Who owns the Decalogue?

This may as well be theology-day.

The ten axioms ('Asherat ha-Debarîm) of the religions from Torah, often mistaken for "commandments", are now back on X because Jordan Peterson pointed out that they are Jewish; Joel Berry is saying similar. Theodore Beale says no: they were divine. Also Moses was a Levite, thus bypassing Judah which was not the best of tribes at the time.

All that stuff about God nonetheless fronting the Messianic Kingdom from Judah, which line the Gospel of Matthew will trace through Joseph of Nazareth... isn't for Beale. For Beale, the truly Messianic line goes through Mary. Judah is quite literally cucked, via Saint Joseph. As Mary replaced their Messiah; so Luke's Roman Christendom has replaced Judaism. And Luke's two books replace Matthew and Mark; Matthew is just there to illustrate the extent of mah boi Joe's cuckoldry.

I assume Beale by the satanic Babylonian religious group intends the Talmud and not, oh, Ezekiel or MT Psalm 137 or the seven day week. As for Mary, Beale doesn't venture, although her relation to the Temple points to one of those non-Judah families. (Akyol thinks it was Levi but he has to wave off Luke to get there.)

So let's look at what Biblical scholars say about whether Judah deserved this cucking. Besides Ezekiel's ancient rants; he wouldn't want Levi either.

Luke (famously) knew much less about the Judaea than about the Greek-speaking northeastern Med, from Syracuse to Antioch. That excepts where he's relaying Mark (and, Catholics add, Matthew; I'd add Peter). So I deem of interest Luke brings the Temple tradition around Mary, which you'd think would be obscure to a goy like him. It might precede Luke.

So now we're on the case of the Decalogue(s) and its/their relation to the Jewish people. Despite high regard for Moses and the arrival to Horeb, the psalmists didn't say a lot of the Law there. The Bible does of course consider the Ark of importance. The Chronicler makes a to-do about the Ark being transferred to Jerusalem. But the contemporary Samaritans rejected Chronicles but hard; still do.

As I noted here, the earlier-composed parts of the Bible rely upon a tradition in which Moses summons what one might call YHWH's Glory. The people cannot bear the fullness of this theophany; however later Moses receives... the Covenant Code (surprise!). Subsequently Deuteronomy develops this, in the course of Moses' parting testament. This is where Deuteronomy 4:13 introduces the 'Asherat ha-Debarîm, some form thereof anyway.

Overall: the Covenant-Code and Deuteronomy are both early and present a case for pan-Israelite shared lore even when the Davidide kings still reigned. But.

It was the Davidide king Josiah who raised these texts to a national canon. Thirty years ago people were talking about a "Deuteronomist Historian" who'd laid out an admittedly-whiggish theory of how their kingdom came to be and what made it work. Ezekiel himself, Babylonian enemy of the average Jew as he was, had to accept some Deuteronomic precepts.

Frankly the Samaritans owe a debt to the Jews for assembling the overall Five Books of Torah and installing that in their Temple, a task the Samaritans hadn't done at Gerizim as far as we know (their Torah is, like the Greeks', secondary). The Christians owe even more a debt, since they've canonised everything else which the Jews kept from before the Babylonians (and much else afterward).

As far as politics goes, the Trump side of the Right - and I suspect even the Vance side - sees the likes of Beale as needlessly-divisive grifters. On the Jewish side, Laura Loomer is reporting it's not helping (although Joel Berry isn't helping either).

John Esposito, antischolar

Jonathan AC Brown offers an eulogy for his mentor at Georgetown, John Esposito (not this guy). Let us venture down Memory Lane on our way to see off his skiff.

A look through the man's Wikipedia page uncovers little in the way of true research, in the way Bernard Lewis had done. His ouevre was to explain Islam to western seculars. This, the Saudis paid for, through Georgetown's "center" for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

If this dancing macaque was compromised as a scholar, he did venture to opine upon other scholars outside the prince's payroll. He ranked Lewis among the Darth Vaders of the world, and then among the devils of the netherworld. Lewis shared this distinction with Daniel Pipes (or Piepes), author of what should have been a classic work on the mawali.

If Pipes perhaps has been damned to the "Islamophobe" corner - a corner Esposito had set up - such could not be done to Lewis. Agree or disagree with Lewis overall, Lewis' work on mediaeval Islamic politics and history will live for generations to come. Esposito's memory will be for a curse.

Inasmuch as Georgetown is (still) a Catholic institution, the Church should have paid for that center instead, and called that tune.

The record from the seafloor

Anton Petrov points to an r-process event. That's neutron capture associated with the "kilonova" merger of neutron-stars. Some of the physics was fine-tuned last month.

Kilonovae be rare these days. This one happened 100-90 Mya. They can tell from the decay of Plutonium-244, actually fairly long lived, but rare here because most of our plutonium is made: for critical-mass. Kilonova should also create Curium-247 but this one has run out already.

As a side note, the Iron-60 spikes from 7 and 2 Mya are also found. And better-constrained, they say.

Toward the third place ribbon

Europe has figured out that Starship is a generation ahead in cargo-to-orbit. Everyone else, including China, is working to catch up... to Falcon 9. On May 2025, Europe mooted something they can do in the interim: a winged booster, which Reusable Launch Vehicle the paper dubbs "RLV C5".

The C5 at least uses tech which Europe has been working on, so there's a base there. Specifically Deutsch: the DLR's SpaceLiner. This paper got to Universetoday last March and it's on ScienceDaily now. Meanwhile all four authors have revisited the theme here (for "RLVC-5").

The Germans independently checked Elon Musk's boasts and, yeah, they confirmed that the 2024-5 Starship was for real. 59 tonnes; and they further predicted that this year's Raptor 3 based booster-and-starship can push this to 115 tonnes. If they don't reuse the booster that goes to a Saturn V tier 188 tonnes. (Once again, that's the SLS ideal of Just Get It Outta Here.)

Since the German booster "SpaceLiner SLB8" is now supporting wings too it is bearing more useless mass toward orbit. This reduces the available cargo on the second-stage. The SpaceLiner would just let that one float for the mission duration. Also the first stage with the wings must burn hydrogen, not methane. Also also the gliding booster gets caught by another aircraft before gently returned to Dusseldorf. Lastly, as of last April the SLB8 was still on the drawing-board; and wings for recovery generally is in low maturity, comparatively.

All that will get their cargo to 70 tonnes. If the second stage chassis counts as cargo that might help.

The RLV C5 does get more "efficiency" however. 74% of mass once-in-orbit is payload; as opposed to the Starship which "is" - meaning, in 2025 was - 40%.

DLR is, I darkly suspect, banking on international agreements sandbagging SpaceX. The pretext will be that methane (and kerosene) expel/s carbon in high atmo.

NERVA on the SLS

As General Atomics was testing their NTP (better, NΘP) engine, and various HALEU-driven tugs were exiled from Earth's gravity well, DRACO got canceled. Anyway here is something I missed that (2025) January: deep-space missions.

The idea best-I-can-tell was to give the SLS something to do besides pay off Senators and prance around on the Moon one more (and last) time. The whole design behind that was to inject something serious past Earth L1, directly, without any infrastructure up there. Starship as you (should) know was never meant for this; it is meant for creating that infrastructure - in LEO, namely a fuel and supply depot.

Anyway last year Arthur Beckman et al. figured that a NERVA engine, once delivered far-enough up that the anti-nuke guys wouldn't bother you, could break the (now-meagre) bonds of Earth and spew out some serious I_sp. This particular design promises 900s. That adds 17% payload to a one-way Deimos trip (relative to Hohmann by hydrox' ~500 I_sp, one assumes). Some of this load is the engine itself of course but they're assuming no difference from the chemical engines we've had. Which is quite the assumption given the need for shielding.

Once at Deimos the passengers do the thing where hopefully they establish a base, unspool cable, kick up local spingrav, make more cable out of anhydrous glass, and generally prepare for a gentle landing on the red planet. (More likely they skip Deimos and fool around in the planet itself which this blog has never recommended.) I mean, they might have the extra space for it . . .

Much more savings can be had from visiting further-away planets. Uranus is noted here in this context because we haven't orbited that one yet. For a seven-year trajectory a chemical rocket could hold "6.8-mt" payload. NTP for the same time boosts payload to 14.3: 210% increase! -mind, here the chemical system was egregiously wasteful (Starship can at least aerobrake) and, again, they haven't loaded up the payload at the depot b/c SLS. This goes up and up as we deal with Pluto (read: Kuiper) or interstellar... but I'm ignoring all that, because interstellar might end up with electrons from a solar statite.

Temematic

Last year I caught wind of something called "Temematic". This was a language somewhere in the hazy region between Old Prussian, German, and Celtic that was not any of the above. Then the Slavs came and the place enters actual history after all the damage had been done. Alexei Kassian is now on Temematic's case.

Holzer in 1989 had defined "Temematic" from the shift of obstruents: tenues > mediae, mediae aspiratae > tenues. Overall IE *p *t *k > bdg, IE *bʰ *dʰ *gʰ > ptk, but IE (*b)*d *g were retained intact as bdg. That shift did not apply to the Balto-Slavic mainline; only to 45 words he'd found within Balto-Slavic. These then would be loans. Maybe it happened in Pomerania.

Most scholars shrugged and went along, it seems, until Matasović in 2013. This one could not find any substrate loans in Balto-Slavic; which - however annoying for Holzer - turns out a boon for students of Indo-European who can now work with Balto-Slavic as a pure offshoot from the baseline of (no less than) Indo-Iranian.

Kassian revives the Temematic hypothesis by allowing for 17 of its words which he can, still, find in protoSlavic. Baltic as well, but independently.

Kassian is elsewhere something of a dissident in Slavic linguistics since he'd date the Slavic breakup to the early first millennium AD, as against the consensus who date it to the middle. But that isn't important here.

What matters here is that Kassian sees the protoSlavs - the first unified Slavs - leaving the Baltic Heimat sometime 1500-1000 BC. They then met up with total strangers. For these 17 words, those indigenes were the Temematic people.

Kassian's Temematic-speakers moreover were not even IndoEuropean. So this looks like a different signal more than a refinement of the signal. They'd be West European Substrates, usually associated with the Neolithic farmers who preceded all those other "Sons of Aryas". Most today associate them with the Funnel-Beaker peoples. Some of their other words entered Greek.

Also: the mix happened in two pulses. One was just the Funnel-Beaker substrate. The later pulse was the pulse we can (still) honestly call Temematic, having undergone the sound-shift; this happened in the first millennium BC or theoretically somewhat later.

The scouring of Flores

There are at least two Portuguese-named Flores islands; we're dealing with the one with hobbits. We now have a record of its climate and of its elephant population.

The Liang Bua clock starts 190kya, for humans anyway (I don't know about before that). After the MIS 5e which we used to call Eemian, this release offers more detail:

We found three key climate phases. It was wetter than today year-round between 91,000 and 76,000 years ago. Between 76,000 and 61,000 years ago, the monsoon was highly seasonal, with wetter summers and drier winters. Then, between 61,000 and 47,000 years ago, the climate turned much drier in summer

After that it gets silly by talking "southern Queensland", as if that part of Australia had the same climate over that stretch. Weak sauce, mates. Maybe instead relate this to Timor.

The Floresian parahumanity limped along as scavengers. Until 48kBC sometime around which, one of Indonesia's volcanoes went boom - and that was it. It wasn't Toba 72kBC; but whatever it was, Flores now went under new management. That first human population might have been like Timor's then; nowadays the "central Malay/Polynesian" cluster has pretty much swamped all those islands.