Blat in Perú

Matt Stoller has a must-read on how we in the West got from winning the Cold War to creating a late-Soviet superstate based in Little Saint James. Stoller calls it "blat", due to Epstein himself being some sort of Memelite or Königbergian like, in all likelihood, my great-grandmother. Same with the Maxwells.

I wonder if we should trace this to the Americas however. Hernando de Soto in Perú was reporting on the "informal" economy in the 1980s there. You wouldn't call this country Marxist; I hold fair to tag their system Left-Wing Apartheid. South Africans were bitterly saying of their own nation it was capitalism for whites and Jews, socialism for Boers and fascism for blecks.

Listening to Epstein tee off on "goys", that's how he saw the entire planet. And why not? That's how the entire planet was behaving around him.

There were young women, and some females better classed as girls; but that was just for special. Mostly Epstein finessed conflicts-of-interest between others, on the Q.T. Every deal then became a blackmail possibility, even without it being sexy, if nothing else because all those who didn't get that special deal would certainly be angered - and either go to the courts, or find other means of vengeance.

Back to de Soto, his brief for making informal networks legal and formal got a lot of rave reviews, including from Bill Clinton. What we should have read more-carefully in de Soto's book, which got into English in 2002, is that some people like the networks staying informal. Stoller uses the word "Governance" - I think, deliberately pulling the G out of E.S.G., corporate social responsibility, corpocracy whatever you like to call it. Governance requires not just the public face of Davos.

rOygbiv

They say that if you live long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float past you down-river. I don't know that I have much seen this in my life. But it does sometimes turn out you see an evil person sent up that river. Like Sonya Jaquez Lewis.

Coloradans know what Lewis helped make of their state. Less known, perhaps, is how she lied and how she forced others to affirm her lie, namely her "marriage" to a woman. The laws of nature and of G-d meant nothing to this state's SJL. And if the laws of man and of woman told her otherwise, she'd just change them.

But she couldn't change all of them.

Vox Popoli is a Hitlerist site

Richard Carrier argues that "Christian Nationalism" means NSDAP. To be more precise: NSDAP as ex-Catholic Hitler envisioned it post-Beer-Hall is a natural outgrowth of political Lutheranism.

The Catholics have a vision of the state as well: the pan-Christian "Christendom", backed up in dogma with the paraNestorian filioque. Obviously this vision conflicts with Luther's. As a result, Lutherans as of AD 1925 used the Catholic word "Christentum" to mock it.

When you look at Theodore Beale's site with the "voxday" URL, you often read the term "Churchian" and "Churchianity". These are Christian institutions which, in Beale's mind, are unfit for purpose. The Venn containing the "Churchianity" and "Christentum" circles is one circle.

I don't think Beale can (or should bother) argue with Carrier's finding. What he might argue is whether the NSDAP was in fact too tolerant, as to make it a poor vehicle for Christian Nationalism. Until the Long Knives the NSDAP was something of a coalition, from Röhm's brief for sodomía to Himmler's mysticism. Neither are particularly easy to count as Christian.

Beale also can't complain about Carrier's arrogant style and willingness to throw names about like PZ Myers at his worst. I might so complain.

Cucked by a plant

PBS / Brilliant, which is unfortunately a Climate site half the time, sometimes comes up with a gem. Here, they bring to attention the cuckoo-effect... for plants. With bonus antiLysenkoism.

We Neolithics like our wheat (and barley... and millet). Apparently, other C4 grasses were able to mimic what wheat looks like. So these "tares" got into the harvests and sometimes got their seeds mixed with the corn. Vavilov found that rye, for one, was a weed in several societies. Oats for another.

I mean, sure; not everyone likes rye, Return to Zork aside. It happens however that rye and oats although annoying when competing with the "real" crops be edible, if pungent; and may survive environments those other cereals can't. If nothing else the livestock'll eat it (and oh boy are oats ever associated with them).

Barnyard grass, reported in 2019, started around the AD 1000s with the Song Dynasty, a short of Chinese exile-state in the ricepaddy southeast. This weed is the problem.

M-dwarf life is colonial

Joseph J. Soliz and William F. Welsh have looked into - what happens with photosynthesis on M dwarf planets with liquid oceans around the rim. h/t the Wonderful Anton Petrov.

The duo looked at Trappist-1, especially e. -1e doesn't get photosynthetic energy. Maybe in 63 billion years LOL. (This star is 7.6Gy.) We kind of already knew this. Purple photosynthesis is possible but that doesn't cough up oxygen for us.

We then must look to nonphotosynthetic solutions: básalt, or not. On the ice side, other side of the rim.

Or, says Petrov: K stars, although I dunno. Alternatively if we do find oxygen in a M-dwarf system, then somebody has dropped by to terraform a planet there...

Brett Devereaux disappoints

The Baghestan is has been overall a proDevereaux blog. Lately however Dr. Bret (PhD) has been astoundingly uncharitable to one of the Right's higher-IQ spokespeople, here the serving Vice President.

For those without X subscriptions, presently nitter.net will get you there; xcancel seems down this cold weekend. But anyway.

Bret questions whether a concentration of infants signifies a special grave for infants - for everybody; or a trashpit, for brothels. This likely depended on the culture. It is, I think, a conversation worth having. Some - also with PhDs - have tried hosting that conversation, which is how the V.P. knows about it. Because this Veep is smart and reads things. No Quayle he. No Harris neither, for those on the other team; note that Dr Bret can't call this man an idiot.

'Tis also possible the article has been DEBOONKED!!. We've had a dozen years since 2014 to have that conservation too. If there is lying going on, why hit the V.P. and not the authors of the original paper? or anybody else still defending it. At best you hit the V.P. with the accusation his scholarship is out of date (even here, 12 years ain't the worst I've seen in literature).

By the way - as long as we're talking about playing games with our sources, how come Dr Bret didn't provide the link I just did, which his commenters are forced to bring to the table? That sounds like something that raises OBJECTION in courts of law here. Did Dr Bret ever watch My Cousin Vinny?

The online rent-a-sage has, it seems, received the rent he sought. So when he's going into theatrics about, oh, ICE; keep this in mind.

UPDATE 2:40 PM MST - h/t Gaius Latine, from 12 September 7:16 PM UTC last year, here's Dr Bret defending that Charlie Kirk's murderer might be a mainstream conservative(?):

To the center right, at least in American terms. It's an anti-fascist/anti-nazi slogan and quite a lot of conservatives, in theory, do not particularly like fascists or nazis.

Last I checked.

Dr Bret is what Righty bloggers term a Concern Troll. He is making plausibly-deniable insinuations. He is the Hollywood crew preaching Turn The Other Cheek at Christians. Chances that he'd buck any Current Year trend are zero. His integrity is zero. His scholarship, therefore, must be doublechecked.

Europa is basalt

Buzzkill here, courtesy Fraser Cain: Paul Byrne [et al.] says Europa's seafloor is básalt. That's like the Lunar "seas", and most of Mars. This was reported 8 January but this youtube interview is our Q-n'-A.

The tidal processes on Europa suffice for an under-ice ocean; everyone has known this since Arthur C Clarke. But beneath this, is a black boring Abyssal Plain. No mountain ranges, no volcanic hotspots - thus sprach Dr Byrne.

Byrne notes the possibility of radioactive decay 19:15, but that's probably less 5.3 AU out than it is down here. Cold hydrothermal vents might form but they aren't warm enough for life.

So Clarke was wrong about what matters, which is whether Europa Report gazurtoids could form down here by nature.

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