Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.

A song for Noah without Enoch

I've lately learnt about a genre of ancient Jewish poetry: the piyyuṭim. These are cantillated historical poems, like certain memrë in Syriac, and so haQallir and Yanni would compose for contemporary Byzantine-/Sasanian-era Jews. One subset of piyyuṭim, Jews have designated for the High Holy Days. Last week I fell in the deep waters, Vered Noam arguing for its deepest layer: these behave as a Levitic Heilsgeschichte better fit for their family-owned Temple than for the Moses-centred synagogue or even for the Hasmonaean temple.

To this Levitic basement-stratum, Noam went on that the figure of Enoch himself must belong. In my opinion this proposal is one that Noam needs to argue.

Noam already knows Ethiopic "1 Enoch" is a composite, so is only entertaining chapters 1-36 the "Watchers". "Watchers" might be composite even at the Qumran level. I think most scholars today, for 1E 1-16, allow - deeper - for an ancient Genesis 6 / 1E 6-11 reading as did without even Enoch. The only hero you need here is Noah, who lives to tell it.

Such scholars must admit if the piyyuṭ poems started early enough, some might never have noted Enoch in the first place. They would have vied with Ben Sira and 5Q13 in the Kippur rituals. On the other extreme we have Enoch as redeemer...

Suppose Judges was late

A few weeks ago I noted that the book of Judges remained subject to interpolation into the LXX / Qumran period. Yesterday morn, scrolling through the University of Arizona's "The Bible and Interpretation" blog, I ran across Niels Lemche.

Lemche is, I reckon, the thinking-man's Gmirkin. The Baghistan has had more interest in Yonatan Adler. We'll take some time to evaluate Lemche, today.

Lemche has marshalled parallels between the Abimelech and Jephthah stories, and events in Greek history and myth (respectively). Myth of course has no copyright, as witness the vast Etruscan and then Roman takings from those Greeks. But myth can be written, and when it is written it takes on a standard.

Take Jephthah. There were many stories of the reluctant sacrifice of the king's own child. For Greeks, the story with the most pathos was that of Iphigenia which they're still telling. Lemche points out that Jephthah is not such a telling; Judges here tracks closer, instead, the Cretan story of Idomeneus (except that here the sacrifice was his son).

Lemche further thinks Samson is simply Heracles, like Milton thought. The killstroke in Lemche's eyes is that Abimelech ended his career in a streetfight just like Pyrrhus was killed, brained by some woman hurling tiles from a rooftop. (Even if Pyrrhus was wearing a helmet, by then he was very old, so this might have been one concussion too many.)

Lemche's approach is similar to the approach other scholars take toward "Judith". "Judith" seems versed in Seleucid military concepts, its heroine follows Hasmonaean-era halakha (and political-theory), and the narrative may even track Eupolemus. Given that "Judith" doesn't know Thing One about Rome and that the Greek Additions to Esther borrow from Greek Judith, "Judith" in its original (now lost) Hebrew is unanimously dated ~100 BC.

In favour of Lemche's thesis, Judges does not much get cited in later stories. Judges famously concentrates on the northern tribes, in between introducing that cypher Othniel and generally trashing Benjamin in its latter movements. So let's look north: Jezebel knows enough of her adopted people to throw the case of Zimri at usurping Jehu. The prophets and CBH-to-LBH psalms are always referring to patriarchs Ephraim and Jacob, and sometimes villains Sihon or Og. I don't see where opponents to the various kings - we'll start with northern prophets Amos and Hosea - refer to the Bible's most cromulent example of a Man Who Would Be King. Judges doesn't even get cited much in the Samaritan Chronicle which has much lore on Joshua then Eli, but little in between. If the piyyuṭ genre be early, this seems not to have got around to Judges' heroes until ha-Qallir and Yanni in late-antiquity.

Against Lemche: the dialect of the prosaic portions of Judges, which the Samaritans (and Noth) would extend to 1 Reigns/Samuel 12, is CBH. Even some of the glosses therein look like they might better match Zionist use of Psalm 78, or precede it. By "Zionist" I mean the Joachim court's reaction to Jeremiah. Further, if Judith can be an observant Jew, and if 1 Maccabees and Esther (neither terribly religious) can talk about ancestral laws; how come none of the several villains of Judges are messing with the laws of Israel? The Hellenistic era was full of this ferment. It doesn't happen before the Persians, which - for most of us - points to a prePersian milieu for Judges. (Less-so Joshua perhaps.)

Lemche might counter that Joachim's court should have cited the Judges stories but did not. But then we don't really have this court's own words, like we have Nahum's own words and Isaiah 1-33 around Hezeqiah's court. In Jeremiah's book, we just have what scribe Baruch deigned tell us about that last independent court.

AI movie roundup

Over 2024 we got some competent AI-generated music. In 2025 we got hype, promises, and teasers done in various AI - we hear of "Sora" - for fullblown movies. I thought the trailer for the Narn i Hin Húrin was a standout, although in need of better editing. We are now in middle 2026.

Last Saturday I caught Oneiric, by Malik at Higgsfield. Up to then I suspect most of us were writing him off as a peddler of... hype, promises, and teasers. Oneiric, I concede, was advertised under a "goonbait" thumbnail; in 2016 we'd call it "malegaze". The actual video turns out to be legit. Watch it.

Interastrae is another author whose earlier stuff looked gooney. And his Alaran starts with the trope of the interstellar rogue crashlanding onto a jungle planet (jungle part of the planet anyway) with an athletic alien wench. Here too: it gets better. The second episode gets excellent.

Dark Fables is running Book of Shadows. We may or may not get to keep this one; it is set in Faerûn, like the Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years ago. Unlike Alaran, these episodes run shorter. But there are a lot of them by now.

My main suggestion is for improvements in the dialog, which can then be voiced by human actors. AI actors don't always rise to the occasion.

Apart from that, I get turned off of watching a scene when the characters blink from place to place on a set. Or, if the AI is smart enough not to do that: the camera doesn't need to be blinking around that set, because when it does it makes the audience think the characters aren't in continuity. A game author would say that this breaks mimesis. The videos I've linked keep that to a minimum.

Shadowing the poles

Among orbital nerdery ToughSF directs to Marco Bassetto and Alessandro Quarta, Solar Sail-Based Mars-Synchronous Displaced Orbits for Remote Sensing Applications. The notion is to orbit the Sun to shadow a planet, on the unstable positions of always-over-the-pole. Which means orthogonal to the ecliptic and all five its Lagrange points: "displaced nonKeplerian".

This is accomplished by solar-sails. The authors believe that Mars' 1/10 Earth mass and 1/3 surface-gravity allow a reasonably low-altitude as can map the poles. Of course Mars also gets less than half the Solar irradiance but space is cheap out there. Just unfurl twice the sail bro. If I read figures 11b and 13b correctly, they'd float about 0.01 AU above or below the Martian ecliptic plane which is 1.5 million-kilometers or, probably better, gigameters.

This would constrain a Mars mission not by propellant but by battery life and/or solar panel degradation. Like docking Deimos.

Injection into that orbit, from a base in high Earth orbit, is also handled here. There's a boost of 1 km/s deltaV to kick off to intercept the Martian DNKO. The sail takes it from there to bring the craft to where it needs to be. Minimum 949 days if the sail is mid-performance, 498 if high-performance.

These are functions of the "lightness number" β, the higher the... betta'. The paper knows of 2021-designed sails all β shy of 0.01. Bassetto & Quarta believe these rookie numbers can be improved. Lower perf does get you closer to Mars however.

There seems no plan to park these over Venus' poles. Six years ago I mooted a network of balloons perhaps angled against the vortex, per pole. From data-relays to polar mapping to weather observation, this does everything a gigameter-off sail could do.