As good as it gets

When you work in a clerical field - a field where, at best, you do problem-solving in an office - you run into misfits. One such strain of misfit is the Gamma Male. He's the guy in the (sexual) hierarchy who finds his niche as the sensitive man who is some (stupid) woman's platonic BFF. His mating strategy is to wear her down.

If you own a Y chromosome, you don't want to drift into Gamma. Smart women see through the Gamma and hate him. The younger Gamma will graduate to a full-on bullshit artist, who gets fired a lot. Or he will wax embittered with women and give up: these are the Omegas to the extent they're still on the scale, or are just shut-ins like Jack Nicholson's author in As Good As It Gets. To the extent Gammas are prey, many younger Gammas are targets of male preeverts in their early teens - of these, many Come Out later in life, wherefrom is no going back in.

Anyway, Vox Day - who has done more than anyone to identify the Gamma pattern - has turned to the fiction enamoured by these pathetic creatures. VD quotes a correspondent calling out Ernest Cline's Ready Player One to which he calls out Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind himself. I've not read the former but did see the movie; I tried to read Rothfuss but couldn't finish, since the protagonist disgusted me. Obviously I concur with the Vox Populi analysis.

As Good As It Gets had its author whose best sellers feature a female protagonist. The female fans of said books saw them as understanding the female psyche in a way most male authors (and many females) didn't. In the movie, one fan-ette confronted Nicholson and asked how he did this sorcery. Nicholson - having a bad day - angrily retorted that "I take a man and remove reason and responsibility". In an otherwise liberal movie NOT siding with Nicholson, this quote is the only quote its viewers remember today. On 4chan, a.k.a. Omegas Anonymous, the quote crops up almost daily.

I posit that that's because Nicholson was right - about flawed female protagonists. At least, flawed in those ways which damaged men can understand: weak, emotional, vengeful, all the other defects which women and men must overcome in life.

And I posit that Nicholson's author is Rothfuss and Cline after they'd turned their eye upon their own past behaviour and reskinned their characters as females. Which Rothfuss and Cline themselves have not done, to my knowledge. Hey, they got paid, right?

As for Rothfuss and Cline, a healthy fiction readership would never accept them. What sales they have rung up come at the expense of emotionally-stunted misfits in the fandom - seeking escape. The verbal-SAT set know this, and know how to twist the knife. This is how "toxic fandom" has become such a theme, when verbal-SAT sets out to manipulate the wider populace. If you meet a fan of Rothfuss and/or Cline, you know not to trust him, like you wouldn't trust a porn addict. And if there are many of these fans, they witness only to that much spread of their mental disease.

My advice to the Gamma seeking a writing career is to start by writing an Omega character, and move on to an unsympathetic female. Open that vein. Then work with humble characters in a sensawunda setting. In shâ'llâh you'll grow out of Gamma. My advice to publishers is to pass that advice on to their writers. Failing that, my advice to readers is to boycott Gamma-enabling publishers. We can start with Tor.

Carbon-dioxide to booze

Stafford Sheehan back in 2017 found an electrolysis that mixes (liquid) water with carbon-dioxide, and produces a weak alcoholic result. Last year the climate-changers and anti-"capitalists" found out. (Verbal-SATers gotta verbal-SAT.)

From that, any distiller can run their own process, to get azeotropic 96% alcohol. Then you dilute that with pure water again and - I dunno, age it in a barrel, or sell it as vodka. Or you don't dilute it and hand it straight-up to the medics.

Quibble: it's not quite true that the process is sticking two carbon dioxides together. Alcohols have hydrogen. That has to come from somewhere. Sheehan, as noted, used water.

I'm thinking this will be the alcohol-generation method of choice in Venus. She has the CO₂, and her surface brings the heat for distillation. She doesn't have the water but that can be brought in. (Mars too. It's easier on Mars where frozen water is everywhere. There, the still can use mirrors to run up the heat in daylight.)

But I do wonder if the electrolysis needs that water. 5 MPa cold liquid (or, below Ishtar, supercritical) CO₂ is already a solvent so, at that temperature, any miscible hydrogen compound should do.

SEQUEL 4/18/2020: For a hydrogen source, I recommend NOT using hydrogen sulfide.

Upload #188b: the wind blows on

When one makes a change on a great scale, old assumptions ripple out as errors. Consider this update today a continuation of yesterday's.

On the 'Abbâsî assumption that sura 29 was later than (I now know) it is, "Against Jihad" was having that one quote from sura 35 as well as from sura 16. I'd thought sura 35 was quoting sura 16 as well... so something had to give. "Islamic Ethics" now has sura 35 quoting from sura 29. From sura 43 too.

Some of the 16/35 links turn out to be independent adaptations. One such was the Tasrif al-Riyahi, in sura 16 but not 35. That's from sura 2 and/or 45 - probably sura 45. It's all from sura 25 ultimately so I have added that 25>45 to "Defending the Days of Allâh", and another 45>16 to "Plots". Long overdue, for the former; I already knew of a parallel but didn't then know what to do with it, so buried it in a footnote. This killed a tentative (but wrong!) 45>34 in "What Waits Beside These Roads".

Madrassa.

Upload #188: break the cycle

I needed to sort out the mess in my Timeline. To that end, I've tightened the 21>52 link in "Fire from the Mountain" and the 52>44 in "New Plague". And I've a new link for sura 40 in "Reformer from Pharaoh's Family": 52>40.

The real problem I've had is with suwar 16, 29, 43. I messed up - I'd trusted the Muslims. Specifically, I'd followed the 'Abbâsid clowns who'd proposed 43 >16 >29, as you may read in Shahrastani, therefore Jeffery. And since (they told me) sura 29 is late, I felt free to pose sura 29 as a reaction to sura 9 in "Against the Jihad".

But it was striking me how much a "late" sura didn't know. Sura 29's Abraham / Lot story doesn't parallel (for instance) sura 51, beyond what either has from 7, 11, 15. And the links to suras-9-plus have dissolved into links to sura 7 or 39.

That's what my 16>29 links were doing here, they had to be here on my 16>9>29 assumption. And then... a 29/43 link bugging me since the 2000s - never posted here - was starting to look like 29>43. But 16 used 43! I'd got at least three essays into an endless loop.

Well, no more of that. "Against the Jihad" is overhauled. It still argues sura 29 belongs after sura 21. But now that it's lost the suras 9 and 16 references, it's having to be tentative about 23, 35, 42, 44, and 46 also. Meanwhile, "Plots Against The Qurra" now argues for sura 16's direct use of sura 29. And "Defending Jesus" owns that sura 43 used sura 29.

Madrassa.

The veil

On topic of how Teh Orient has handled this, here is one of many, many articles by people not following the WHO's "white" lies on why we should each mask our nose and mouth. It's the large droplets - coming out of the sick, and coming in from the sick.

We don't have the hard historical documentation from the East as we have in the West. That is because the East only had one country in it - China - until the early Middle Ages. China itself did encompass a few smaller nations, once; but when China became China, under the Chin régime, it burned all the other kingdoms' records.

What does survive in the East is Eastern cultures, passed down in unwritten rules and taboos. And they involve little physical contact and much formal ceremony. I can't remember where I read it, but I read somewhere that this may reflect, exactly, prior experience with disease. The plagues were forgotten but the habits to contain them were remembered. UPDATE 7/21: South India especially.

I wonder if early Rome's famous sense of "decorum" is of similar origin.

Also: the Near Eastern veil, which (if Larry Gonick is right) started in Iraq under the Babylonians. This veil was for women - who, pre-Internet, can be counted on to cluster with other women in a society. The North African "Berbers" also had a veil, here for men. These also lived in huddled, dense towns (albeit semiliterate).

Nova, supernova

Supernovae get all the press, but there's a reason for that prefix. The baseline is the "nova", the "new star" that fades away. To that, Hillman, Shara, and Prialnik: doi 10.1038/s41550-020-1062-y offers a lifecycle for the average nova.

(h/t Science Daily, itself h/t this presser. These constitute the most inept summary of a paper I've read in some time. Our sun is not a red dwarf; it's yellow - as we all learnt from reading Superman comics at age seven, or from watching the cartoon at six. Also, the link is a mailto. And is Shara really "the lead" if Hillman is so noted in the paper? Be better.)

Think of the nova as a Type 1 supernova. (Type 2 is the single-star blazeout.) Two stars orbit each other: one white-dwarf; one main-sequence "dwarf" or maybe giant. The white dwarf, being more compact (henceforth called, "the dwarf"), keeps its integrity. The main-sequencer loses its outer layers to the dwarf. Eventually the dwarf has acquired a shell of hydrogen. That stolen hydrogen undergoes fusion like the good ol' days. But now, the fusion happens really fast. That's a hydrogen bomb visible from Earth - the nova.

Type 1 happens when it's so violent that it rips the dwarf to pieces. Those follow the same template such that they can be used to calibrate the distance from Earth; we use them to track the time-space distance to various galaxies. UPDATE 7/23: Those aren't well understood either.

But back to normal nova. These don't rip the dwarf. Some mass is lost into space, and I guess it might jostle the stars around some; but rarely enough to disassociate the pair. So the thinning star is still there and the dwarf is back to where it was. That means the process can happen again.

Shara / Hillman (and Prialnik, fetching coffee perhaps) ran some simulations and explains how. They go nova and nova-like and nova and ... Later, nova / novalike / dwarf-nova. Much later, nova / novalike / dwarf-nova / detached. We catch them at their brightest, and when we catch them; therefore, the novae we see here are usually the former, soon after the binary first forms. The Eta Cancri system may form as such after its red-giant collapses.

BACKDATE 4/1

Upload #187: fore and aft

Sura 110 is not early. Arguably it's the last sura in the Quran. I'd join that argument in favour, since it uses suras 29 and 40. So I've written "The Last Word" on that. That project is short, since there is a limit to what can be said for a two- (or four-) line composition.

Also I dug around various pericopae in my digital geniza - some of it from 2004, when I was diving into Professor Hoyland's library. From the clutter, I've assembled enough material to offer "The Camel of Sacrifice". It accordingly has that retro air of my Mecca-centred projects 2011; it remains Impressionist. Consider it a House of War out-take.

Madrassa.

Hibernation

Whilst we're all here, here is/was James Hamblin's January article on hibernation. Yes, just like 2001. So, relevant to the Venus project!

As I read this, lowering the metabolism works but, for humans, not all that well. It isn't sleep, so the circulation system isn't flowing and the body isn't repairing itself. That means you rot, from the inside out. The intestines start first (I believe the word is "peritonitis" - you don't want that). Relevant to this cold season, if there's a virus in (say) the lungs, it's multiplying there. In rats, the bowels start rotting after only about a fortnight. UPDATE 11/25: Although in microgravity, cells - and cancers - slow down.

At the least, the population of long term hibernators will need to be sharing some space for a few weeks before undergoing the process, just to ensure segregation from outside germs.

"But bears", I hear. Hamblin does mention them. They cycle in and out from hibernation to [REM] sleep to drowsiness. Hamblin expects our voyagers to be cycling from two-week hibernations into wakefulness - as crew - and back.

To add (more) to this summary: I expect the transports still to require artificial gravity. I allow it's redundant for the hibernation cycle but the sleep cycle requires gravity, for the damage to heal.

If we're talking colonisation, once at the destination there's still the problem of food and air. Mars and Venus don't have any, and now the food and air is less than it was at the start. So the hibernation protocol remains active for those voyagers not involved in setting up the colony. That's the specialists in the voyage itself: pilot and crew.

Once planetside gets sufficient Lebensraum and a surplus of food - looking especially at the 8.6 g of the Venus cloud bubbles - we relax the protocol.

BACKDATE 3/25

The power of patience

Sturt Manning is still at it. I think that his tree-ring chronologies are bearing fruit - finally - for the Bronze Age. h/t Cornell and, er, my mum.

Over the 1990s I ran across a skeptic who warned his readers from getting too excited about the VERY precise dates which the tree-ring labs were claiming. Kuniholm was the main target but Manning was implicated. The skeptic had issues with the labs releasing data to the outside (Reich's lab has been hit with the same critique, for DNA). But mostly there was a problem with the date-ranges being such a moving target from one publication to the next. I had to agree with the skeptic.

[And yes, the author of one book titled Throne of Glass can appreciate the irony.]

That an event might work different in one latitude than in another was what Baillie found for the late 17th century BC downturns in the Greenland ice record: that the tephra was Alaskan Aniakchak and not Aegean Thera. Manning is finding the same in the vegetation. By the way they are right that the growing-season is inverted in the Southern Med: Old European Culture taught us that last month.

As recalibrated, the Thera explosion might be a 1580 BC event. Still too early for the Hittites to write it down. But there's possibilities that the Egyptians caught it.

All I can say about Manning and his team is: well done, and thank you for sticking with this until it worked. As for the skeptics... also, well done, for trying to tamp down citations of Kuniholm-Manning before the work was ready.

Hubble constant: 67.4

In more shoot-the-wounded news: a longstanding cosmological contradiction is now solved.

The Hubble Constant - the rate of expansion - relies on two precise calculations. One is the cosmic microwave background. The other is a witness of distant supernovae, which are older, against nearby ones which blew more recently. The background yields 67.4 in kms^-1 / Mpc; the supernovae, 74. The precision has improved for each - opening up a statistical gap in between.

Lucas Lombriser points out that our closer galaxies roam this universe in a cluster. Those more-recent and closer supernovae, then, are no statistical sample of the universe at large. Therefore, says Lombriser, that measurement should be discarded for the Hubble calculation. Supernovae can be repurposed for finetuning the properties of our galactic cluster.

The space for NuPhysics shrinks again.

OH DEAR 6/2: Another measurement, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.221301. 72.3 +/- 1.9 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹.

BACK ON TARGET 7/15: 67.6, from the Atacama in Chile's ACT.

SIGH 7/27: 75, ruling out all under-70s at 95%. Make up your minds!

MEASURMENT 10/29: What's the expansion rate?

ATACAMA AGAIN 1/4/21: 13.77 billion years. Cornell found what Stony Brook found 7/15.

DONE 5/20/21: Variable over time. Let this be the last appendix.

The Luwian conquest of Cilicia

The Cilician plain, in the Bronze Age, was dominated by the city Kummaha on a road connecting that with classical Adana and Tarsus, "Adaniya" and "Tarza" in those days. Kummaha knew its holdings as "Kizzuwadna". I don't know if the people here had a literature as such, but the Hittite empire transcribed a lot of local tradition for its own palace - like 19th century AD ethnographers among the fuzzy wuzzies. The Hittite empire did the same for a region to Kizzuwadna's west.

Billie Jean Collins in "Religious Convergence" argues that Hittite interest in the west wasn't continuous, but came in pulses. Two such pulses were defensive. To whit: Tudhaliya I was interested in sorcery; Mursili II, in plague. Plague had carried off the great king Suppiluliuma I and his heir Arnuwanda II, forcing Mursili to redo all they had done. In between, the Hittite regime tottered, even switching capitol a few times: Hattusa-Samuha-Sapinuwa-Hattusa. To the extent we even have documents, as in Sapinuwa, the scriptorium was more for the army than for the healthcare system.

In the Bronze Age mindset, demons and disease were usually about the same. (The Jews held on to this thought for rather longer than they should have. Not that Greek humour-theory was much improvement.) Collins notes a nuance in Arzawa: here, exorcism was womens-work and defence against plague the province of men. Another nuance is that the palace adapted Arzawan rituals into Hittite with no transliteration, unlike with general Luwiana whose rituals (as we've noted) are recorded there in the original.

The Hattusa palace cared about sorcery in Kizzuwadna too. If the Hittite ethnography of the west was as two snapshots, one in 1400 BC and one 1300; then I expect the same for Kizzuwadna.

What was calamity for the Hittites in the 1300s was opportunity for the kingdoms surrounding it. I do not hear that Kizzuwadna did well. I do hear that of the west - under Arzawa. This Luwian speaking empire even had the nerve to send correspondence to the Amarna court in Egypt, albeit in Knesian since Arzawa knew no Akkadian.

Over the 1200s, Ugarit and Hatti knew Kizzuwadna's coast and near-coast as rife with Luwian towns like Luwanda. If these were simple organic Lycian and Carian entrepôts, they could have come there at any point. That they pop up between the two snapshots suggests Arzawan colonies.

The Segovia school of Quranic tawil

According to this review, there exists now a Beck / Segovia school of Quranic revisionism. En banc, the judges' panel of university-published revisionists agree with (early)Crone and Wansbrough that the Quran developed over the Umayyad era. I belong to that party myself, albeit from the outside.

Unlike Crone, Beck and Segovia haven't yet bust out to the wider group of interested infidels. I don't read them at (say) Pipes or Spencer. Partly because their books are expensive. (The Qur'anic Jesus, yours for only $99!) But I think the real reason is that their arguments are, well, weak. "Speculative" is the polite term.

Segovia in particular has a bad habit of just rewriting a sura when it doesn't say what he wants it to say. This isn't new; Barth and Bell had indulged this fantasy before him. But it was dangerous when they did it. It shouldn't be indulged by scholars today, unless there's a witness in Qirâ'ât like in Arthur Jeffery's catalogue.

At their best, I haven't been convinced of their legwork in deciding which sura depends on what. I think suwar 74, 76, 81, 85 are later than when many scholars think, dependent on later suwar.

I would rather that university publishers not publish Kewl Idears. I'd rather that was left to, I dunno, Garnet, White Cloud, OneWorld, or (especially) Symposium to be submitted to paperback in the $15-25 range. Prometheus, if the idear is really kewl. This would encourage a wider dissemination of the kewl as can be evaluated on the cheap by the likes of me.

The Great Lent of 2020

Ed Yong breaks down the facts about Winnie The Flu. Technically a specie of common-cold.

The gastro stuff concerns me. Tuesday night, my gut got inflamed. It felt more small-intestine than diverticuloid / sigmoid, and my lymphatic system hasn't done much. There was diarrhea but I've run that much out yesterday noonish, after a sharp shift to a liquid diet with soups. It still hurts like a bruise when I stand up and walk around. Either way, this is the worst I've felt since late 2018.

The MDs talk of spread to the lungs via "faecal-oral". I interpret that farts in an enclosed space would do it. We DON'T want this in lungs. If I don't eat, I don't poop. (Needed to lose some of that early-2019 weight anyway, and the gyms are closed.)

I bet a lot of "asymptomatic" cases were "a case of the sh!ts" not worth the bother to hit the local MD. I sure hope so!

As for why Coronas never got attention: my theory is, they were deprioritised versus cancers and HIV. The pathogen-budget went to retroviri. I hasten to add, to "signal" if you must, that I am not John Derbyshire; I do not call HIV "a fashionable venereal disease". We needed to do this work to learn how to hack cells, like cancers hack cells. But it meant "we'll have a cure for the common cold!!" remained a Bloom-County tier joke until the present.

Askin' questions: Covid-19 edition

Askin' questions, raisin' concerns over at the Unz:

Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?
OLDMICROBIOLOGIST • MARCH 13, 2020 • 3,400 WORDS • 464 COMMENTS • REPLY
[The following is the republication of several long and very detailed comments by an unidentified purported expert on biowarfare that originally appeared on a recent thread of the Saker blogsite.] I’ll throw my 2 cents in here. I have zero proof other than my gut feeling that this is a bioweapon. I do have 40... READ MORE

Was the 2020 Wuhan Coronavirus an Engineered Biological Attack on China by America for Geopolitical Advantage?
METALLICMAN • JANUARY 27, 2020 • 15,300 WORDS • 803 COMMENTS • REPLY
[Portions of this article were drawn from various sources as cited. However, additional portions seem to have been quoted from Larry Romanoff at Global Research without proper citation.] It does seem farfetched, doesn’t it? That the United States will risk World War III, using nuclear weapons, by launching a coronavirus inside China during the 2020... READ MORE

Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China Itself?
PHILIP GIRALDI • MARCH 5, 2020 • 1,100 WORDS • 759 COMMENTS • REPLY
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where... READ MORE

Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent Darpa Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
WHITNEY WEBB • JANUARY 30, 2020 • 5,700 WORDS • 285 COMMENTS • REPLY
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic. As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have grown,...

There is a rule in journalism for any headline containing questions and concerns and Problematics: the question has an answer, and the answer is "NO!".

The shared frame of all these Concerns is a rhetorical chess-move: instead of arguing the point, you're positioning yourself as a disinterested questioner to elicit such a response that you can then cry help help muh free speech is bein' oppressed. I WAS JUST SAYIN'

Contrast The Saker, on that same site. His post "Looking at the Military Aspects of Biological Warfare" does just what the title promises. Having done that, he can state the bloody, phlegmatic obvious.

Ron Unz ought to feel shame to have allowed the run of his site to such insanity, and dishonest insanity at that. I expect he won't.

VERDICT 5/30: Natural. Obvious to everyone at the time who wasn't either a paranoiac or an opportunist.

ROMANOFF 5/16/22: I'll be saying more, of him. I've been brought back into this fray since Romanoff's self-outing as a Protocols crank.

The Kizzuwadna witchtongue

Last year Dr Fatma Kaynar checked out some rituals current at Kizzuwadna from the Middle-Hittite stratum. This is the 1500s BC, after the raid on the Near East which did for Babylon and Ebla. This should be about when the region's literate class shifted from Hurrian to Luwian.

The Šalašu ritual was Hurrian, which was translated into scribal-Knesian for the Hattusa palace at least in part. Knesian as of 2019 AD was/is a very well-understood language, especially in cuneiform peppered as it is with scribal ideograms common to all the Bronze Age. Somewhat infamously the Hittite palace rarely wrote out their word for "woman"; they used the MUNUS sumerogram (I recall in the 1980s nobody knew what the actual Knesian was).

Based on the Hittite portions, Šalašu was a MUNUS-exorcist. The Hittites imported these to Hattusa like the Romans would import Etruscans. In this light, as the Tuscan menfolk weren't speaking much Rasnal as of 100 BC; so, the few Kizzuwadnans still speaking Hurri in 1500 BC might have been heathen witches in remote villages.

Dr MUNUS-Kaynar notes that the Hurri portions of the ritual are incomprehensible without the Hittite help. She muses that this might not have been common Hurri, but Kizzuwadna dialect to such a remove that it be another language in a "Horite" (and not Urartian) family. Mitannians in the east, speaking a standard Hurri in the 1500s, would not have understood this western ritual.

The later Kuwatalla ritual, is also MUNUS-driven and mainly an exorcism - but Luwian. This one bears a Hurri loanword, although an understandable one so not limited to Kizzuwadna. It also has some Semitic - the word halal, and not Akkadian "ellum".

Kaynar did not notice where Šalašu spoke any Luwian nor anything in the wider Semitic family, e.g. Eblaitic. I don't either.

If Jesus' Atonement was a trick, so what?

More al-Qâsim, through Ryan Schaffner - pages 223f. Here Islam rewrote Genesis for what's now its sura 7 and sura 20. I hear that these suras also aimed against the Cave of Treasures.

Al-Qâsim assumes an Allâh so powerful and alien that It doesn't set up rules for the cosmos nor for justice. Christianity, by contrast, does - or at least did in Late Antiquity. As a result, al-Qâsim feels free to expose those Christian rules to ridicule.

In Late Antique Christianity, Eve and Adam followed the Interloper and subjected our whole species to this satan. There are echoes of this theory in the Quran, as well. Where Christianity departs is in how God has solved the problem. Basically: He didn't. Instead He worked through subterfuge, tricking the Devil's agents into performing a substitutary sacrifice.

In my thought, God is finite and faces some limits on His power. But for the Christian, more to the point is that God feels affection for this His creation. God limits Himself from wielding a heavy hand. To that, what better way to demonstrate the Devil's ultimate impotence than to beat him at what he prides himself best at - trickery.

There may exist arguments against The Atonement, but al-Qâsim didn't use a good one.

Lan astaslam

I am still on the case of al-Qâsim through Ryan Schaffner's thesis. Last night I reached page 152, which summarises al-Qâsim's theology. Al-Qâsim devoted his first section to his interpretation of the Qurân's kalam.

As I've been mentioning here, mostly the Qurân assumes a theology rather than argue for it. Most suwar appeal to the cheap-seats, to argue against other Muslims who claim the same assumptions down to shared preceding suwar. These rarely argue that theology against Christianity, and almost never against (say) Judaism. But sometimes the odd sura will float up an argument of its own - largely because it must, lacking earlier precedent.

For his kalam, al-Qâsim went with suwar 2, 5, 19, 43, and 112. He also cited suwar 6, 23, 30, 34, 42; here, I think in context he might have been better served by 17 and 21, maybe 3. Conspicuously absent is sura 4: a wise Muslim knows he cannot argue the Crucifixion, and that he doesn't need to.

I am aware that al-Qâsim was a Zaydi, now a minority sect. But as Schaffner points out, al-Qâsim's arguments against Christianity require no text nor hadith strange to mainstream Egyptian (Sunnite) Islam. The Zaydi Shi'a although following Oriental praxis never took wing on Iranian flights of fancy, as contemporary Ithna'Ashari Shi'ites were doing.

Every attempt to make sense of a religion must start with a creation-myth. Al-Qâsim starts with a stark division between the Creator and His creation. Whatever we can experience in this cosmos, beside God, is creation so nonDivine. From that, the Creator cannot beget: more exactly, cannot allow substance independent of Himself access into this Creation. A rival god would quickly throw the creation into chaos or usurp God's throne. To put it another way, the only possible sons of Allâh are the satans.

Another assumption al-Qâsim makes is that only a nonlimited God can be a creator.

I cannot speak for Muslims today; but as al-Qâsim described the multiverse, that one Muslim was ignorant of mathematical infinities. I cannot blame him; before Cantor we all were jahili, from Numenius to Marcion. Of religions the only exceptions I'd allow, in the Western Biblical tradition, are Christianity and certain strains of Judaism, which (somehow) have stumbled onto Cantor. As a result I have had to constrain al-Qâsim's thought, to focus the Creator and this creation together.

Any sentient and sane god might be boundless but he is countable. So is whatever He can create. Whatever He blunders across as isn't countable, amounts to a discovery - not creation. As the sane god is inferior to the great Multiverse, this god is Himself vulnerable to the chaos without.

Already we have exploded al-Qâsim's logic (muntiq): here is an alternative to Allâh, potentially not as mighty as He could be. This does not (yet) explode al-Islâm...

Next, as Philip Pullman pointed out, the question to ask any god is whether He is worth the following. To the extent the Christian God is constrained and weak; Muslims assert Allâh as less constrained. Perhaps we were better with The Stronger Horse.

Except that, as not being bound to muntiq itself, Allâh isn't just associated with chaos, It is ruled by it. Allâh is crawling chaos. A cosmic horror.

Bats as a reservoir for viral plague

From Ineffable Island: Cara E Brook et al., "Accelerated viral dynamics in bat cell lines, with implications for zoonotic emergence".

They sometimes call the bat, "the flying rat". As far as disease goes, it may be better to call the rat a sedentary bat. Bats fly from place to place, and then land, picking up whatever sort of bug from the locals. Rabies, most notoriously. As a result, bats have developed an immune system perhaps the mightiest of all mammals. Rodents by contrast tend to migrate only when they have to. Rat-carried plagues tend to spike under sharp climate shifts like the late 530s AD.

The bat is the jetsetting social-liberal of the mammalian world. The globalist.

The moral is: don't eat 'em, and stay far from them.

Retcon Matthew

In the middle 1990s, I attended a meeting of the Muslim Student Association to hear out their case for Islam. They made the case for Orthodox Christian tahrîf, since made more-famous by Bart Ehrman, and which I was already primed to accept. However they went further and made a brief for the Gospel of Barnabas. I was vaguely aware of this concoction; but already by then I was more aware that it was a concoction, not taken seriously by any serious (read: atheist) reader of Christian scripture.

I left as soon as I could. I felt I could vouch for the moral character and piety of the MSA. I felt I could not so vouch for their grasp on reality.

But let us be fair to those Muslims not in the 1995 MSA. Since then the Umma's better lights have produced literature like Khalidi's The Muslim Jesus and Akyol's The Islamic Jesus. And I expect that younger Muslims don't reach for Muh Barnabas as they once did.

One hit against Barnabas, as noted, is that the first Muslims dealing with Christians flat didn't know it existed. Instead, they had a forged Gospel of their own. Enter Ryan Schaffner's 2016 thesis The Bible Through a Qur'anic Filter, pages 130f.

Argued here is that, just as Greek and Syriac polemicists had access to Quran translations, if somewhat tendentious; so the first Muslims arguing against them had a Bible translation. What differed between these religions was the attitude toward their counterparty's text. The Greeks and (as)Syrians were out for such translation as made the Quran look ridiculous. At times, as with Peter Venerable and John Damascene, these were freeform adaptations of Tafsir; at times they were literal... over literal.

A Zaydi intellectual in Egypt, al-Qâsim (later Imam), worked from an Arabic Bible which - for Matthew - did not render its base obscene. In fact wholly the reverse. His Matthew amounts to an Islamist rewrite, a sort of Mark Version Three. This could well be bruited about as the real Injîl, "censored" by the Christians and also diluted by inclusion of the other three. Marcion, Christians say, played a similar trick with Luke.

I am interested if this version bore any relation to Shem Tob's Hebrew version of Matthew. Just as a pro-Matthew faction arose in (western) Islam, such a faction bumped around in Mediterranean Judaism. Now, Matthew didn't arise to a canon text in either. Also, the so-called "Jewish Christians" among the Syrians - culminating in Jacob né-Aphrahat - preferred the Diatesseron, based on that Jacob's quotes. Still: "Jewish Christians" also existed who spread about versions of Matthew. These either maintained a text from their ancestry, or else switched "back" to (a redaction of) it from the Diatesseron.

We were (mostly) wrong about Sardinia

David Reich's lab has constrained ancient Sardinia. From 24 February: doi 10.1038/s41559-020-1102-0

Five of their samples come from the Iron Age and later. NONE of them are related to that Farmer/ WHG mix common to the earlier Bronze Age, and making up about half the modern Sardinian genome. The newer samples are related to the other 38-44% of said genome - that is, they made it.

To the extent the present Sardinians look like Farmers, much of that signal had come in from the Near East later. Specifically, mostly by way of Carthage and Utica given the strong African signal there. It's Punic. (Some Greek too.) I am sure that this population shifted the Sardinian language, throughout the African- and Sicilian-facing sides of the island.

Although I reserve my right to question the Corsica-facing north.

The "Tyrrhenian Sea" was a thing - the Greeks knew it as the Etruscans' lake. The Punic group although mighty came late, and they only got to enjoy the place for a few centuries before northern Italy - under Rome - reasserted her overlordship. It became politically-incorrect to speak Canaani languages, so the people learnt Latin and Greek. Corsica and Elba were some bridges - rather, ferries - further.

To sum up: the Punic and (to a lesser extent) Greek migration over the early Iron Age swamped Sardinia to such a point that when the Romans got there, whatever indigenous languages had existed in 1200 BC were since wiped from the whole island. It was Greek and Punic, mostly Punic, just like Calabria and Sicily and, thereby, of no interest to what passed for Republican-Roman ethnography.

I still question Iron Age Corsica - and Bronze Age Sardinia. The latter, before the great Punic immigration, underwent another population shift, but smaller. About six percent of the modern genome, or 10% of the pre-Punic population, drifted in over the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The place has plenty of HV, JT, and U from the women. Contemporary (Early Bronze) Sicily has R1b-Z195 from the men, which is Iberian; given the shipcraft of that time, it must have got at least to Elba and Corsica too by then. This particular study didn't look at Elba or Corsica; and if Z195 isn't in Sardinia yet, it could well be from the size of the sample. Earliest Sardinia instead has R1b-V88... like Chad.

Learning to write

From Saraceni: Stela 87, found at the Tak'alik Ab'aj park in Guatemala in 2018, is being deciphered. This is an ideographic detail of a king and his titles. It forms a transition between Olmec civilisation and the Maya.

The stele bears no linguistic content - as yet - but the excavators are confident that the script is ancestral to Classic [Choltal] Maya.

Upload #186: big dig

Whilst I was cooped up here I mused over Afsaruddin's comments about suras 29 and 49. As Andrew Harrod has observed, her argument would work best if these suras abrogate the less-irenic suwar of which JihadWatch readers are aware. For that, perhaps we could demonstrate that those two are among the last suwar.

I have added some more 16>29 arguments to "Against the Jihad" [UPDATE 3/28 - I take it all back]. As for "True Belief against Islam", I considered the Masûdî variant text. Can't hurt.

Mostly today I've been after sura 99. There are questions on whether it is "Meccan" or "Madinan". For Ibn Masûd, the question went more on what's in it, and whether it is a sura at all.

I explore these in "Gaia's Burdens Exposed" - I'm proposing Palestinian. Also I think sura 10 used it, so, "Promised Egypt" got a change. By the way this means I think sura 99 is early: 635ish AD. But like 29 and 49, it is by one of the Jihad's critics; contemporary with Jacob famously-baptised.

Madrassa.

The Buy-Bull Museum

The Hobby Lobby owner has a Museum Of The Bible in DC. The Museum exists to bypass Secular Humanist collections, so to deliver an alternative message to the people.

I am so far doing my best not to be sarcastic. I am an independent researcher / (semi)publisher myself.

But too-often those who dispute the modern Texto Implicito devolve into Protestant Bible literalism which is (even) stoopider. With the Barbie Bible Museum, we can add that they buy stuff from likewise-independent Near Eastern retailers.

And by "independent retailer" I mean thief. Sometimes these guys steal stuff off the ground - ISIS got in on that racket. In this case they've just made sh!t up. ALL the "Dead Sea Scroll" fragments are on ancient leather... modern ink. I take it that on fragment 15QJub frag 3recto the doodle of a rocket ship was also a clue.

We can thank another team of independent researchers for the tip-off on the Exhibit Of Last Week's Pseudepigrapha. Sadly with outfits like the Museum, the more-respectable researchers don't want even to touch it. So the rubes come in to see what the Really Smart rubes have bought.

The last retreat of the Hurri

The "Hurrian" language, associated with the Biblical Horites, comes up in the northern foothills of the Mesopotamia as of the first Bronze Age tablets from the region. Those foothills receive further witness from their northwest, in the "Hittite" age. By then, they are a mixed group speaking both Hurrian and Luwian. In the Iron Age the local monuments are Luwian or bilingual... with Aramaic. The Bible remembers "Horites" but as an ethnonym.

I don't think Hurrian is spoken anywhere during the Iron Age, but Urartu around Lake Van was speaking a cousin-language. Still: Hurrian history was not a simple tale of decline; they spread influence among the Hittites to the west, and (albeit under Aryan leadership) the Mitanni empire had a Hurri base when it conquered Mesopotamia.

One of those mixed regions, which went Luwian, is Kizzuwadna. There was an open question on whether it was Hurri first or Luwian.

Vladimir Shelestin has answered that, in "The ethnical history of Kizzuwatna: an onomastic approach". That is: place-names, which by the way trend conservative (witness: "Massachusetts"). Shelestin sees the first-attested placenames there to be Hurri. Luwian names spread in the province later, over the years of Hittite domination. In later years the Hittite elite became quite bilingual, in their own Luwian-related Knesian language and also in Luwian itself.

I am unsurprised, given the total absence of Luwian in the Mesopotamian record until the Late Bronze. The Song of Release composed in Hurri ~1600 BC, for fallen Ebla, may well be the first witness to Luwian words: vanishingly few. But onomastics are valuable evidence in support. Incidentally we only have elite-speak in Kizzuwadna's monuments; the merchants trended Aramaic and, subsequently, Greek. So who knows how long the "Horite" pagans were holding on.

Luwian looks like a southwest dialect, where we will later find its dialects Lycian and Carian. As for the Hurrian homeland, that is looking like immediately west and southwest of Lake Van.

Urartian, in this case, hailed from east and north. No Bronze Age source documented that region as far as I know, but more excavation at Lake Van may correct that.

UPDATE 3/19: Also, Kizzuwadna sorceresses. When they incanted in Horite, they incanted it clean; when they incanted Luwian, they incanted it with Hurri loanwords.

Fly, my pretties

Talk is afoot that Chinese fentanyl - which killed Scott Adams' stepson - has Xi huángdì's blessing because China wants revenge for the Opium War.

I haven't read much about "the Opium War" (so-called) but I am (dimly) aware of some recent books on topic. Stephen Platt's book got panned over at Reason. Quillette had better things to say of Song-Chuan Chen.

Platt's book is not all that new. Literature decrying those hostilities as "the Opium War" is literally as old as the war itself, hence the name that has stuck to it. The same is true for skeptics: no less a civil-rights icon as John Quincy Adams noted that opium was a MacGuffin; calling it "the Opium War" would be like calling the 1775 Yankee revolt "the Tea War" (much less the wider thirteen-colony Revolution from 1776 on).

But Chinese politicals find it useful to blame outsiders whenever something goes wrong at home, like sitting on news of a bat plague and allowing sick nationals abroad to infect everyone else.

UPDATE 3/14 - Winnie the Flu, trademark 2020 by Sarah Almeida Hoyt.

Venus' space fountain

The Space Fountain is an eternal machinegun battery aimed up. The bullets are magnetic iron, nickel, and/or cobalt. Their target are evenly-spaced holes around a disc. The disc has its own magnet, to steer those bullets sideways and to steal their kinetic energy. The bullets fall back down... into the fountain. Fountain-guns redirect the bullets back up. (I assume the guns to be rifled, to spin the bullets.)

Over Venus, there's some wind-shear (tho' not Coriolis, as here). But the wind is unlikely to divert a speeding, spinning bullet. Also gravity isn't so high.

To handle the shear at the disc's altitude I'd fire the bullets at a bit of an angle. Now the wind isn't a problem for the disc; it becomes the disc's energy source, just like down on the surface. The surface will need to collect those falling bullets and roll them back into place though. This is what we'd do over Maxwell's site; upwind of that kite.

If the disc is floating over cloud-level, it soaks up to 2620 Wm^-2 of insolation, also. Solar-panels can nab that. Some fountains at Aphrodite Terra aim straight up. Those stations serve the exosphere - that is, space.

3/13 MEN... DE...: I don't trust the wind to be consistent at Maxwell latitude. It's perilously close to the Vortex. Let's NOT do that.

11/26/21 THIS CORROSION: I expect the wind constant-enough at Maxwell to get maybe 20 km up. I further expect some katabasis at Aphrodite where, at the equator, the wind is near-fully predictable. I don't see superconductors anywhere but with this much free energy, who needs 'em. Our first constraint is that the top of the tower not touch the clouds.

Reach to heaven

Project Rho's pages have collected several wonders-of-the-world designed to end-run around Tsiolkovsky (that jerk). These wonders tend to run in the many of kilometres.

There's a lot of stuff we'd like to build here on Erfph but cannot. Partly that's energy cost. Energy is artificially high because of various Concerns raised by trolls - excuse me, by Concerned Scientists. (I acquired utter contempt for them when they came out against nuclear power.) What epic structures the Concernyfaced Concerners won't let us build here as could actually better our lives, I'm considering for Venus.

Not the geosync tower; that's obviously a nonstarter at Venus' sloowww rotation (and gentlemen prefer tethers). I'm more interested in Venus' surface. Here we're in luck: the surface in most places enjoys near free energy from the wind, and in some spots (lookin' at Maxwell's slope) a LOT of that wind. Katabasis ftw!

The laser-propulsion schemes seem like they would work best for vehicles already outside the atmosphere - like in orbit. Besides, hydrogen is gold at Venus. For this, let's start small(er). I wonder to what altitude superheated carbon-dioxide could fly a cargo. I'd line the nozzle with something that doesn't react with ionised oxygen; or something real cheap that we can discard and replace after it does. If a laser can kick a load from, say, Aphrodite Terra to cloud-level, or allow a surface-bound craft to slow down its fall: I'll declare that a win.

What jumps out most: the Space Fountain, and various magnetic railroads like Lofstrom's Launch-Loop [4/20/24 whereever we put it]. Maybe the Bifrost Bridge. UPDATE 9/23/21: As of 2002, the Lofster was sinking $10 billion to put stuff in the air at $300/kg; $30 billion, for $3/kg. In May 2020 Elon promised to beat $300/kg (in 2020 dollars), with Starship. I won't bore you with Elon's numbers, because I frankly don't believe them; but they will undercut Lofstrom's lowball. Which means the bidding starts at $30 billion 2002$USD.

Lambda Zero

As a followup to the stability-island comment, leading up to the neutron-star level:

I had a thought that the Island might not exist, due to (recently-observed) neutron repulsion from the Argonne V18 model. Argonne are still in the news for testing magic-number nucleus collisions; there may not be a number past 126.

This assumed our fermions are all protons and neutrons, made up of Up- and Down-quarks and only these. But, as of 1947, we know of other quarks, starting with the Strange. A Strange-quark among the other two creates another sort of particle: the hyperon. These don't last long on their own, namely in the 10^-10 second range. But then neutrons don't last on their own either. In a nucleus the Strong Force might keep them longer.

A hyperon positively charged, and attached to some neutrons, can take on an electron and congratulations, you've now got an atom without a proton. Mostly the experiments are around a proton with a neutral hyperon − the Λ⁰ being stable-est here − and a neutron too, I guess to keep it all together. This enhanced deuterium is called Hypertriton.

Hypertriton is a project of current research in that, even if it's unstable in of itself, it might be like a miniature neutron star. Everything is so dense in those, that hyperons can last longer.

I presume that the Argonne team has already taken this into account. If neutrons repel each other in Strong interactions, the Λ⁰s will mutually repel harder. I assume a balancing-game here.

Dark matter candidates

News on the Dark Matter front: the "axion", which to me sounds vaguely Aquinan, is taking on the load of more unanswered questions in physics.

Call me a more dubious Catholic than was that particular Saint Thomas, but I'd rather see proposals for answers than increase the scope of the question. The D Star Hexaquark is a thought.

UPDATE 3/26 - The sterile neutrino just shot a blank.

UPDATE 1/15/2021 - Magnificent Seven neutron-stars. They're magnificent because they have high-energy X-rays despite being "boring", as these go; they're not even pulsar - let alone magnetar (we only know 31 of these). Anyway, the axion is just, like, their opinion man. But testable!

Constraining Theia

The "Big Splat" theory has a few new constraints this week.

The regnant theory explaining our moon's formation is that two planets banged into each other about 50 million years into the Solar System's coalescence (UPDATE 7/13: or later). The debris re-coalesced into a heavily-iron Earth and a heavily-silicate Moon (UPDATE: constrained to 4.425 Gya UPDATE 10/24/23: 4.46?). The latter then suffered a dark green iron rain, locked its rotation with ours, and suffered further impactors; raising up lava seas on its side facing us which solidified into black basalt "maria".

Some problems with this: backtracking how far the Moon was at over time, it should have been within Earth's gravity well as of only one to two billion years ago. Well after the Splat theory's projections elsewhere. Also Earth and Moon look chemically similar - perhaps too similar. Where did the two protoplanet parents come from?

Now it is being projected that, of the two protoplanets, indeed the larger one was recognisably Earth, albeit rather lighter and larger (less dense, more sicila). Earth formed in-situ here like Venus had formed further-in. The smaller one was icier and (still) rockier - a Marslike. Forming about where Mars is now, perhaps, or in the Asteroid Belt. Definitely fair to give to a different planet its own name: "Theia" being the popular choice. Much of Earth's sicila ended up on her new Moon; some of Theia's heavy metals ended up here. But the Moon's mantle is mostly Theia's.

As for when: I don't know that there are surprises: our day was shorter then. But the rate of change, given a similar pattern of Earth's seas, is better-constrained. It was linear from the the late Cretaceous on UPDATE 6/12/23: but we need to backtrace before 2Gya.

IRON 02/02/24: Theia mantle 13-18% iron? Versus Earth 8% and Luna 10%. They did it with computers!!

A vast and lonely continent

Neanders and Denisovans are different from us "modern" (African) humans, going back maybe 700k years. It was found that later specimens of both, which are the best-preserved, are mitochondrially African. That is: there was an out-of-Africa movement, after 370 kya but long before us (70 kya), whose female line pushed out the native Eurasian line.

Martin Pitr's team finds that the same is true for the Y chromosome - the men. There were male-Neander (or -Denny) + female-African hybrids; and female-Neander + male-African hybrids. When the hybrids met, their offspring were of course half of each; but the grandkids with the advantage were male-African and female-African. Eurasia ended up still Neander and Denisovan, but tracing their direct ancestry on both sides back to Africa. An analogy in our subspecies is how Sundaland men pushed out the native lineages of pre-Aurignacian / -Magnon Europe. (The Indo-Europeans are different, they just invited everyone to the Number Six Dance.)

The paper thinks that Eurasian DNA had broken down, such that their Y-chromosomes and mitochondria had the disadvantage over Africans'. I suppose because the population never got over a few thousands. And the distances were so vast and impassable that Neanders and Denisovans didn't cross each others' paths much.

Underdark farms

Earlier (well, this evening) I crunched some numbers on how to farm over the Maxwell mountains. It wasn't pretty. So let's see how a green-thumb would work on the surface (assuming coolant, obviously).

I rule out photosynthesis entirely. Not only is Maxwell's slope even darker than up in the clouds, but there's a mountain to the ecliptic west and we get the full "benefit" of Venus' lengthy backward day-year. As in, over two hundred of our days. Plants are flat not going to survive this long night. Unless we use underground grow-lamps - but I am prioritising my energy intake for coolant, machines, and computers. Life-support too, eventually. And mines. And the bullet-fountain and... ah forget it.

But then I started thinking - extremophiles. Suppose we get enough water to flood a cavern, and can keep it cool(er). What can live there?

Here's the good news: I mainly need only not to boil the water. We don't even insist on lowering the air-pressure. Allow me to introduce the Movile Cave.

Some millions-years ago, Mother Nature introduced some bacteria and bugs into a sulphrous cavern in what's now Romania and then sealed it from the surface. Amazingly, the life there didn't suffocate. Instead, the bacteria shifted to a sulphur cycle and the bugs shifted to live off of them.

The best of it is: as long as the cavern's air has some oxygen, I don't think raising the air pressure will hurt the bugs. In fact I think it will help them - they breathe through their skin. I am also unsure how hot this pot can go before it starts "boiling lobster" as it were, but I suspect there is some leeway here.

This cave would still need to reside around the later phases of habitation: the liquid CO₂ coolant tier. And humans wouldn't survive here unaided, and robots wouldn't do well for long.

But it's a local food source not requiring too much effort nor energy, just coolant and airlocks. One more step to self-sufficiency.

PLANTS TOO 8/22/23: Consider acetate-driven plantlife.

You are going to catch the virus

Whether you're Elizabeth Warren or Donald John Trump: read this graph.

Both parties, playing their Daes Dae'mar, have hitherto been more concerned with using the crisis for advantage than in thinking about how to solve it. Warren can be singled out as the worst Democrat (taking funds from border control to fight the virus? really?). Politico gets on the roll of shame as well. Luckily for us, most Democrat voters saw through it, choosing two candidates who've at least kept their traps shut on this.

But Donald Trump has been just as bad in his own way. In fact: worse than all the Democrats. In classic Swamp style, Trump has acted on the principle that the people do not need to know.

Tucker Carlson had some good takes but even he has missed this central point. Perhaps because he does not wish to displease His Imperial Majesty.

The United States must immediately take action to create hospital space and to free up what space it now has.

It should also work to halt the decay of the American lung. A Federal-level push against inhaled tobacco and marijuana products should be a no-brainer.

It should consider an age-limit on who gets to board an aeroplane, never mind flaccid "recommendations". It should definitely stop gatherings of more than X number of people... and that assuredly includes Trump rallies (and Bernie's).

Above all: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the whole lot of the GOP need to cut the malarkey, inform us why these actions are being taken, and show this graph.

If this post offends libertarian sensibilities - not my problem. Will we catch this bug anyway? Yeah, probably. But it is better to catch it in October when "only" 600 other people are catching it, than in April when 600,000 people are catching it.

Theodosius' Creed

Vox Day has a bone to pick with the current mainstream Creed. His site "Infogalactic" offers a comparison.

I recite the Creed every weekend, and I am in whole agreement with Chalcedon's corrections to Ephesus where the Father and the Son relate. But I do not understand the Trinity. So where's an argument for or against, I need to look into that. (And I leave aside entirely Muh Scriptral Authoriteh.)

As background, what we're now calling "the Nicene Creed" was absent from the Nicaea consensus 325 AD. The bulk of the longer creed went unnoticed in mainstream Christendom up to Chalcedon. Emperor Marcian's bishops claimed they had found this longer version, and duly brought that to Chalcedon.

Before we go "LOL, Donation of Constantine amirite" keep in mind that opponents to Chalcedon still exist... and they hold to the longer version too. This is an indication that even if the longer creed wasn't in canonical use, and even if it wasn't Nicene; it had likely gone out into the world several generations prior. There is no reason to libel Marcian as a liar. Marcian had found a genuine document in the Theodosian archives. Vox Day concedes that this creed was known to Theodosius in 381 AD. [UPDATE 4/1/2021: But hold on...] In context the Empire was working to reëstablish the Church after two generations of Eunomian "Arianism", whose emperors had failed spectacularly on the field at Edirne.

It is possible that the Empire gave the longer creed sanction as an end-run around legacy Eunomian bishops. There was something of an interregnum AD 408-25, when Theodosius II was still a minor and the western half wasn't under Constantinopolitan control. This also may go to explain how Theodosius II's synods at Ephesus felt the need to reinforce the shorter and truly-Nicene creed. The longer creed might have been a target.

I agree with Vox Day that it is Not A Good Look for the Church (any Church) to retroject modern solutions upon ancient contexts. But to be fair to that first Theodosius and the Chalcedonians, those men in antiquity may not have intended to do that. So let us see if they were right to switch creeds. Let's go back to their comparison.

The first plus/minus transposes God as "maker of heaven and earth" to the forefront. Later is added that Jesus came "from heaven". The longer Creed by "heaven" intends "the Throne Over The Waters" - to which seat, the longer Creed further adds, Jesus shall ascend. The plus about "before all aeons" might do for time what "heaven" does for space.

That Jesus issued forth before / outside the alamûn is, also, John 1. That Jesus now sits at His Father's right hand comes from the Synoptics; here is, I think, absolute justice tempered with mercy. The longer Creed insists on Jesus' death and burial, where the shorter one allowed for a direct Ascension from the cross (Philippians? Egerton?). The longer creed does better at flagging "heaven" as metaphor, generally.

(Meanwhile the longer creed does better at placing this Christ within human history, naming Mary and Pilate - this is an Eastern Roman gospel. 4/1/21: But Theodosius I had done this already.)

The longer Creed's metaphor is still a bit clumsy. [UPDATE 2/4/22: purqan > sotería.] If there's no formal jubilee, Jesus sits at God's right hand to do... what exactly? before coming back down here to judge (again?). The shorter Creed doesn't have that redundancy. Its Jesus is to descend from Heaven at the End Of Days, and shall hold court then and, implicitly, here. The short version is close to Islamic views of Jesus except for tawlîd and hypostasis.

I think where nonTrinitarian Christians have a problem is in the role of the Spirit, here. The original Creed doesn't talk of the Spirit much, except to nod that It exists. The Gospels had warned against blaspheming It, whatever It is. The long version expounds for some length on that "whatever". In the process, the long version supports the Church as apostolic. By asserting the Church as an eternal human institution (the only one, at that), and further by tagging Pilate as overseer over the Cross: the long Creed leaves open the question of the Empire.

If we don't own a Church independent and transcendent over Caesars, we live in Heraclius' Empire still. Which Empire corrupted Christendom and failed, after some ephemeral success, to defend her Christians.

So there you go. Despite whatever imperfections and confusions may exist in the longer Creed, to the point it doesn't argue Trinitarianism to our satisfaction; the longer Creed is the Creed.

UPDATE 4/1/2021: Compare the AD 390s Latin creeds. Vox Day was being too generous. I no longer hold Theodosius responsible except for the addition of the Virgin Mary.

We have met the propagandist

JihadWatch takes on "Holocaust"-revisionism:

The only controversy over the number of people who were killed in World War II is over how many people were killed in the Holocaust. There is a place for careful historical inquiry into this. Historical investigation is always to be encouraged. Malkin was not, however, speaking to a historians’ conference. The minimization of the number of people who were killed in the Holocaust has become a political tool. The claim that Jews have exaggerated the number of people who were murdered in the Holocaust in order to claim victim status, and victim privileges, has long circulated among anti-Semites, whether they’re on the Left or on the Right, or are Islamic supremacists. It is a basis of efforts to discredit and destroy the U.S.-Israel alliance, and ultimately the State of Israel itself. Holocaust denial, as well as Holocaust minimization, thus aids the global jihad, which both the U.S. and Israel face.

That’s why I thought it important, and consistent with our mission at Jihad Watch, to make a statement by running Jones’ article: because politicized and ahistorical Holocaust minimization abets the jihad ...

To get this out of the way: Nick Fuentes as of December(!) "was" a clown and a coward. There is no reason for anyone to self-involve with this sideshow until the barker grows up. Not Michelle Malkin, not Robert Spencer; not Vox Day.

I also allow that The Jihad - the Islamic Wille-zur-Macht - is integral to Islam as it stands today. The Qurân itself is largely Allâh's internal debate over whither and how to direct His Muslim soldiers. (I mainly "question the timing", so to speak.)

Unfortunately JihadWatch got into the mud with the pig and now Spencer has some schmutz on him.

Whether from anger or frustration, Spencer let out a small confession, about the First Law of his work. Namely: Thou Shalt Not Support Nor, Through Inaction, Permit The Jihad. I disagree with this.

First and foremost, "but it helps the Jihad!" is weak as an argument against a proposition. If your argument falls down elsewhere, all you've done is make the audience wonder if the Jihad has a point.

The argument is the same argument which Herschel Shanks made two decades ago, against Biblical minimalism. Shanks argued that questioning the Torah narrative was Problematic on account that Palestinian activists might make hay with the scholars' doubt. I was already coding HTML webpages (remember them?); Shanks' argument gave me a raison. I argued that when you mix an argument over history with a discussion of motive, the propagandist in the room is you.

Shanks' article has knock-on effects, by the way: it shows that Israel-based archaeology is mired in politics on Israel's own part... and on the part of the Israelid peoples (Samaritans too). For that, we can get into Spencer's statement: The oft-repeated claim that “the Jews” are behind the push for these things ignores the fact that many Jews dissent from the Leftist agenda, and that the Jews who do support such things are doing so because they’re Leftists, not because of their Jewish identity or Jewish principles. Fuentes' circle will respond to that with citations from Kevin MacDonald which argue that Jews go to the Left precisely because they view the Left as Good For The Jews. If they're smarter they might cite Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century... or defer to Rabbi Waskow and innumerable other in-house "influencers" for the Jewish Left. These Jews might not have a Bible but they do retain a Tribe.

These are unhappy facts but they remain facts. If responsible historians won't say a thing, then irresponsible hucksters like Fuentes will. And the latter will say it in the way they say it, for whatever purposes they say it.

And again, when you mix an argument over history with a discussion of motive, the propagandist in the room is you.

Professor Reynolds casts down his face

Dr Gabriel Said Reynolds a professor of Islam for Notre Dame has taken time out of his schedule to offer this. Robert Spencer has already plucked the low-hanging fruit.

Reynolds is, in fact, a true scholar of Islamic literature. (And far be it from me to impugn a man's scholarship based on whatever he might tweet on the side.) But this particular man is being selective with his Qurânic quotes, in print.

Reynolds cites suwar 7, 16, 43 and 68. He doesn't say that Islamic dogma assigns all of these early into the Prophet's mission - which, in Yathrib, turned more militant. It's nice that these suwar exist for peace-minded men to cite. It's just that actual Muslims won't listen.

From "the Madinan Qurân", Reynolds cites suwar 3 and 5. Reynolds notes that Q. 3:106 refers to the Judgement, in which the Celestial Court shall blacken the sinners' faces. These sinners are internal schismatics against sura 3's favoured suwar; to them: Did you disbelieve after you had believed? Then taste the chastisement for that you disbelieved! Q. 3:106 parallels 54:48, where sinners are dragged on their faces on the Last Day for a "taste" of Hell. A reader might also look to sura 10. In Q. 10:21, men get a "taste" of God's mercy. Over vv. 50-2, a "chastisement" comes to Earth in day or night - the "taste" of the eternal chastisement. Sura 3 itself at v. 185 will consider death in this dunyâ as a "taste". For sura 3, the true death occurs for the damned, tormented in the eternal âkhira. To sum up Q. 3:106 does defer final Judgement to God. But it nowhere forbids His Believers to tease His enemies on Earth with aspects of it, first.

Reynolds should know that Muslims believe themselves to be God's apostles on Earth to bring God's will into it. This is true for all religions and philosophies, including Catholicism and even atheism. Otherwise, why even bother? It happens that the Qurân presents itself as God's direct command to the Muslim... and that command is frequently violent. As Spencer has documented from suwar 9, 33 and even 5 which Reynolds had cited in support elsewhere. Talk about an own-goal.

Reynolds might agree, with me, that suwar 7 et al. are in fact later compositions which abrogate (say) suwar 3-6, 8, 47 and so on. He assuredly knows that his citations from "the Madinan Qurân" are often abrogated by suwar later in any chain. But if he'd admitted as much in print, he'd need to recast his whole essay into a condemnation of the canon sîra. At which point he'd find himself on Spencer's side. And the New York Daily News might not publish his piece. And Notre Dame students would picket their administration. And he'd still be stuck with suwar 9, 33, 48, 58, 63 and most of the Musabbihat ...

Upload #185: Memory

To get this out of the way: I like sura 81. I like its pro-life message, particularly as aimed at would-be sex-selectors. I like its style, with its allusive and staccato stanzas. It does get a little selfdefensive toward the end but we've learnt to accept that.

It gives me no pleasure to offer up "Remembering the Reminder" here.

Those bits which look parallel to suwar 53, 69, and 74... are derivative, I now think. And I've already argued that sura 74 is late - which kicks the door wide to other possible borrowings. Here, to suwar 3, 6, 10, 15, 17 and maybe even 37 and (if Jakob Barth is right) 52.

As a knock-on, I have removed the sura 81 references from "Blasting the Caliph" (on sura 69) and "Fire from the Mountain" (52).

Over the past three months I've also been working on "The Booty From God’s War". I think sura 8 belongs to 'Uthman's last year or the aftermath thereto.

Madrassa.

This ocean Earth

3.24 billion years ago, when the Solar System was 1.32 billion years old, is in the "Archaean" era pre-Cambria. We have some constraints now on what this planet looked like. The New York Post offers a translation for lower Zones Of Thought.

The original essay argues that the isotope ratios from 3.24 bya indicate oxygen, but an alien sort of oxygen. It was being emitted but not taken back in (UPDATE April: plants are later). Bacterial life wasn't all that effective; oxygen mainly would have been taken in by weathering, which can be spotted in old rocks as well. The oldest rocks are in Australia, South Africa, Antarctica (to the extent that ever gets drilled into), and Quebec. There wasn't much weathering in Australia, at least.

The essay concludes that continents and mountains were mostly underwater at this time (at least, Australia was). The article explains that for dummies: WATER WORLD!!

It's not unanticipated. Later comes the famous Snowball Earth / "Cryogenian" interval. I always figured the Earth would need a lot of water to come up with the amount of ice for the projected albedo. Admittedly I never ran the maths myself.

A better question is: where did the water go. Maybe the continents rose up in tandem with the seafloor sinking down. Maybe the young Earth's poor radiation-protection allowed water breakup and hydrogen escape - like on Venus today.

Photosynthesis at high latitudes

I went out looking for some basic equations on insolation. PV Education has 'em.

My baseline is 2620 Wm^-2 where the sun shines at high noon (or 11 AM) through no clouds and negligible atmosphere. Maybe that'll fly (heh) at the Flotilla. But I've been talking farms, within the cloudlayer, at 50°+ North. There's atmosphere there (comparable to Earth, at low-50s km up, by design); moreover, clouds and - also - an angle. Think how much more farming is difficult at, say, Labrador than at Venezuela. Ideally.

If I am reading the graphs right, I should be getting half the direct insolation at my "farming" latitudes. But it's worse than that: if I'm farming within the clouds, those clouds have 0.75 albedo. That means: they're bouncing off three-quarters of the light, before my farm can get it. So the actual light in the clouds and below them should be more like an eighth of the full 2620 Wm^-2.

So 327.5 Wm^-2 of direct sunlight... at noon. Worse than Mars; perpetual (if warm) twilight. The noons do last longer. The mix of warmth and darkness reminds of Cretaceous Greater Australia.

This is where the Photosynthesis-Irradiance Curve steps in - they'll want a steep initial cline. I suggest such crops as photosynthesise efficiently (dark leaves!), and can manage under a thick canopy. It's warm enough for cane sugar, and at 4% efficency that'll get the essentials done.

BACKDATE 3/9.

Papias' scholia upon an implicit text

Last month Philip Jenkins did a study on a "meme" (his word) which Papias posted out as an agraphon, a then-unwritten saying of Jesus. Papias collected many of these in his Expositions of the Lord's Oracles. The five-volume book circulated widely among Christian scholars - and a Latin version perhaps floated up and down the Rhine - but it seems not to have entered the actual churches.

With all propaganda, the first question is - why did you do this. The gospels are propaganda: that is, arguably, what "godspell" / "evangel" meant in an Early Roman context. Evan Powell would have us believe that Mark went out to defend Peter. Matthew was similar, but also wanted to claim Mark's overall narrative for a Judaising church. Luke set out to reconcile Mark with Paul.

Papias' Expositions isn't preserved fully, but we own enough to know that it argued its own case. Ancient scholars thought that Papias was a chialist - that he thought the Fin Du Monde was at hand. Eh, maybe. It happens that Papias actually told us what he was doing; and that wasn't it.

Papias never claimed to be a contemporary of events himself. What he claimed to be, was a muhaddith. He met up with the first Christian saints and collected their recollections. He was a contemporary of the first published Gospels, which may or may not be the ones current today.

And he had opinions about some, especially about one ascribed to Saint Mark. Papias reported (famously) from "The Elder" that Mark accurately transcribed Jesus's life but not in the correct order. That Mark was factually-questionable was the consensus in Papias' day can be readily observed in the very fact of "synoptic gospels": whichever came first (which is indeed what we're now calling "Mark"), two other evangelists redid it. And then others did harmonies [UPDATE 4/17, more likely Muqâtil-like exegetical expansions] which show up in Justin Martyr's work and so-called "2 Clement". And Mark isn't as well preserved as these secondary works. And 2 John, in The Elder's name, likely introduces the Gospel of John so pointedly not Mark.

Papias' problem wasn't that he was himself more of a chialist than was Mark or Paul. And - pace Eusebius - it wasn't that Papias was a fool.

Papias' first problem is that he was stepping on the gospels' toes, and vice versa. The Church depended on a body of Scripture. A store of logia not in the canon would have weakened that case. (ALSO 4/16/21: Hegesippus had the same problem.)

Also in Christendom, Paul got out in front of everyone to dismiss that Jesus' oracles even mattered. What mattered for Paul was that Jesus was crucified and thereby expiated all our sins. As a result, the Passion Narrative took precedence over Jesus' message, or messages.

In a parallel history, the Lord's Oracles could have been set down into a book like Isaiah without a narrative structure at all. Something like this did happen, in the form of the Gospel Of Thomas among others; the Epistle of James is a paraenesis on such didascalia. In this case Papias' book would have been readily accepted as a commentary upon such a collection. But Christianity did not become a pre-Islam; it could not so become.

Papias found no audience for his project. His Jesus wasn't the Gospel Jesus, and the oracles were redundant.