Ex-Presidencies

Against Matt Mehan, Yglesias yesterday about 6 PM UTC: Most ex-presidents are either old (Reagan, Eisenhower) or unpopular (W, GHW Bush, Carter, Nixon, LBJ) or both (Biden) but it’s normal for a young and popular ex-president (Clinton) to stay in the mix.

I'd add here Carter (especially) but even Nixon stayed in the mix. Nixon didn't much defend himself over Watergate as I recall; but he absolutely defended his decision to prop up South Vietnam. He was kind of a Pournelle in that regard. In retrospect, I suggest Nixon should have hit Watergate, harder; it might have given some pause to the later excesses of Obama and Biden.

Really the model for the ex-presidency is Carter. I used to argue for Clinton 1993-4 as Carter's third term. After the loss of Congress we couldn't say that anymore as Clinton shifted Right (to save his Party; but I don't need to ramble on past-1995). But Carter was constantly injecting himself and continued to do so after 1995, most-egregiously over "Palestine".

Should linguists drop in on exorcisms?

With due apologies for titling a post with a question, which I rarely approve for others; here's Shawn Ryan's interview with Fr. Chad Ripperger. Father Chad is a local boy, up here (Casper-to-Denver) where the oxygen is 5/6. The bishop of Tulsa chartered? ordained? this priest to exorcise demons.

Father Chad is also a Trump guy. On the minus side, Chad has run up against Trent Horn who questions whether these demons are, like, real even if they don't approve this Administration. "Extraordinary claims" and all that. There's also the anti-evolution stuff.

We are here for the claim that one of the demons spoke a 1500 BC form of "Phoenician". Chad got this from some kid who wasn't even much for high-school. So how would such a one know Canaanite from before Amarna? I can think of a few "shibboleths" - no a>o shift, no ha- article (or, it's still han-), Aramaic-like 'abd connotation...

Recordings of post-Thera Canaanite would be a true gift for the Northwest Semitic linguists. I am not being facetious:

I believe that this poor kid was going schizophrenic and, as they do, look up Secret Knowledge. If he's smart, which I concede is rare for schizophrenics (as opposed to us autists); he might be reading old prayers in Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian. The human brain might make interconnexions. Intuitively, the young brain is plastic for that.

To be remembered, language isn't a cipher. Language is used for daily interaction with peers. Language is not supposed to be hard for the in-group, and we have a pleasantly large dataset for Bronze Age Semitics what with the Ugaritic archive.

Professional linguists tend not to be overly-impressionable sixteen year olds anymore (David Stuart aside). Perhaps the pros should listen in. It might even give these kids some help.

Four Heavens

David Stuart the Mayanist has a book out, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. American Scholar has hosted Ilan Stavans' review. Nature since has posted Andrew Robinson's, but since it is not open access I'm not linking it.

Personally I had a problem with Dr Stuart turning his classmates out for Obama in 2008; which I saw in light of minority populations in central America not least the Chorti of western Honduras. I didn't think Obama would be good for them. I didn't think Stuart was good for our discourse (also see, McGaugh's "Triton Station" 2020 - or, indeed, Nature itself). But hey. For Stuart it's been eighteen years.

By this book Stuart has stepped forth as Michael Coe's heir. Although as Stavans points out, Stuart doesn't touch sociology - or, more worryingly, the economy. Coe, revising a 1966 text, initially started with material culture, since he simply could not then read the elites' words.

For sociology, I must be more lenient than Stavans. It might be that Stuart is not the man to do it.

I am unsure what Stavans wants from terms like "race" in a Maya context. One can imagine a local response to foreign leadership. The Maya endured a lot of that, starting with Striking-Owl from that land of reeds which Aztecs will name the "Teotihuacan". Some of Palenque's ahauob were Yucatec, from its north. Later classic-Maya kings are also western and depicted in foreign trappings, of course not then Teotihuacano. The true Maya in the north are, later, famously depicted like Toltecs. And as they all sometimes bore foreign lords, the classic- and postclassic-Maya all had neighbours, starting with Maya cousins whose languages may or may not be depicted in the hieroglyphs. We would love to know how the Chorti understood closely-related Tzeltal, or the more distant Mam up the hills. Or, for Copan, the Honduran Lenca, or what happened to the Xinca after the Ilopango eruption. Can foreigners be depicted as slaves?

Sex relations (we're not just talking the bedroom) might also be of interest. We have a real literature on that for Assyrians, Greeks, Hittites, Romans... Chinese, arguably the Aztecs if only via Gary Jennings. Can such an essay be written for the Maya? Hittites and Muslims have given us law-codes. The Spanish related one for the Aztecs. I don't know we have that for the Maya.

I'll throw in, the animal kingdom, as well. They raised dogs and rabbits, and tamed monkeys, and respected the jaguar; the owl, perhaps, was held in honour more elsewhere.

Such might have to come to us via the myths. Again, though, I am unsure to what extent we have those myths. It is like reconstructing the old Arabic creation-myth from graffiti-references, architecture and statuary. A "Popol Vuh" exists; but I see this as a reaction to the classic myths, like the Quran is to the (then mostly-Syriac) Bibles. Or, heavens, like our Bible reacts to... itself, and to the Canaanites before it.

Noah as the new Adam

Just this morning, a Lutheran posted about the Noah story. He points out (he's hardly the first) that Genesis 7-8 is a de-creation, along the lines of Genesis 1. What I didn't know is the further parallel of Genesis 9 with Genesis Two - the gan-'Eden.

For the Christian, or - I'll argue - the Jew: Noah follows Adam's footsteps in a way history repeats itself as farce. Noah barely has agency; the mover of the story is the Elohim of Heaven. When Noah is left to himself, he plants a vineyard - shadow of Eden - and gets drunk. Our youtuber points out that Noah isn't the hero. Someone like that was the hero of parallel Flood tales all over the Near East, but Genesis refuses to present Noah as him.

If there has to be a hero, he isn't onstage. James of Edessa would have it that the final editor of Genesis set up these stories on purpose, as failed Dispensations. Coming up is the Exodus. In the Haggadah interpretation, God is once more the mover of events, leaving Aaron and Miriam and even Moses as flawed implementors of His will. So: who'd read that sorry litany, if it weren't to end in a successful Dispensation?

The Deuteronomic History might say the hero were Moses, the Torah he divulged to the people, and the king Josiah who made it law. The Samaritans would say the hero was the spirit of YHWH in the Tabernacle, someday the Temple; Essenes and Sadducees agree, all differing on where exactly He resides. Somewhere around here was the righteous Messiah, and you know who Christians need that to be.

That Genesis 1+2 does parallel Genesis (6-)8+9 has Implications for the Documentary Hypothesis. TheTorah is saying Noah was the hero... of Genesis Two, as his vineyard redeems the land from the curse set upon Adam (and Eve). Noah's part in the Flood myth came later.

The counter-coup

Eli Lake: Mossedegh had dissolved the Majles, replaced the army leadership and Supreme Court and closed newspapers by the time the Shah used his constitutional authority to fire him.

The first Parthava Shah, Reza Khan, served under Ahmad Qajar, whom the parliament - which we'll agree to spell "Majles" - had installed over his father. The Qajars were Turks; Khans are also usually Turks, but Reza claimed to be Pahlavi. Someone would have to test that Y chromosome. Anyway as it happens, Khan did the coup - in 1921. This vacated the throne, although the Qajars lingered on, until 1923 when Ahmad gave up and left the empire. The Majles then installed Reza as shah, 1925; as he remained until 1944, when he died and Iran got the Shah we 1970s kids know and love, Mohammed Reza.

I know that it may be bad form to bring Greek standards into an Iranian context. Luckily for you, readers; bad form is exactly what we do here. Mohammed Mosaddegh (sorry, I'm insisting on this spelling) was a tyrannos. This, as opposed to a dictator; we can argue the legality of Reza's rule, but at least the Majles formalised his term, in retrospect, in 1925. For Mosaddegh, there was no Majles. He was simply the commander-in-chief of his own pet army. As well as the supreme Judge. And the arbiter of information.

The only in-house centre of power left as could reinstate any norms at all was the institution of the shah. Off-house, I'll admit, we Brits didn't want Mosaddegh either and who was in charge of the north in 1952-3... well, after March, that's actually a good question, and whoever wanted to be in charge had some motive for a quick victory abroad.

The shah did the only thing he could do, and the Brits were right to support him. This does not excuse how the shah chose to run Iran until the 1970s. But it can't have been worse than arbitrary rule by a tyrant and the likely Soviet invasion to follow.

Baetica's shifting economy

The south of Spain got reconquista'd, and the Catholic conquerors found it a vast plantation economy. There was a lot of wealth in Granada allowing its emirs to import Moroccans to defend it. That wealth came from olives: before natural gas and petroleum, nights were lit by olive oil. Also some ranching; their vaquero literally means "cowboy" as certain Puerto Ricans had to (re)learn over here. Right now we're talking olives.

With tariffs in the news, the old Baetica might not be able to offload their product so well. But Baetica (and before it, Tarshish) has something else: sunlight. The climate is quite East Texan in that regard, although the sheer timespan of its agro-mono-culture might not make its soil as good.

So some landowners are making the switch from olives, to solar-panels (and maybe batteries).

Some people care. They ... shouldn't. That's what Baetica has always been.

BACKDATE 3/3

TANSTAAFL

I am unsure where else than Christianity we hear this:

It's a free gift!

All you have to do is -

The rest may be safely ignored. The Christian has already revealed himself to be peddling snake-oil. Anything that comes after this wastes time.

If it's a free metaphysical gift, then - either it's not real, or - I've got the gift already and I don't have to thank you for it. I don't have to do or think anything. But this line of apologetics is never honest. Anyway, although we're done here, allow me to talk past the sale. Heaven knows the Christian who's already lost the argument will near-invariably switch tactics.

One such is to assert that our life was that gift - so simple honour demands we pay it back somehow, in gratitude ("faith") if nothing else. That assumes we're enjoying life.

More respect may be given to such as argue that the gift however costly should be accepted - and paid for - because of the alternative. This was Blaise Pascal's take. It has some vindication from Cantor (and, they tell me, Dedekind).

But paid to whom? Some Jew on a stick? Or maybe with Richard Carrier and 2 Enoch we assume the act of redemption happened on Mars' Lagrangian haloes (or so I count Fifth Heaven). There's the rub, isn't it?

Anyway, don't take the tack of fREe GiFt. It is not an honest tack so you'll sail to hell on it.