy Store of "breadtube".

Arctotherium is an antivaxxer and they cannot help themselves from outing themselves as such. And he runs up against the same problem as other "free speech advocates": he has to allow for the likes of Jack Kerwick (laundered through JJ Sefton). We are now Askin'-Qwesschins about The Virus Assumption. And for 1980s-era televangelism.

There exist some gullible people and these are prone to scams. Scams will become only more profitable as more internet people get up in age, bringing their wealth with them. I am tempted to suggest that these people deserve it, especially boomers given their vast sense of entitlement. Except that wealth - and power - would shift to the scammers who, I dare say, don't deserve to profit. Privatised theft isn't better than government theft.

Given the fury being fanned by these personalities, who by the way have no problem shutting out anyone pushing back upon them, I fear for Anthony Fauci's life.

Middle Hunter Gatherers

A few days back we primitive European hunter-gatherers got some notes that, alongside the famed Spanish and Italian refugia, we should take seriously the Balkans 'fugium as well. Maybe foremost.

"Cro-Mags" got into Europe in the latter 40sKBC, for good this time, forever ending the Neanders. But then the Others returned and pushed everyone there into those refugia. These papers are talking about what happened when the ice melted.

The Balkan peoples went west, to mix with the Magdalenians in Italy and Spain. That's the Epigravettian replacement noted here. Likewise that Italy proved a poor refuge although some Italian DNA persisted. Here are your WHG, gentlemen.

Bacho Kiro remains none-of-the-above. They're IUP East Eurasians in Europe. They had perhaps brought a little (male?) DNA to the Magdalenians, earlier. Not on this scale.

This Balkan group further spread east, along the steppe. That branch might be the source of the EHG.

Cofnas' most questionable take

Everyone hates Nathan Cofnas. The far Right can't stand that Cofnas read Kevin MacDonald and engaged with his work. High academia calls Nate-Dogg a "racist". Here, perhaps, is the biggest hit on him: he's no biologist, rather a philosopher, so prone to just so stories.

There is an "iron constant" in sociology, involving standard-deviations, usually one-sigma. Suffice that when prior generations wanted, basically, any African American presence in a skilled profession, they set a quota. (Alternatively you can skim the cream from Africa or the Caribbean; but the Caribbean - being an island chain - swiftly runs out of cream. There also exist those Rachel Dolezal types who play off the one-drop rule but these tend not to be the cream of any race.)

Cofnas was impolite-enough to state that this wasn't a mistake; you must do this. John Derbyshire said similar. You're not supposed to say this. You're just supposed to act on this, and babble excuses maybe sometimes citing Jared Diamond. During Obama's second term, Equity started to kick in and everyone had to act on this but turbo.

Cofnas continued, though: that West Africans are jungle / savannah tribes who can't into Neolithic. Uh.

Going back to @Evolving_Moloch and Alexander Gusev, they point out that although jungles and their tribals do exist in West Africa (e.g. that Liberian coast ain't great for permanent structures), such tribals weren't the Africans targeted for the various slave-trades. It was found in the Americas that when a hunter-gatherer was nabbed, he proved a poor worker in the fields, as in the crop-fields. It was found along the western Indian Ocean that sugar needed a force who could swing a machete. The phenomenon may well have been noted in Carthage before them all; Hanno seemed unclear on any differences between a chimp, a "gorilla", and a pygmy. A plantation, in short, needs farmers - Iron-Age farmers at that.

The Zanj was eastern Africa; we've handled that elsewhere. On our side and in our more-recent times: along the Atlantic, the Bantus... Expanded. Farmers, all. In fact a lot of the problems in Africa today are problems between herders, who usually adopted herding after their vast experience in hunting; and farmers, overwhelmingly Bantu or at least generally Niger-Congo. The "Black" peoples now in the Americas are generally Niger-Congo; I suspect Brasil being further south and hooked into likewise-Portuguese Angola, as Bantu-skewed.

Farming happens in the savannah as well because the upper-Niger part of that duo allows for irrigation, like the Nile. These more fed the Saharan trade than the Atlantic. As Gusev notes: that side of Cofnas' argument is simply irrelevant. The Atlantic trade wasn't taking the savannah's herders. If anything the savannah's herders were taking the savannah's farmers and shifting the latter, northward.

Interestingly Jared Diamond himself pondered if hunter-gatherers like he'd seen in New Guinea might be of intelligence superior over ... whites, like him, also the product of farms. But hey.

Personally I think Gusev is at least as big of a prick, to use Gregory Cochran's term; since Gusev sideswipes Cofnas as a sland'rer, where that "slander" is about David Reich's lab blowing off Davide Piffer and generally dabbing on other rivals (like Watson) for specious "racism" despite repro'ing all their results. Reich was a social-climber in 2018 and he remains a social-climber today. Reich doesn't want to suffer Cofnas' career. Cofnas, by contrast, doesn't want to be Reich, with all his ethical compromises. I doubt Cofnas wants to be Gusev, that pick-me, either. Anymore than Cochran wants to associate with anysuch "pricks".

None of this is to confirm or deny the existence of the Iron Constant. Nobody seems brave enough to confront Cofnas on this. (Or Gregory Cochran. Or Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade or...)

I will say Gusev is right on this much: if Cofnas wants to step onto palaeo-sociologic turf, he needs to learn the history of that turf.

The abortion jab (or not)

The COVID-19 jab was an abortion jab, say Ron Johnson and Katie Pavlich. Now Ace of Spades, whose motto may as well be "True If Big".

'Cause it ain't true. It was debunked last year.

The whole reason the Senators are bringing this up now is to distract voters from seeing all the work they're not doing for the SAVE Act, although there's plenty of votes for illegal-amnesties in "farm bills" and for Middle Eastern wars.

MUTANTS 8/11: Cool story, ace. Sport. Champ.

On skipping Phobos

A decade ago Hoppy Price, John Baker, and Firouz Naderi wrote "A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars", doi 10.1089/space.2015.0018. On the assumption of SLS, four launches of those could get sufficient cargo to hop to inner (6000 km) moon Phobos. This would - they said - allow for the main prize some years later which is the Martian surface. Some have of-late proposed additionally supplying Phobos from the Belt; supplying Mars from the Belt, too. This blog doesn't endorse Martian surface missions exactly, preferring outer moon Deimos, but we can allow for supplying either moon from outside.

In 2021 Drake, Rucker, and Cianciolo henceforth DRC evaluated the earlier trio (pdf). Deimos - I think - has its own merits, which aren't Martian merits. Phobos on the other hand - they think - is still looking for purpose. Inasmuch as it's being sold as a waystation to Mars, DRC say it's a cuckshed.

DRC nod to Deimos as having similar issues as the inner moon. They don't really consider it however. Perhaps because indeed it is not really a Martian waypoint (I say an interplanetary waypoint).

The issues had in both, which are not shared with Mars, include gravity 3 mm/s² (twice that for Phobos), and yes that is in millimeters. Also they are entirely airless where Mars' atmo may be compressed for CO₂, nitrogen, and argon. On Mars water may, further, be drilled and now you have most of your requirements for feeding plants and housing us animals. More: on these moons regolith cannot be shaken off gloves as it can on Mars or our Moon. So you are going to have to send over two different kinds of life-support: one for whatever moon, and one for Mars' surface. Three if we count the craft getting everything over there (one assumes, a cycler).

The 2015 architecture was proposing just to land humans on that moon and then "teleöperate" robots on the Martian surface. In that case, life-support on Mars is to be built on Mars, by those bots. The 2021 DRC review denies the point of this. Just land everything on Mars all at once, they say. Maybe get into some lavatube tunnel, aerate the place and teleöperate thence.

It is further difficult to catch Phobos from the surface, and likely harder still to catch a tether dangling thence. Here Deimos has the advantage because it's almost in areosync (martistationary at that, it's equatorial).

Overall I must agree that Phobos is the also-ran in the Mars-or-Deimos competition. I still think Deimos deserves consideration as our first port-of-call however. Although here we'll have to be serious. We'll have to build a whole city from that rock.