Pisanosaurus

MIT again. The first dinos.

The discussion is over the divergence between "lizard-hipped" versus "bird-hipped" dinosaurs. This distinction confuses me to this day: actual freakin' birds are lizard-hipped, like all 'raptors and the apatosaurus. Obviously at the timescales they're talking, they'll confuse the researchers too because this is, again, when they diverged in the first place. Up to 2017 the question was reopened: it was mooted that lizard-hipped dinosaurs came first. In 2017 the sauropods and therapods were mooted paraphyles: the therapods broke off from the birdhips, and the true lizard-hips – the sauropods – are basal.

(The article erroneously cites the infamous chimera "brontosaurus". Ignore that, pedants.)

Earlier palaeontologists had found Pisanosaurus (bird-hipped) in the southern parts of Triassic-era South America - "Ischigualasto". Apparently they hadn't constrained the date; a dark-age breaks up the postCarnian Triassic record from 225-209 Mya. The new result is a redate of the context: these sediments span 230-221 Mya. Thus it rolls back this dark age - although, the fossil here is (postextinction) Carnian at 229 Mya. South America and Africa were as one then. I think it was all still Pangaea in fact.

Ischigualasto is, here, matched to Chinle here in North America. All the dinos evolved in the south. The north had... nothing. (Close to home, that's the Colorado Plateau; hence the Coring Project.) Partly that's because the Triassic from 252-229 Mya wasn't exactly nice for life at all; but they're saying the north should have had something.

Thus is constrained the sauropods - they broke off during the Triassic. The therapods came later, after Pisanosaurus.

Sudden freeze

Re Snowball Earth, Constantin W. Arnscheidt and Daniel H. Rothman offer some ideas. The three factors are carbon, albedo, and surface irradiance from the sun. They're looking at irradiance.

These two're MIT but published to the Royal Society. I'd thought rather the point of Massachusetts was not to have to do that. Anyway.

Of carbon, albedo, and irradiance: albedo is a feedback-loop. The world gets whiter as it gets snowier. So for those looking into origins, they concentrate on carbon and irradiance. Carbon sequestration by plants used to be a hot topic but, I last heard, plants came 600+ million years earlier. These two researchers sketched up some equations for the factors mentioned. They found a short way to an ice age: 2 percent drop in incoming sunlight over a period of about 10,000 years.

This could be a solar-minimum; but these authors mainly look to volcano and cloud-formation. (We rule out meteors because they are one-and-done. Chicxulub certainly did not last as long as a million years.) For cloud-formation they're looking at photosynthesising life. Where they're looking, the Sturtian 717 Mya - "cryogenian" onset elsewhere - I'm not seeing life as a cloud-generator. In fact, I think clouds are more common when it is warmer.

BETTER IDEAS 2/15/24: The volcano lull.

Argentine ghost population

Via Razib, Argentina genetics. It turns out here that the Argentines as of 1900 were mestizo. This has since been swamped by a near-century of Italian and NaziGermanic immigration.

I perked up when they said what sort of mestizo. There are four:

Three of them are also found in modern South American populations and are specifically represented in Central Andes, Central Chile/Patagonia, and Subtropical and Tropical Forests geographic areas. The fourth component might be specific to the Central Western region of Argentina, and it is not well represented in any genomic data from the literature.

Central eastern Argentina is actually Welsh, not Spanish; they were there to farm in the earliest days, not over those great later migrations mostly urban. This is the most Welsh-speaking land in the world after Wales herself.

That fourth, western component is the most interesting. If I am reading this right, here is an Andean foothill people whom nobody met. The Incas and Paraguay were far north of them; the Mapuche were across the freakin' ANDES. Those first "Spanish" settlers, I gather, didn't keep good records nor entertain an oral-tradition as do the Mapuche. These settlers were, I think, a fringe people in Argentine society already ethnically Miscellaneous. It all reminds me of the Melungeons in Appalachia.

Inca benevolence

Once Covey gets out of Spain he does better. I like that he discussed Spain's School-Of-Experience in overseas administration from the Canaries to the Caribbean, which Carballo didn't. Anyway here I'd discuss the Inca administration. Covey has no illusions about that.

Previous books I've read (or skimmed) about the Inca take the Cuzco ruling caste's word for it. The whole Four-In-One Sector - Tawantin-Suyú - lived under a single peace with the Inca taking responsibility for everyone's welfare. You can see how 1970s progressives loved this account. They weren't above "teaching" it even to children. Covey doesn't address the myth... directly. But he is clear that to the extent Cuzco was a Socialist Utopia, this was on the backs of millions of subjects from conquered nations.

And the Inca's subjects didn't like it, any more than the Tlatoani's subjects liked it in Mesoamerica. There wasn't the flowerwar tourney system, and human-sacrifices weren't being done for the gods themselves. The Andes got, instead, vicious war and reprisal. Then there came a civil war; Atahuallpa was fighting Huascar at the same time Pizarro was making his first probes south of the Colombian jungles. Pizarro's sustained invasion coincided when Atahuallpa was sending his brother-in-law against Cuzco itself.

Atahuallpa, based in the north, was not of the north. He was a Cuzcian himself. So to consolidate his base, he'd reconquered a lot of it. Pizarro was invading cities which, in several places, had recently been invaded by Incas, at least twice. They all told tale of Atahuallpa's egregious cruelty. These colonial subjects didn't side with Pizarro outright - yet - as the Mesoamericans did with Cortes; but they did "play their cards close". They helped Pizarro meet with Atahuallpa to see what might happen.

Pizarro was cruel and rapacious too, much more so than was Cortes. But by then, the northern provinces (suyú) were used to that.

The one people who remembered better of Inca rule was the Quechua / Aymara base in the central highland suyú. Cuzco was indeed relieved when they heard Atahuallpa was not ever going to enter the city to enact (more of) his vengeance; at the same time, Cuzcians were not about to submit to an alien from another world. Covey here sketches out that, eventually, Pizarro and the Cuzcians agreed to install Manco as Inca. Meanwhile other Spaniards were busily pulling the north into the Caribbean economy but that's another story.

The Slavs' ecliptic

From Reddit Worldbuilding, today I learn that Russian - like Polish - uses the Latin names for this solar-system's planets.

Since the planets are visible to all nations, this surprises me. Shouldn't there be old Slavic names for the Morning Star, Mars, and/or Jupiter? (Same goes for Old Norse.) The Romans didn't change their planetary names. (Which makes me wonder if the old Norse named Mercury "Hermódiz", Mars "Tyr" and Jupiter, "Wótan" . . .)

Also: if the Slavs were like Celts and handed over their elite society to foreigners, why did the Slavs not use Greek names?

Alt-Aztec

The El Guapo of Mesoamerica was that the local hegemon, Tenochtitlan, didn't control down to the Spanish Caribbean in time. In a generation it'd have entered the Bronze Age and assuredly would have integrated the Nahua / Otomí heartland better than it had. I propose, though, that we already own the contrafactual, for "Columbus 1522" and "Cortes 1549". Spoiler: it ends the same.

The Tlatoani system was like the Inca system at heart. The emperor was polygynous and ruled, in large part, through a network of direct relatives. Motecuzoma II, granted two more decades, might well have fended off some initial Spanish raids, which he couldn't given his poor grasp on the coast 1519. But then he'd have been older. And the smallpox would have come - come faster, in fact, given the better roads in this contrafactual. I give a coin-flip that the tlatoani survives this.

Then there would have come questions about the succession. Cuauhtémoc, as competent an Aztec as any, survived smallpox in his twenties in our world; I'll allow he'd have survived it in his forties in the alt'. But would Cuauhtémoc have been the only survivor? and: would he have been at the capitol when the plague hit? In the contrafactual a whole generation of Monty pups are roaming the city. Several cities.

Yes, that's the story of the War of the Inca Brothers. Atahuallpa was in full command of the northern suyú when the Spaniards came. That wasn't his problem. His problem was that he'd had to conquer his way there, through already-conquered peoples.

The Incas had the problem of Elite Overproduction, the same problem we got - except that we're not as inbred about it. The Aztecs will have needed to solve this problem too and I'm not seeing that Monty had it in him.

X3

A few years ago we heard talk about a better ion-thruster. Here's the latest presentation I could find - last August (pdf).

Ion-thrusters are subject to that jerk's Rocket Equation. That is: they need propellant, which after use we must refuel. However: for alternative if we were suggesting solar-panels and solid-state batteries, these degrade over use and time. So functionally equivalent.

I figured ion-drives for shuttling nonurgent material between orbital tiers. With this new thruster, we're getting to the point 90 kW will push 5 N. System alpha under 5: so the contraption is under 450 kg. Until we run out of propellant it levitates at 0.011 (earth 9.8). This will improve as the efficiency and alpha improve.

0.011 g kicks in somewhere penumbra, below SVL2. L2 has its own rules of course. Here it enjoys well under 262 Wm^-2 of direct solar-power. UPDATE 1/31/21: How about 5 MW for 50 N? Might get my statite down to full shade then. Either way we'll have to beam power down from L2 halo.

But we're already resigned to losing propellant. So nevermind solar. Why not use a nonrechargable battery - nuclear, say - to recharge, or not, manually. Also this thrust assuredly suffices to keep a metastable orbit, steady: like at the aforementioned L2, or L1 or L3. It's already good for stationkeeping over Earth.

The Venus polar balloon(s)

JPL is floating a helium balloon over Earth's south pole. Why not float one over Venus' north - actually, several.

We're looking for about the same air-pressure of 34.5 mbar - safe from the down-sucking vortex. At the 85+° poles that's 70 km above Venus, where it's 240 K (-33 C). I've already done this work, for th'equator (where Hadley is pushing up): I can't carry very much. For the equator I gave up and went with aeroplanes and (later) ramjets instead. Helicopter-assistance for the lower deck balloon.

Over Venus helium and hydrogen both are expensive. Hydrogen is still less expensive, however; and, further, it won't react with much up here. I'm not worried that it needs be replenished often.

Venus' poles, especially 70 km over the poles, will have sunlight all year 'round - removing some of my other concerns. For energy the sun hits from the side; the gondola doesn't need as much cable.

So what does this stratospheric balloon do? It's cold, dry, and vacuum enough that it can bear some computers aloft. These computers can assuredly relay messages between the lower satellites and even to Earth (at what, 3-10 light-minutes away).

MATH 6:15 PM MST - Over the 80s° north at least, a ring of such floaters is 30° from Maxwell's floaty farms at the 50s°. I was curious about pure line-of-sight so I trig'ged at how much hypotenuse we need to get past a 6050 km hump, with 15 degrees on either side. 6050 = cos15 x. That's 6263; 213 km over the surface. And that's on both sides. So: not happenin', not with balloons.

As a side-note, however, 50s° will be line-of-sight with "low"-orbit sats at 1948 km.

MOAR POWAR 8/12: Supplemented from space.

The polar balloon

JPL presents, the stratospheric telescope.

Over the poles of a windy planet, the Vortex shouldn't shift the balloon much and you always know where it is. They're floating this at 40 km. Here the gravity is 9.71; air-pressure is calculated 34.5 hPa. That's an h: the same units of mbar, so yes 0.034 atm. It's not yet space (100 km) so the wind will carry this thing around the pole every ten days or so. They're proposing a 150 m (1.5 hm) wide helium-filled balloon to do it.

Payload, beside the balloon itself: gondola, solar-panels, a cryo-cooler, and the satellite dish itself to detect infrared. Okay. Er. Earth has seasons. If you're flying this in a polar winter, why do you need solar-panels. If not, the sun is swamping the infrared.

Since this is polar, the sun hits from the side. Given solar power, a spherical / oblate shape makes sense for the balloon. I trust the cable is a long one for midsummer noon.

Crocodile

I didn't even know the Americas had crocodiles before maybe twenty years ago. I thought we had alligators. Here, now, explains how we got crocs.

American crocodiles came from west Africa. This was before five million years ago; but after the Atlantic opened, which split American archosaurs from Old World.

They're going with SEVEN million years. That's impressive raftin'. More impressive even than the journey the platyrrhine monkeys made.

La leyenda nueva

I'm reading R. Alan Covey, Inca Apocalypse. This runs a parallel-life "buried mirror" thesis contrasting Habsburg and specifically Spanish thought circa AD 1530, against Inca / Quechua thought at that time. Covey takes Restall's approach, source-criticism. I'm at page 126 of 519; I'm here to take issue with this book's take on Spain.

Covey is aware of the Black Legend of old: Protestants casting judgement on Spain's New-World policy, as a means toward casting judgement on Spain itself. At the same time he is also aware of the growing European consensus about nonEuropeans, today called "racism". Covey implies he is above both.

Covey's stance on the latter comes out over pp. 21-8. Here the book considers Jared Diamond's classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond was writing a long book, not an entirely good book, arguing against racism for the most part, except where it comes to disease-resistance. For the Inca, Diamond fixated on a single battle: Cajamarca. Covey concedes that the Spaniards, certainly, won Cajamarca but he argues that as watershed it was shallow. That's fair. But Covey goes on to ding Diamond for being racism-adjacent. (I'll interject other critics have hit Diamond on how he lets us wicked whiteys off the hook. Geneticists laugh at Diamond from the other side.) As far as Cajamarca goes, Covey has the right of it. As a side effect Covey has set himself up as a moral superior, even over Diamond.

Covey who isn't a racist, just ask him, then goes off against fifteenth-century Spanish propaganda. He had the opportunity to dig into whence the Spanish elite got its proto-racist ideas. I do not find Goldenberg's Curse of Ham in the references p. 540. I do not find Ibn Khaldûn p. 541 - I don't find Ibn Anybody. Nothing on the dhimma which is plain Jim Crow. Now, Goldenberg could be wrong; but if he is, Covey needs to weigh mediaeval Arab / Berber views on race against Spanish (and Sephardic).

Instead Covey finds a tradition of Spanish historiography full of self-serving myth. This is a chapter on "The Invention of Catholic Spain", in the Whitelam / Sand tradition of "Invention of Ancient Israel" text. It is Covey's contention that the Reconquista was a simple Conquista, by various north-Iberian Catholic dynasts over a vast region which never owned a united identity. The Reconquistadors themselves pointed to the Visigoth kingdom, that which lost out to Tariq and the Umayyads behind him. To that, p. 76:

Today, historians view the Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula as an imperial renaissance that followed centuries of political fluctuations. Corruption, unrest, and foreign invasion marked the last years of Roman rule, in the fifth century, and the political organization of the succeeding Visigoths appears to have been decentralized and fluid. After years of raiding the Iberian coast, Berber forces loyal to the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Gibraltar in 711, and a decisive battle the following year led to the extention of Umayyad control over the southern part of the peninsula. This new imperial era united regions that Carthaginian and Roman colonization had, almost a thousand years earlier, pulled into Mediterranean trade routes and political hierarchies. The Umayyads called the new domain Al-Andalus, and it grew over time from a remote province into an autonomous realm, the Emirate of Córdoba, which at its peak ... As did earlier imperial invaders, the Umayyads brought peace and order, along with new technologies, religious values, and trade opportunities. The secular Muslim government guaranteed Christians and Jews considerable religious freedom, establishing a coexistence (convivencia) that endured for centuries.

Covey for that farrago brings four: Collins 2004, Hillgarth 2009, Grieve 2009, Lowney 2006. Note: all four are Anglo, and ten years old by time of writing. No Fernández-Morera, for Covey. Nothing specific about the religious values in question, from Awza'i then Malik; nothing about how Andalusian Islam interpreted the dhimma. Covey goes on to weep tears over the fate of the Jews p. 105; with no mention of the Almohad bigotries in Andalusia pp. 85-94. The Almoravids aren't even mentioned - good luck finding here that 1066 pogrom in Grenada. Covey gives over to Muslim apologetic a rein which he never offers to the Catholics.

Covey defends his erasure - as we call it - of the Visigothic system because the Visigoths ruled mostly-indirectly through local elites. Leaving aside the standard Visigothic law-code, which he ignores, decentralised governance is exactly as the Incas had ruled - and as the Romans. Centralised government is better, he claims. But only when Umayyads like 'Abd al-Rahman do it. When Catholics insist on a common law and a common governing ideology, that's bad.

[INTERJECT 8/28/21: as to that "renaissance" meme, LOL.]

So I'll go further. This p. 76 paragraph is a brief for colonialism. Here colonialism was great when Carthage was "bringing peace and order". It was fine when Rome was doing it, although maybe not so much in the fifth century [when Rome was Catholic]. Fortunately Damascus came back to restore Spain's natural state, as subjects to the east. Outside authority is Not Okay only when Catholic Toledo makes a play for it. You know, the city on the same peninsula.

There's all sorts of Approved Opinion in these early pages. Page 86, The Christian realms established [in the Holy Land] after the initial successes of the First Crusade could not be sustained, and they fell one by one between 1150 and 1291. Besides this weaselly passive-voice, these realms absolutely were sustained - the Crusade even had Jerusalem again in the early 1200s, for a full generation. Joachim "of Fiore" (da Fiore / of Flora) didn't live to see that resurgence; that's where Covey needs to set his marker, not at 1291.

As for Joachim's Last Emperor, Joachim didn't invent that trope. It's in pseudo-Methodius for which Petrus' Latin translation was rife in "Gaul". Petrus wasn't very good at his job and I dimly recall that Spain owned a further Latin or Spanish retranslation straight from the "Chaldean" (as Comey calls Syriac, p. 105)tho' I am unsure when. UPDATE 9/11: Roda Codex, Latin: Navarre / Asturias 900s AD. So Pablo Ubierna, "Byzantine Greek Apocalypses and the West", also pointing out Ps-M's resurgence in Joachim's Italy late 1200s.

Now, let us look in which direction Covey's errors and omissions all turn. Covey doesn't allow for the Visigothic state. He doesn't allow that the Muslims preceded Spain on racism, or on antiJewish attacks. He prefers Damascus over Toledo as overlords. He sneers at the Crusade. He doesn't recognise pseudoMethodius, that most famous Christian voice under Islamic rule.

Covey is an antiCatholic bigot; and as for the Spanish, he believes that they don't deserve to rule their own peninsula, nor themselves. His pretensions otherwise ring hollow.

And you know what? That's not even what I care about. I am the very last person on Blogger to deny one's right to hold a prejudice. I also recognise that if Spanish Catholics learned it from watching YOU that does not grant to them any moral right to pick up where the Almohads left off. Still. Some of this mitigation needs bringing to evidence.

R. Alan Covey is unethical. Don't buy his book.

The Neander pain threshold

I'm told that old farts don't handle pain so well. Neanders in this respect aged faster (eight years) than Africans.

It suggests the Neanders were more cautious... perforce.

The ubiquitous Pääbo finds the same Neander gene in "central and south America" and also Europe. Not in Parias or Beringia between them. That suggests it maintained itself in the older Siberia, among the RQ class of men. So Mal'ta Boy, again. The African variant became an East Asian variant; I take it that the Na-Dene who came to North America, later on, spread that around. I am unsure if this got as far as the Uto-Aztecan peoples.

It seems clear why the African-to-Asian variant should do well, in a hunter/warrior society. To me less clear is why the Neander gene did not undergo selection in the great Eurasian steppes.

The Orthodox Mind

Yvonne Lorenzo proposes to demote the Bishop of Rome. She argues that Gregory "the Great" (AD 590-604) never claimed superiority to Constantinople's Patriarchs.

I'd interject: as a matter of political history, we can extend Lorenzo's argument. Take Roman Bishop Martin (649-655), the Confessor. Martin, faced with the Monotheletism of his predecessor Honorius and the tolerance which Emperor Constans II was decreeing, did not issue the contrary from the Cathedra. Martin convoked a synod to the Lateran. That synod found for Dyotheletism against the Emperor. The Emperor, for Martin's role in this, deposed and imprisoned the bishop.

In those days, the Emperor held that authority. The historian must say "Roman Bishop" rather than "Pope" because the Bishop was an appointee. Italy came under the Exarchate of Ravenna, itself an appointment - from Constantinople.

This "Byzantine Papacy" ended in the eighth century, however. Charles King of the Franks, seeking a revolution in Christendom and in its political thought, called upon the independent Bishop Leo III. Together they created the model by which Catholic states and their Protestant successors came to dominate this planet. "The Vatican", as the suite of buildings around Saint Peter's Basilica, now had meaning. (Beforehand, although there did exist a Vatican palace, the bishops inhabited - as I hinted - the Lateran; I vaguely recall they ruled from the Palatine also, but as intermittent agents of Ravenna this could be moot.) Leo III had become the West's Pope.

Lorenzo holds that, following Charles and Leo, this intellectual schism has held firm unto the Fourth Crusade and beyond:

Unlike those in the West, Orthodox thinkers have never thought in Cartesian terms; while the Western theologian might begin by assuming God does not exist—or nothing exists—and then proceed in an attempt to establish His existence and the created world, instead the Byzantine scholar worked [from] the assumption of the existence of God and his creation, “basing his intellectual observations on this a priori assumption.”

As an argument, this vision of Christianity is circular and, therefore, dead. But that much is obvious. I'd rather talk about how Lorenzo got here.

If I read this right: "theology" exists in Western Christendom, and not in the East. Lorenzo agrees with the nineteenth-century Orientalists that the Orient does not reason about God. Not even its Christians, not even the Greeks. Reilly's Closing of the Muslim Mind preceded Islam by centuries in those lands.

And indeed Lorenzo's interpretation of Christianity has no intellectual defence against Islam. Why couldn't an all-wise and ineffable God change His mind - or, if you prefer, change His actions upon this His creation? I observe that Orthodoxy couldn't argue against Zoroastrianism either. Byzantine Christian argument devolved into militancy: witness the Christ-as-miles motif in sixth-century Ravenna (I remind you: a Byzantine colony) and then George of Pisidia. (Lorenzo asserts the Church Militant as a Western innovation because I dunno.)

Roman Bishop Martin and then the third Leo, by the will of God, insisted on the Dyothelete theology and put it into practice, respectively. From the a priori assumption that Martin couldn't claim the title "Pope", the Catholic discovers that Martin was nonetheless God's vicar, against the opposition of the greatest powers of his world. Martin is no longer a bishop but is forever a Saint, a rank far more exalted. The Catholic sees the work of Divine Providence and thanks Him for His gift of reason.

For Lorenzo, all the Catholic can do is pray that she too comes to use the gift of reason, which God offers to the Greeks as well, if they'll only accept it.

LAST WORD 1/1/2021: I've returned to Lorenzo's post. The comments petered out in August. Technically I have penultimate word as of now, not last; but that subsequent word also rebuts Lorenzo to no response. I'm claiming victory - at least over Lorenzo, who is a maskless moron as well. "Orthodoxy" needs a better champion at Unz if we're to take it seriously.

Sedeprivation, a cop-out

Nishant Xavier takes down the Sedevacation hypothesis. That's the (post)Catholic theory that the Seat has been Vacated. For such theorists, Catholics exist in an eternal AD 1315 with no Pope. (What'd that be in Greek: "Cathedracenism"?) Nishant allows that Sedevacancy is possible, but rare and never indefinite. Even in 1315 the Church had a functioning if rather dysfunctional Curia with legal Cardinals.

One Giuseppe Filotto has been touting to Youtube, as "The Kurgan", an alternative - Sedeprivation. Best I can tell this develops an old Jewish legend about the seat of Solomon. As sura 38 had it, the 'arsh is occupied - but by a jasad. Last Christmas Eve a debate ensued between Filotto and Jay Dyer. Dyer's followers claim victory.

If all the consecrated bishops and consecrated priests, currently, are here by grace of a sort of mummified Inca rather than no Pope, either as opposed to the True Pope, Nishant's argument applies either way. For Filotto the Apostolic Succession has been log-jammed so long that Catholicism is, like the Pius X cult, back down to some Orthodox level.

Another proposal is that the True Pope is occulted like the Twelfth Imam or the Last Roman Emperor. I always thought this violated Occam's Razor. Christ's death and resurrection should suffice for our human pining after Camelot. The alternative makes Christ un-unique; he's like Rhesus of Thrace, or Zalmoxis. So why be Christian at all?

Filotti and the other no-real-Pope theorists argue that heresy suffices against the present Church. To be fair to them, many good Catholics do worry about Vatican II. To each, I retort and/or reassure that clerical error need not rise to full heresy. For instance: I disagree with some aspects of Trent. I contest the Ephesian synods also; as do all Chalcedonians. Certainly I do not think Nestorius deserved the excommunication he'd got. Such errors - whether they be on the Church's side or on mine - were/are terminological or practical or, in Nestorius' case, political. We accept what we must, we reject what few mistakes we recognise and on what we doubt, we hold our tongues and do our research. And we pray, either way.

I remain in Catholicism (although, through mine own grievous fault, not in full grace presently) because it promises an eternal Church to handle spirituality as the governing authorities deal with the moist fleshy work of governance. If you don't like it, nothing's keeping you from - say - Orthodoxy.

Hello, fellow kids!

Remember Intelligent-Design? Those guys who bilked millions of mostly-Americans concerned about the Secular Humanism? They lost hard at Dover and still aren't done whining.

The IDiots are now jumping on the cancel-culture bandwagon. They claim they're the canaries-in-the-coalmine. We didn't help them and now cancel-culture is coming for us. They say.

Hmm. Where were Behe and Dembski and all their fanclub when cancel-culture came for "Holocaust Denial"? And: where were they when Charles Murray and the human-biodiversity researchers were getting called out as Problematic? Oh that's right! They told us that the Shoah and WW2 generally went exactly how we're taught except for being Darwin's personal responsibility; and they actively joined in to call out Sanger, Galton, and even Darwin as dah reel raciss.

Intelligent-Design was never going to be a scientody, to use Vox Day's term; it was never headed for Engineering, as genetics is. ID was always a means to launder paper credentials to sell a placebo to Americana. It was always a grift and, here, this leaping to cancel-culture martyrdom is the grift's latest mutation.

No, you frauds, absolutely no sympathy is coming from this quarter.

Mike Adams' untimely death

I'll point out here that I have never, in twenty years, been a supporter of Professor Michael Adams nor in any way impressed by him. I always thought he was a troll. He trolled his employers good enough to earn some handsome legal paydays in addition to his salary.

The con man finally got his last payout - but he didn't get to enjoy it. So: justice?

Only in the way Jeff Epstein got justice.

I am with Vox Day for once: this reeks. For his death if not for his life we need solidarity, even if we have ethical and/or personal disputes amongst one another.

If the haters of G-d can murder one of His self-professed apostles, they can murder a real one.

IF, 7 PM: Homicide, by gun. Questions remain on if suicide - he was erratic as if stressed. Are we going to find he was in contact with enemies? Blackmail, harassment...?

SELF-OWN 12/15: Looks like Beale's disingenuous Questions got refuted again. Adams might get out of Purgatory before Beale does.

The Volga pox

Here is a mostly-good article about the history of past diseases.

Rinderpest / measles was pinpointed a few scant weeks ago, but I didn't see point in commenting on that since, about 500 BC is about what I'd assumed (wasn't Pericles' Plague, measles?). The article is also claiming that 2011(!) is when we finally proved that the Black Death was the same Yersinia as caused plagues in nineteenth-century India. I didn't even notice that "proof" in 2011 and, honestly, I'd have laughed it off if I had.

This new finding, on Variola, interests me more. They found some 'pox up in Viking Scandinavia that comes from a different lineage than the 'pox roaming around elsewhere up to 1980.

The 'pox against which I was vaccinated in the early 1970s comes from that famous western Mediterranean strain which did for the Americas. The Vikings had something else, something older - it must have broken from the main chain 300 AD.

The authors assume that it got to Scandinavia and hung around for five hundred years. Therefore, it must have been less virulent - more endemic and mild. I admit it helped that the Normans were (and are) a cow culture which offered some cowpox to inoculate the locals.

But I do question the conclusion. If the Norsepox was just some measle, how come it died out. How come it didn't spread wherever else the Vikings went.

I offer an alternative: this was a Volga plague, rampaging from Kazan in the old Bulgaria upstream the Caspian. In origin, it was a Sasanian and 'Abbâsî bug. Its separation from our west strain reflects Iranian and Islamic separation from the old Roman and Christian world. It died out in Iran because Iran itself was depopulated and depressed over the Two Silent Centuries. It died out in Bulgaria and Scandinavia because the populations were never high here.

Undersea base

Amazing we hadn't figured this earlier, before pondering moon and Mars bases: Fort Cousteau. 135 million dollars to stick a laboratory sixty feet / 20m underwater. We already have whole fleets of submarines silent-running around the 300m level but of course these're specialised for military and, well.

They're proposing offshore Caribbean. That can just pull energy from the power-grid. Although, recapture of energy from a local nuke-plant should work. At 20m below there's even room for a cooling-tower. Better than a submarine anyway. How about Dogger Bank...?

To keep the pressure consistent they're building only two stories. 3 bar at bottom. (Corresponds to 40 km over Venus' surface. Below the cloud-deck; hazy, 150 C. About right for Uranium City.)

For their setup I'm curious on a few details. For one: at only sixty feet below, why don't they just pipe up a lift or even a stairwell to the ocean surface, and have incoming seacraft dock there. Basic stone and waterproof concrete, in a circular-tower model, should keep the ocean away. Hook the lab on the seafloor to that.

I do get why they don't build the thing in a cenote under Yucatan: they want to study the real Caribbean, not the exotic environment of the deep caves.

And how's the air-pressure in the lab. I do understand how the air-pressure will be high to keep the whole structure from imploding. The article implies it's higher-pressure further down within the structure itself - it'll be a two-story building. Hmm. So they have airlocks between stories?

If they have a tower to the surface, of course we will need an airlock for that. Somewhere. Maybe the tower's floor is airlocked, from above.

They got a plan for earthquakes or Cat-4s?

The ideological Arab contribution to the Dark Age

From about AD 600 to 800, the Late Antique world fell into darkness. The decline is documented in Decker for the Greeks, Pirenne (and "Scott") for Europe, and Zarinkoob for Iran. If you don't like these sources you're in luck: the Dark Age Hypothesis is easily refutable. Simply present to scholarship evidence that any of these peoples raised up a Procopius or a Ptolemy or even a Hypatia.

Europe had in places suffered earlier. Justinian can be blamed for Italy, and as Gregory of Tours noted it wasn't going great for Gaul/France either. The Visigoths held the line in Spain... until their outside trade dried up, Italy and France being weakened and then Africa being taken by hostiles. Then Spain fell too, not really sorting itself out until 'Abd al-Rahmân in the 130s / 750s.

If you want the history of this postapocalyptic world, you go to Hoyland who, over the 1990s, scrabbled together what little he could find. Why was this collection so difficult? Because so little literature was being produced in Greek, Latin, or Middle-Persian.

Tim O'Neill at History for Atheists would beg to differ: although Europe was unpleasant until Charlemagne (he's a little fuzzy on that, himself) everything was fiiine in Byzantium and Egypt. I tried pointing out that it wasn't fiiine in Byzantium or Egypt, nor in Iran (or Iraq) but: Pirenne’s thesis has been largely rejected, and the rest of your comment above is almost as simplistic as Hicks’ nonsense.

I confess, I was trolling. My main point stands though. And O'Neill, again, does himself no favours by his high-handedness. (Not to say Vridar's much better.) Allow me to explain why I say "a religion" did this disaster.

I start with the assumption of the Two Centuries' Silence. I nuance this with Christian Syria: even Ward-Perkins notes that Syria was an exception to the ruin all about her ears. JBV Tannous in 2010 produced a fine thesis, "Syria Between Byzantium and Islam", on just how hard the Christians in Syria worked to keep the lights on through this era. I understand Syriac-speaking Jews offered some help in Iraq, as well; at least in medicine.

I also do not believe, pace "Scott", that "ISLAM!!" as we know it did the worst of the damage. I do not see a united Qurân over the first of these Two Silent Centuries. If you press the Muslims, they'll agree for the first two decades: they hold that 'Uthmân canonised their text ~ 30 / 650. By that time Egypt, Syria, and almost all Iran was already either under Arab rule or in total upheaval.

But the Arabs required something to motivate them.

Here's an idea, from the heartland of the South Syrian Araby: God chose the Arabs to be the world's masters. Now, I stress that this goes against the Qurân as we have it today. If, however, we accept that most of the Qurân comes from para-prophetic qurrâ after 'Uthmân and, in large measure, in opposition to 'Uthmân's family... we can't bring those parts of the text into evidence.

What can come into evidence, for the 20s / 640s, are the Torah, sketching out a Chosen People; and then the Gospel, to dethrone Israel from that status. But the Gospel denies superiority to any race, Arabs included. Suppose, however, that the Christians have corrupted Jesus' message. Perhaps Jesus meant only to denounce the Jews. Who, then, is left to carry out God's intended promise - but Ishmael?

A religious theory, we might call it "deisprudence", supported the Syrian Arab Wille-zur-Macht. The Arabs, as supremacists, didn't want converts; they wanted only subjects. To the extent Syrian Christians stood aside, the Arabs protected them.

This deisprudence, which evolved into Islam, threw the world into darkness, except for its source, at and around Damascus.

UPDATE 7/26: Umayyad south Syria. Deborah Cvikel says: The size and richness of the cargo seem to contradict the notion, currently popular among scholars, that during the transition between Byzantine and Islamic rule between the seventh and eighth centuries, commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean was limited. It "seems" so only to idiots. From the 30s / 650s on the Umayyads were in full command over the eastern Med between Cyprus, Egypt, and Syria. The Zubayrid fitna delivered a minor hiccup in the mid 60s / 680s - but from the Med side this was almost immediately resolved. The Iraqi rebellions under 'Ali and 'Abd al-Rahman didn't touch the west at all. Please, Dr Cvikel; don't be an idiot.

North America before the Younger Dryas

Some studies claim early habitation of North America.

Of course Clovis-first is cods, has been known as cods since (at least) Dillehay in the 1990s. That's a strawman. And I agree that the LGM 25-17 kBC was no time to be journeying into the Americas. Ship tech from across the Pacific wasn't up to it either. Genetics point away from any Across Atlantic Ice intrusion.

And yet: Ciprian Ardelean at Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas sees 30 kBC human spoor in Mexican cave Chiquihuite. Elsewhere around Parias (as I like to call early North "America"), Oxford researchers claim 42 sites up to 17 kBC. As Ardelean notes, anything that old had to have got there in the first place "BEFORE" (his caps) the LGM; therefore, vindication for his cave.

At a guess, Ardelean's numbers are off. His cave is unique for the 30 kBC range, and radiocarbon that old simply isn't good. But I do not guess his numbers so far off to discount his main point.

Also not good for 30 kBC... is DNA. We need one of those well-preserved skulls or fingerbones as we had for Denisova. Early modern man liked to live down in the tropics, not up in the steppes or mountains or deserts.

I expect NOT to be dining on crow for my anti-Solutrean stance. To this day we've no American record of Europe (nor Africa) prior to Amerigo. But I must concede that remains this early have opened the question again. More likely is [para]Melanesian as seen in Amazon DNA.

UPDATE 7/23: Razib agrees. As to why the Americas are so predominantly ANC-A and ANC-B with little else: There is no evidence of Oase Aurignacians in modern Europeans. His term for "paramelanesian" is Clade-2 East Eurasian.

Asteroids on the moon

Via Reynolds, "Asteroid shower on the Earth-Moon system immediately before the Cryogenian period revealed by KAGUYA". KAGUYA is a crater-survey on the Moon. "Cryogenian" is that ice age starting 720 Mya.

... but the craters are dated 800 Mya. That is... NOT "immediately before". That's a swing of years (far) exceeding 66 Mya between Chicxulub and us. The authors do indeed offer a ridiculously wide error-bar, 797 ± 52 Mya.

More interestingly, eight craters cluster 660 Mya. Also late in the Cryogenian, and these didn't hit Earth; but if they had cousins, perhaps enough to keep us frosty.

Also of note is that Earth's phosphorus-cycle shifted around 800 Mya. That, rather than cold, seems more on point.

BETTER FIT 7/30: Volcanoes.

Returning to nonperiodic transits

A planetary transit gives us the diameter of a large planet. The transit also nets us distance from the star and at least a constraint on its mass... if we keep watching that star. It happens that sometimes we don't keep watch. The TESS survey kept watch only for 27 days per region, so if the gap between transits took longer than that (or maybe even than fourteen days...) we didn't catch its rate of recurrence.

After the first sweep of transits, we're now checking back up on single-transit events that didn't recur in the window.

The university of Warwick found one: K-star NGTS-11, 620 light years away. The planet "b" runs a 35.5 day period, and is 0.847 Rj. This planet in turn wobbles its low-mass star: pinning its mass to 0.344 Mj. It's only as dense as Saturn!

Given that the star is only a K, if the planet is cloudy as Saturn (or Venus) it's 435 K (160° C). That "coolth" is rare for transiting planets since, as noted, we'd been catching under-27-day transits; most of these cooler planets are locked around red dwarfs. I say "locked" because 27 days on down is... like our Moon, so should present the same face toward the barycentre.

0.344 Mj is still massive. Saturn itself is only 0.3. And although it's hot, it's not so hot nor so subject to flares as some others. And it's not dense enough to be a planet of supercritical ices - those are alternate Neptunelikes. Warwick is right, I think, to treat this as a nonexotic Saturnlike. Likely it migrated inbound to its present orbit.

Dark Age Arizona

The Triassic, from 252 Mya on, is the Dark Age of the post-Permian. The Earth was a near-dead planet at the onset. Also (I'm now told) we flat have no record of the Norian epoch, a good portion of the second half. This is when Pangaea broke up; and, another one of those mass-extinctions occurred toward the end.

They say we have snapshots from these dozens of millions of years - enough to tell us that three (3) "mountain sized" asteroids hit us. But fragments from a span offer no frame-of-reference to place specific events within it. For that we'd need an unbroken rock core preserving the whole stretch. The Colorado Plateau Coring Project has been on that case.

Paydirt: Petrified Forest National Park, 225-209 Mya.

LIGHT 7/31: In South America anyway, make it 221-209 Mya. We learn here that one reason Arizona / Colorado records are so rotten (at least earlier) is that we have no fossils to mark that era of time, as South America has. These are mostly land-sediments. And there was little life on this land - actually, there's not much life in Arizona to this day. For the inverse, imagine piecing together Pliocene South America from the Atacama.

Water worlds

Transiting planets have had their surface-area measured directly. On assumption that they're not spinning out like Saturn: therefore radius and a good constraint on volume. Mass too if they wobble their stars at all - giving us density.

Some are "super Earths" in the 1.3 Earth radius range... but others are quite a bit larger, 2.4 radius, and aren't wobbling the star enough to be iron or even rock. The only planets we have around here like that are Neptune: ice or even gas giants, covered in helium and hydrogen.

This is hard to square with their presence so close to a hot and possibly flaring star. Should they not be rocky? (Lava counts. Liquid metal-silica covers about the same volume as plain rock, as Archimedes noted, and weighs the same of course.)

The French have another idea: supercritical water. At a certain pressure / heat, the water is in supercritical mode - like carbondioxide on Venus' lowlands. It turns out that this extends the opaque part of the visible surface area. Like Sudarsky's class-II Water Giants, but smaller and hotter.

UPDATE 8/26/21: Hycea.

Venerean Volcanoes

Laurent Montési is looking at volcanoes on/under Venus.

First off, we DO want to keep track of potential bursts of ash into the high atmosphere where we're floating or flying craft. Next that's where I want to pick up phosphorus for the floating farms. Among other ores. We don't get banded iron or other bio/chemical processes here so geology (and craters) be all we get.

Koski & Grcevich (p. 85) had made note of the volcanoes on Lakshmi to Ishtar's west, specifically Sacajawea (which also hosts an impact-crater, Vlata) although Colette could be younger. Also Theia in Beta Regio, or pretty much all Alpha or Lada. Another basin 4° east of Maxwell, Cleopatra, has historically been deemed volcanic, as K & G assume; but it may be a crater.

Montési's crew has tested that, and put them on the globe with a spinning gif. This reiterates that Ishtar Terra is a "shield" like Quebec with no vulcanism on it nor nearby. Several dormants to the west - that is, Lakshmi. Since Vlata wasn't covered over I'm unsurprised.

News to me: an active volcano some distance northwest of Maxwell. And the southern hemisphere, like earth low on continents, is high on volcanoes.

PHOSPHINE 7/13/2021: I am glad I didn't get into the LIFE ON VENUS hype; anyway, more evidence of vulcanism.

The first Aryan

Peschanitsa R1a: PES001 comes from a burial site in what is now northwestern Russia and is dated to a whopping 10785–10626 calBCE. I'm not surprised to see him so early; Mal'ta Boy was older than that and already R (and not Q).

For reference the great Russian icefields had been melting before that... but were about to stop melting. Younger Dryas was 10800-9500 BC - contemporary. It was gettin' chilly up there, and would stay chilly.

During this cold millennium-and-change the Upper Khvalynian Choresmian Transgression ended 10500-000 BC [UPDATE 12/1 finetunes]. During the great false spring, the Khvalynian (Caspian) sea had been (much!) bigger, draining into the Euxine well north of the Caucasus. That would have kept the sundry R's out of the Caucasian piedmont and, one assumes, from transUralic Asia generally. The Finno-Ugric Urheimat (as N) was, of course, transUralic.

Absolutely no way this d00d was speaking anything remotely post-Indo-European. Although we will entertain that his tribe contributed to the protolanguage.

The end of peak oil

One theory knocking around the fringes, back in the 1990s I recall, is that Earth has hydrocarbons as don't come from fossils. Many, many more.

I hasten to affirm that fossil fuels exist. It's a bad idea to ignite them all at the same time.

In the 1970s, before the abiotic theory arose, we all used to worry about Peak Oil, that point when supply trailed demand and drove up prices. We assumed further that as hydrocarbons ran out, CO₂ would be drained from the atmosphere and lead to an Ice Age. To this day I doubt we have nearly as much fossil-fuel as they had back in 260 Mya.

Peak oil didn't happen: we got better at pulling oil and natural gas from wells. Better at catching it too. Also energy use got more efficient therefore scalable. Nuclear power got safer - which I expect we'll be noticing as time goes on. I don't think the abiotic theory ever entered the geologists' calculus; as noted, they've done just fine chasing the fossils, and there hasn't been a need to look elsewhere.

Enter Hokkaido. They address an ongoing Problematic: Earth is within the snow-line, so didn't form with water - and has been impacted since then. To the extent it has likely-foreign water, it isn't cometary. That impactor "Theia" was a thought at some point, which formed further out. But it looks not to have formed outside the snow-line either.

Hokkaido suggests Plastic Planetoid. Here is a water-poor asteroid whose "ices" (in the planetological sense) were carbon monoxide and ammonia (and methane), with several oxygenated minerals. Over millions of years this asteroid could have gone like the moon Titan: rearranging its chemistry toward hydrocarbon chains.

I'll interject all of this still takes place outside the snow-line. The Hokkaido theory allows to keep that foreign molybdenum. This theory simply allows to de-constrain (as much) familiar snow. If meteors like this hit the post-Theia Earth, the organics could add hydrogen to Earth's carbon/oxygen-heavy crust. Hydrogen and oxygen form water...

... and there should remain much organic, abiotic, alien material in Earth's crust, still.

Three Gorges

About last week I started hearing about the floods in southwest China and Tibet. The Three Gorges Dam is no longer doing flood-control; all efforts are on draining the place downstream. Like Hurricane Harvey.

If a dam's water level gets too high, the force of the water shifts upward. Unless the dam is designed by Abdel-Nasser of Egypt, dams tend to the vertical and are thin on the horizontal. High water can tip the dam over, at least parts of it. Then a wall of water rushes downstream and tsunamis all the people there.

It gets worse. Nuclear power plants need water and are usually placed near-ish the people they serve, who also like water. China being China, there are many many nuclear power plants downstream.

Even before all those plants were erected, Chinese engineers were complaining that this dam was good only for 100 year floods and hadn't considered the (high) probability for a 200 year flood along the way. Bayes Theorem, yo! (See also: northwestern Boulder County, September 2013.)

Last night I saw official Chinese news claiming nahh it'll be fiine it's under control. The party itself is now singing a different tune. The dam is displaced and deformed.

Even if this thing holds, and I give it about 40% at this point, the dam has already failed for purpose as all the floods coming in keep coming through. I think lower Shanghai, for instance, is already underwater. If the people aren't dead, look to New Orleans Katrina: homeless Chinese in Wuhan ... yes, that Wuhan. Whatever CoVID strategies were in place to keep social-interactions controlled, that's already done wit'. This virus is coming back.

Expect that war on India to be called off, for a start. Plus: if China could beat the US Navy (UPDATE 7/20 - big if), how would they follow up on it? If the dam fails, I don't even know if Xi survives or his Party, which suggests more warring-states and a retreat from that non-Chinese west they're holding.

More interstellar objects

Besides 'Oumuamua and a few other high-eccentricity, weird-inclination comets: nineteen "Centaur" planetoids are on the list.

Means we don't have to wait for the next incoming gate-crasher, if we're looking to send a mission to an alien world.

These nineteen are screened from basic Oort comets or Kuiper objects because their orbits started off polar, and they're at least as old as the Solar System itself. Since they are unlikely to have formed in the coalescence of the Solar System, they must derive from outside it.

'Tis seven years hence

Having some spare time, it being an overcast July weekend under shelter from several elements, I'm revisiting some Radish classics of yesteryear. Let's start with "Slavery Reconsidered" (2013).

Author Karl Boetel here brought two silly arguments against slavery, at least as North American Anglos practiced it: what slavery was actually like; slavery contradicts ... miscellaneous abstractions. To the former, Boetel compares this institution to its contemporary alternatives, like working life in the North and, of course, slavery as practiced back in the Ashanti kingdom. The latter can be, and is, dismissed as holy cant and humbug. They're not straw arguments, mainly because silly people were constantly re-running them in 2013, so they did need rebuttal, which Boetel supplied.

At risk of playing the Stonetoss meme, in the evidence Boetel brought to us, I can see two more reasons against racial chattel slavery.

One argument was already I think made at the time, which still crops up in books like Escape from Rome and other indictments against that earlier slave-dependent empire. As long as you can force a man to do your work, you're not in the market for a robot. Moldbug back then countered, what to do with the Dire Problem of surplus labour; lately we have Fred Reed. Still. That just shifts the burden on those researchers studying the cognitive sciences. John Calhoun was never going to the Moon and neither were his followers.

Boetel had earlier analoguised the best master/slave relationships to family adoption, mixed in with Japanese social stability. But unless you're actively marrying those races together, the "adoption" model means you've adopted a pet. What legacy to the posterity is that? Do you want to breed black people into better pets, is that it? (Of course we're increasingly developing robots to fill also that need - niche, rather.)

We can appreciate that Aristotle, John Calhoun, George Fitzhugh and - in 2013 - Karl Boetel made the case. I am certainly not recommending #cancel! against this blogger itself. But the Peculiar Institution was Considered Harmful, for good reason. Whether the necessary emancipation was properly handled is another question.

Nantes

Another Catholic cathedral is burning. This one's definitely arson. The firefighters caught this blaze in time to see it started at three places at once. I have a suspect: not the Muslims.

The Erdogan set would like the building for Islam or, at least, would prefer to leave it alone so as to build a greater mosque elsewhere. Also, where church-attacks are current it's in context of the general Cultural Revolution. Christianity is part of the West's brand.

For historians of France and of Christianity, Nantes is the site of that royal Edict which gave toleration to Protestants. (Back then, the Kings had that cachet.) Louis XIV rescinded that Edict. Burning this Cathedral represents an extreme beyond the Edict - an ultraProtestant move.

The cult of #woke is nothing if not ultraProtestant.

AWW POO 7/26: Rwandan. If he speaks French he's likely Hutu. Francophone Catholicism (to its eternal shame) took the Hutu side against the Tutsi, a Nilotic bunch often Anglophone. I knew this guy was a Person Of Interest but I never dreamed he actually did it; I never saw the motive. So what was his deal: race envy and resentment?

Alan Jeffs

A few weeks ago I got, from the official Republicans here, an email relayed from one "Carl Moore" about some Antifa invasion of Greeley(!) on 5 June. The mail stank of rat, as do all email ahadith. I hadn't previously visited Greeley and I didn't choose that Friday (a work day) as my day to start. And now we might have the source of such invitations to violence:

Drudge links around a firewall to a WaPo article, reposted at Stars & Stripes. It's about someone who trolls the conspiratorial Right, most notoriously lately concerning a NVA flag-burning at Gettysburg. A mirror to how the Yes Men troll the corporate Left. Call him "Alan Jeffs".

As I read it, this article is comprehensive and fair. But still, overall, a job-interview for the Alinskyites.

Jeffs, born 1982, is a charismatic loser. He charmed his way into a marriage and four years later, his wife dumped his ass. He never really got a job. Lacking persistent health-insurance, he moved from basic-bitch 20something Kerry-voting liberalism into Socialism. Because the American medical-industry owes him.

As do many losers, Jeffs looks around for other losers in his crab-bucket to pull down. Jeffs has chosen, as his target, the #MAGA base. That's the base which the more charitable sociologists observe are descending into opiates and self-harm. Thither, but for the grace of Satan, goeth Jeffs.

Jeffs is, thus far, like Audacious Epigone, Kevin Williamson, Donald Trump, and myself in recognising that these people are unwell. Williamson is the angry distant father yelling at his troubled son MAKE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF, as if that helps. Trump promised to help and (up to this spring) had actually delivered, somewhat. I am ... just an observer, at this point.

Jeffs for all his Socialist posturing isn't out to help. He plays on White American insecurity and basks in the result, as Murrkins show up where he tells them to and make a spectacle of themselves.

I will admit here that I do not like Alan Jeffs. He's that sort of bully who needles the autistic kid in class. At some level it feels personal.

On the other hand, there's a point where the autistic kid needs to hunker down and weather it out, and find some other way to beat this guy. The first step is to deny him his fun.

UPDATE 7/18: Empathy.

UPDATE 8/10: And again. Although, here, he dragged in Ben Shapiro. Shapiro may have a legal case.

A tale of two kitties

Two months back we talked about the mice of Neolithic Europe, and the cats of Cyprus. Yesterday John Hawks talked about how cats crossed the Aegean. The press release was disseminated ( ineffableisland.com/2020/07/5000-years-of-history-of-domestic-cats.html); here is the full paper.

The study is Nicolaus Copernicus University at Toruń in Poland, studying the local cats 4200-2300 BC. These cats are Nubian; it is from the Nubian line that most domesticated cats descend. There also exists a "European wild cat": related to the Nubian, but not the Nubians gone feral. So those cats were already there, and not taken as domesticates.

This means the first farmers from the Near East brought Near Eastern cats with them.

The (Nubian) cat remains these Poles have found were in caves. Also they ate mostly the same food as the wildcats: they can tell from the Nitrogen-15. The wildcats have more Carbon-13; this, from small birds. So those Nubian cats abroad were feral, at least semiferal living on the villagers' fringe. Fed by the old Polish catladies no doubt. (By "Old Polish" for this period I suspect greater Old Prussian, by language.)

Oconee

The Creek Nation in Georgia is being revised, over the 150 years Oconee Valley interacted with the Spaniards.

It wasn't clear that the Creek/Muscogee or Oconee ever had so interacted. The mounds in old Creek territory didn't have Spanish remains. (Contrast, the contemporary Comanche, or the Cherokee after the founding of the Georgia colony.) So the mounds were dated beforehand, and the Creek were assumed later arrivals.

Now we know that the Oconee settlers were indeed Creek. This means that the society deliberately chose not to enter the literate or metal ages for themselves. Too white for them. [CANCEL, 7/21! - Lawrence Mead, "Poverty and Culture", 10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1.]

The article constantly castigates modern "racism" (i.e. whypipo) for denying the Creek / Oconee connection. "Erasing" their heritage I suppose we'd call it. It seems to me, though, that it was the Creeks' folly in the first place which... stuck them to their present state in central Oklahoma. The Muscogee told us for centuries they weren't civilised and we, at the final end, took them at their word.

Uyelgi

h/t Davidski: Veronika Csáky et al., "Early Medieval Genetic Data from Ural Region Evaluated in the Light of Archaeological Evidence of Ancient Hungarians". This is a cemetery at Uyelgi on the east side of the Urals. Under study were the remains of 29 men and 16 women.

Culturally Uyelgi was like the tenth-century Carpathian Basin; that is, old pagan Hungary.

Csáky's team (brilliantly) got mtDNA from all 45 of these samples, both the women and the mens' mothers. Daughters-of-Eve are represented by U2-U5 (but not U8 or K!), H, and T - plus, N1a1a1a1a. The Orient is represented by A and C. There are four outliers, all eastern.

The 29 men have Y-chromosomes also, of course: 83.3% is N-M46, 5.5% G2a (G-L1266), 5.5% J2 and 5.5% is R1b of the typed male individuals. N-M46 is Uralic, fully confirming this nation's kinskip with the Finns and old Magyar elite. Of the minority sixth, all (as of the Glacial Maximum) were Ukrainian or Near Eastern. These will have drifted in from the Ukraine. Note the Euro-Hungarians also have R1b and G2a along with the N. A bit more R1b as we might expect.

Of serious note: not R1a. Uyelgi's IndoEuropean population was negligibly Aryan / Scythian / Parthian. Whenever the R-Z2123 Árpádides took charge, it wasn't in the Siberia. Further: this suggests no serious Scythian invasion over the Bronze and Iron Ages. The Uralic elite dominated or maintained their dominance of the westerners. Afanasievo, as earlier, seems more likely than even paraTocharian which should have some R1a.

Tocharian as an IndoEuropean offshoot

Ever since Mallory 1987 - which got a lot right - I'd assumed that the Afanasievo culture was Yamnaya-like, and not Aryan. We have a nonAryan IndoEuropean language-family from the area, but only the one: Tocharian. So Afanasievo was the first protoTocharian society - yes? Sadly no! says Douglas Adams.

Adams accepts the consensus that Afanasievo culture was Yamnaya East. But the dates don't line up right for the Tocharoi to ... exist, yet. Rather - says Adams - we should look at Afanasievo as we look at the Anatolians: a second sister to the IndoEuropeans, but not IndoEuropean itself like Tocharian was.

Apparently there was a paper for this Afanasievo-Yamnaya-TarimJunggar link against direct Afanasievo-Tarim. Clémence Hollard et al., "New genetic evidence of affinities and discontinuities between bronze age Siberian populations" ed. Am J Phys Anthropol. 167.1 (2018), 97-107. I'd missed that.

Adams bemoans the lack of constraint for Tocharian origins beyond that, so suggests the eastern Kazakhstan pre-Andronovo for future archaeology. Andronovo itself is solidly Aryan, like the later Tocharians' technical glossary.

STRIKE TARIM 10/28/21: Real Tarimese were A.N.E. For P.I.E. we look to Junggar.

Europe was a population sink

h/t HBDChick: the settlement of Europe [by Neanders] came in waves, all from the same source-population.

The same pattern held for our people. I don't see the old Europeans spreading eastward, or the Farmers returning to the east, or even IndoEuropeans going back east - until the Celtic, Roman, and German eras.

It took an agricultural and social revolution in the Rhine / Rhône valleys before their inhabitants could push back east.

Theia and Earth

The Earth-Moon system coalesced 4.425 Gya. h/t Vox Day (voxday.com/2020/07/the-precision-of-science.html) and RT.com.

The Münsterites say earlier models had the Theia-Earth merger much earlier in the Solar System's formation, sooner after the first carbonaceous asteroids 4.567 Gya. RT says when the molten Earth was still in the process of taking shape and covered in a vast ocean of liquid magma which doesn't explain much. The press-release clarifies they mean that the Earth was already differentiating; that's when terms like "covering" and "ocean" make sense against an iron core.

The moon does seem more carbon-silicon than would be expected if Theia hit us when there was more iron circulating at the surface.

As for why the earlier bias: they say that we'd misinterpreted the age of the moon rocks. The ones we brought to Earth. You know, from those Apollo (and Luna!) missions which Vox Day doesn't believe happened excuse me, has Perfectly Reasonable Questions About.

This younger age for the Moon is linked to the formation of the Earth's own core. That's telling me that Theia had stirred up the Earth's innards again, which had to re-differentiate. That might explain what surface metals the Moon does have.

SIGH 10/24/23: At least this time "VD" Beale was not actively lying, but ... he was wrong again. On details, perhaps; 4.46 Gy is still nearly a hundred million years after 4.567. I note that VD has dropped that webpage, interestingly. UPDATE 2/2/24: As to that stirring of innards, the scrambling left residues.

The case against Albert Einstein

Larry Romanoff is heir to a century of muttering against the German patent-clerk. Romanoff's brief starts with Patterns Of Behaviour: Einstein relied on his wife Mileva Marić-Ajnštajn's maths from 1903 to 1919 (when it mattered), and the man was loose with attribution to De Pretto (E=mc², 1905) and to Hilbert and Poincaré (general relativity, 1915). Then Romanoff gets interesting.

Romanoff insinuates that International Jewry chose Einstein and preserved his scholarly reputation. Romanoff doesn't provide much motive, at first. Later, he drops the famed Einstein-Szilárd Letter of 1939.

If you follow Unz, you know that site's main theme is the mostly-united Elders of Zion, who control events through kompromat. Szilárd had conceived atomic fission energy as early as 1933, trusting America to use it as an energy-source and/or as super-dynamite - for New Deal public-works. The Letter is where Einstein attached his name (and celebrity) to the cause of war. Why? Because the Elders wanted to take down the National Socialism (as of 1939, remember that Stalin was a national-Bolshevik also) and America was looking to be the least-Nazi viable state on Earth.

Romanoff has a tendency to overstate his case. As he does with Edison, presenting the evidence as a new revelation where plenty of bloggers have done so already lately; so he does with Einstein-Szilárd 1939, I have copies of correspondence. Get over yourself, Larry; freakin' Wikipedia has copies.

For all Romanoff's bluster, and (maybe) for all Einstein's own, I still see Einstein as important for the development of real energy physics. Szilárd's own biography includes a lengthy stretch 1926-30 helping Einstein with "the Einstein Refrigerator". Here is another patented device with Einstein's name and someone else's work. But. Szilárd kept part of the patent and the moneys thereto. Szilárd also forever owns co-credit for that. Whether the device was overrated, whether it remains fit only for Martian daylight, whether Einstein was involved only for the patent-law... I don't care. (1) It works as designed and (2) Szilárd never resented working with Einstein on this project.

The Zionist Hypothesis would, I suppose, present Einstein at such (commercial) projects as The Mafia Don's Nephew. I think if Einstein was that much of a worthless thief, word would have gotten out earlier. So I doubt it. Or, to be more direct, I trust the word of Einstein's direct colleagues more than I trust the word of the average Unz contributor.

UPDATE 5/16/22: Romanoff is a Protocols crank.

The foreign giants on which Americans stand

Unz is getting in on the Wuz Kangz bandwagon publishing Larry Romanoff: debunking in order Einstein, Edison, Bell, Coca-Cola, and the brothers Wright. H/t Vox Populi on Einstein whom he deems the most important.

I'd edit Romanoff, to restrict Edison and CocaCola. I had thought that everyone already knew Edison for a P T Barnum since that Oatmeal cartoonist started making a meme of Nicolai Tesla. And do we even care about sugary soft drinks anymore? These begin and end with Prohibition and 1950s drugstore culture. We have Starbucks now.

And Romanoff is plain unfair to the Wright Brothers. Maybe they did stoooole it frrrom uss, preciouss but I didn't notice Australia (here) setting up an airforce before the Americans. Australia had and still has all the empty land one could want, to test such an invention and for motive to use it internally. I apologise to Larry should this cause offence, but the Snooze?Lose! law applies. If the Smithsonian hasn't yet accepted the Australian claim to the curved aerofoil, that much - if even true - is annoying... but fixable.

I do allow the Italians' genuine beef on Tony Meucci's behalf. Better he had stayed in Tuscany and set up the north-Italian 'phone system, instead of moving to this land of thieves.

As Vox Day intuits, Einstein is the most important target. Although that might wait for a wholly separate piece.

UPDATE 5/16/22: Romanoff is a Protocols crank.

Civil strife

Carballo offers input on Cholula, where Cortes conducted a notorious massacre. The moral controversy depends on the historical controversy: did Cortes actually do it, and if so why, and also how did he get away with it.

The confusion in the sources hints at confusion on the ground where it happened.

Elsewhere Carballo reiterates that Mesoamerican wars weren't total. Now: this needs to be nuanced. The Mesoamericans took to the "new rules" pretty darn fast later on, when the Spaniards presented that opportunity to them. Also, Carballo seems unaware that Xaltocan shifted from Otomí to Nahua ... at all, let alone how it was done. To be pointed out here: between Otomí and Nahua are real linguistic divisions with, at the time, ethnic prejudices.

When the battles were between one Nahua town and another, the two sides used war as Politics By Other Means. Just like Bismarck never intended to annex Denmark, Austria, or France. Cholula was a Nahua town disputed between two Nahua polities. So the nastiness there still requires explanation.

Carballo brings here that Cholula was, at the time, itself divided, into an old guard who supported the former Tlaxcala alliance; and the newer elite, subservient to Tenochtitlan. That, then, might explain it: the war on the outside covered up a lot of internal score-settling. Civil wars are, in their way, as brutal as tribal.

When Carballo met Restall

David Carballo's Collision of Worlds represents another go at the meeting between Cortes and Moctezuma. Restall blurbed this one. So, I'll compare these two.

Carballo is constructive, where Restall was (what the cool kids call) deconstructive. Restall also struck this reader as being a bit of a dick. I admit Carballo's prose, also, has suffered from Current Year style: he capitalises the B in 'Black', for instance. Here, though, I detect similar to what I found in Stephen Shoemaker's latest; I don't know that Carballo means it.

Carballo sees Cortes as exerting more agency than Restall did - at least, after the Night Of Tears. When considering this book at the 'store I looked first for the battle of Otumba, which I (now) consider fateful and which Restall sneered at. Carballo also lets the reader in on Quauhchechollan: whether Cortes led the attack, or ordered someone else to do it. Against Restall the event works either way: Cortes acted as a leader. I don't recall that Restall had so much as mentioned this.

So I bought the book, which I didn't for Restall.

Moana's children discover Columbia

Razib Khan posted about East Polynesia yesterday; Turtle Island has a more comprehensive take. The immediate paper is Alexander Ioannidis et al., "Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement" doi 10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2.

As is being noted, Janet Wilmshurst et al. had earlier (2011) posted "High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia". This constrained the Polynesian arrival: the colonization of East Polynesia occurred in two distinct phases: earliest in the Society Islands A.D. ∼1025–1120, four centuries later than previously assumed; then after 70–265 y, dispersal continued in one major pulse to all remaining islands A.D. ∼1190–1290.

So, first the Society Islanders pushed out to New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Marquesas. Then the Marquesians and Americans met 'n mingled. Their children went to Rapa Nui, before that fateful Easter day. I seriously doubt that the American shipwrights were up to it, so it was Polynesians who visited them - with those chickens.

Rapa Nui is now Chilean. Maybe the Colombians should ask for it back.

PROBLEMATICAL 8/30: Molle Guillaume wants attention.

The revival of the Hypatia myth

Always welcome it is to see a new History For Atheists post; this week, it is Hypatia's turn. Tim O'Neill here sketches a Christian city fighting a class war; in which, Hypatia - allied with the upper classes - lost her life.

Hypatia herself, as a scholar, wasn't original. As far as I can gather from O'Neill, she mostly edited and improved the Ptolemaic Model. And she did that mainly in service of the Middle Platonism. Thus she shored up one since-discredited model to help another model limp along for a few more years. If anything her work held back the progress of Late Antique science. But she did have students and she did acquire admirers. I consider her a Nile Delta Carl Sagan.

For O'Neill, the first chronicler of these events was on the upper-class side, so on Hypatia's: Socrates Scholasticus. This one was a "Novatian" so in the protoJansenite wing on the Catholic faith. Despite every motive to blame Cyril directly, Socrates didn't. Later, one Damascius mentioned these events in his vita of Isodore. Damascius was a pagan - Alexandria still had some. He was no follower of Hypatia's specific philosophy, but he too knew to side with her against the Christians. This one blamed Cyril, for that one's envy.

In modern times as European scholarship gathered together these Hypatia accounts and others, they made a martyrdom of a mobbery. Every century's secular enthusiasts found something new to raise her profile: Toland's feminism, Gibbon's antiChristianity, Voltaire's neoClassicalism. Kingsley seems the worst of these authors with his Occident / Orient obsessions.

One should have hoped that Kingsley represented a Jumping Of The Crocodile... but that didn't happen. I have a theory on why not.

Soon after Kingsley's death a "new" source came to light. John of Nikiu's history had been translated from Arabic into Ge'ez back in 1603. Europeans found two copies of this translation, and over the 1870s they edited and translated it, first (poorly) to French (thence into Amharic!). In 1913 it made it into English, a bit better than the Amharic had gone. It turns out that John, back in the 690s AD, had found Socrates' account and LOVED IT. John thought that Hypatia had got about what she deserved as a sorceress.

It took awhile for people to figure out that John was adding nothing new but his own bigoted distortions. But in the meantime, here was all the proof Hypatia's twentieth-century fanclub needed. Cyril did it, and all the Christians rejoiced.

Béla III, the Turk

With a hat-tip to Davidski, the Árpád(ide) Dynasty may have been Irano-Turk. Péter L. Nagy and his team have tested King Béla III's genome.

The base stock of Pannonia is Central European, as of Late Antiquity mostly Slavic. This extension of the Eurasian steppe took on a Eurasian elite during the Dark Ages, from the Urals. The Khanty/Mansi stock was sufficient to change the language as had not happened, for instance, in Bronze Age Aquitaine.

But the Hungarian elite entered modernity convinced that they were Turks. It took a long time over the 1800s to convince the Magyar scholar that his language was related to Finnish. I'd always attributed the Turk "myth" in Magyar high society to its chivalric tradition; like the Turks were chivalric. The two tribes' similarities derive from a mere accident of geography and from the needs of the horse. To borrow from the biologists, their cultures were paraphyletic.

Turns out the old Magyar elite knew better than I do: Béla belongs to R-Z2123, like the Bashkirs of 2500 BC. So, that's from Álmos and his son Árpád.

What we're dealing with is like Mongols leading Turks into battle; here, it was one Central Asian family leading a nobility of Finno-Ugric north Eurasians.

The 21%er ghost-dance

Over the first week of May, the Pew Research Center asked Americans if they trusted Science!! on the Corona Virus. Specifically: if the conflicting messages they were getting from researchers meant that the research itself had failed.

The results are in. 70% agreed that the core ideas on how to prevent the spread are well understood, even though research studies conflict. Some 28% went with it is difficult to know. This shifted to 78% / 21% when it was allowed research is continually improving.

I am not here to support Science!! on every pronouncement The Scientific Community proclaims as Consensus. I can however do sanity check - this site is even bold enough to use that term. And I am not alone. 70% of my compatriots can figure out the difference between sheer politics, and the physics of aerosolised particles plus the biology of viral transmission.

Further: given that the 21% has cut itself off from the scientific method itself, it has no lever to convince the 70%.

This 21% is clustered nearly entirely on the Right, the QAnon / Nirth Certificate / Expelled Right at that. They are entirely delusional. They are Ghost Dancers, equally doomed and damned.

The tragedy is that they have seized the American Flag brand, and the Christian banner with it. When others see the Ghost Dancers waving the flag without wearing masks, they make the same association. Where the Gadsden Flag became an extremist symbol carried only by the wrong people, the same is now true of what should be a symbol of Union.

UPDATE 7/9: here come the fatalities. It's the same pattern: infections (perhaps first seen in the waste outflow), then tested-positives, then cases, then hospitalisations.

UPDATE 8/4: evaluations. A changing explanation corrects earlier mistakes; it does not impugn the process.

The room-temperature liquid-state battery

University of Texas announces the liquid-state battery at 20 C. I've been looking at solid-state here, with an eye to moving vehicles.

Inasmuch as I care about a continual-motion vehicle, energy capacity is my king. Secondarily I've been made aware of solid-state degradation. But I figure that everything falls to entropy in the end. Also liquid-metal doesn't have the capacity pound-for-pound, and (reading between the lines here) I doubt it ever will.

My side-interest is Venus. I'm not flying the planes all the time. As I've used the air-flight checks as my model; I also swap out dying cells in our batteries, on a schedulable basis.

What liquid-state buys me, is less degradation. I won't use liquid-state in my aeroplanes but I might find its place in my aerostats; few of these are going to dip below 25 C at night. I could use liquid-state also on the Venerean surface where, of course, the ambience is already quite warm enough such I won't need to fork out for the gallium. But I'm assuming Venus for my clearinghouse for the asteroid trade anyway, so gallium-at-Venus might not be as expensive in future as it is now. Also in orbit: heat needs radiating away elsewhere, but not for the battery.

Where the Neolithic Revolution stalled

Lia Betti et al. on Europe 6100 - 4500 BC: "Climate shaped how Neolithic farmers and European hunter-gatherers interacted after a major slowdown from 6,100 BCE to 4,500 BCE". Before "the Sons of Aryas" or, for that matter, of anyone shaping their beakers in the bell shape. DOI 10.1038/s41562-020-0897-7.

Razib runs a victory lap. He adds that social factors likely applied as well, thinking of how various internal Arab strifes bogged down the effort to conquer Constantinople, until 715 AD when it was too late. For whatever reason, the Bell Beakers would be more internally united.

I wonder to what extent the Neolithic farmers ever penetrated Aquitaine. I understand that the J mitochondrion is absent from modern Euskara. By contrast Euskara men have a lot of (my) R1b, hinting that my IndoEuropean bros did much better there. Although - for the Basques - not budging the language.

The Trump family's self-condemned sociopath

As I read the summary of Mary Trump's book, I detect that grassy scent of BULLSH!T wafting over.

Leave aside the psychoanalysis, which was unethical when applied to George Dubya and just as unethical to Obama. The whole field of psychology is forefront in the Reproducibility Crisis. My nostrils got seriously burnt from this barely-English sentence: When his poll numbers started to rise he may have received tacit assurances from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would do everything it could to swing the election in his favor, the appeal of winning grew.

"Tacit assurances" means, NO assurances, where not backed up by facts and, indeed, are flagged as speculative: may have....

What Mary Trump does here is what I've been calling an Appeal To The Gallery, just the gallery to the left this time. The audience for this book wanted the RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA meme to be true, they lost that struggle, so they're out for more comfort-food. More: loading up the book with lies was a deliberate strategy. Mary Trump and her publishers have assured themselves of an angry reaction from the book's victim, leaving him no choice but to head to the courts to salvage his name. Thus allowing the criminals to stick that "the book THEY don't want you to read" label on the slander.

This book is bad and Mary Trump should feel bad, as the saying goes; and her publisher is also bad, and her readers should feel bad.

Although, in an irony, since Mary Trump has proven herself a sociopath; #NeverTrump can use Mary's example toward something Deeply Wrong in the Trump genome.

UPDATE 7/16: Cernovich spots the tells.

The Punic empire in Denmark

Robert Mailhammer theorises that the Canaanite languages affected the prehistoric Germania. I won't rule it out.

Our first constraint is 200 AD. That is when the Germans fanned south and north from their Bothnia homeland.

Cyrus Gordon (notoriously) thought that Semitic lies behind Linear A. On closer look, this is likely... for its accountants. This is what Mailhammer finds in the (copious) vocabulary which proto-Germanic doesn't have from IndoEuropean. The Shilling, for instance: *skil-ling < *sQIL < *seqayl cf. "shekel". That would require paraHebrew in its Carthaginian form.

To clarify, only two routes are possible between Denmark and the Iron Age Med. One is a land route from a port in the Gaulish Riviera, heading north up the Rhône (historically, by coches d'eau), then the Saône and (here) the Doubs to the Rhine. The other route is the Atlantic. The former requires a Punic colony around what's now Arles and friendly ports up river. The latter requires the Strait of Gibraltar, and ports along the coast. I think the Greeks owned Massilia and blocked that route too early. Also: if involving Carthage directly, the German trade must postdate Carthage's supremacy over the Strait which is Hamilcar Barqa, I believe. And I don't think his empire lasted long enough. More likely is general North African contact.

Either way the thesis would be much easier to defend if there could be found Punic bastions along the Atlantic littoral: Galicia, Brittany, Bilbao between them (because Iron Age navigation couldn't do the route direct), Cornwall of course, Calais / Dover.

AFTERTHOUGHT 8/4: We sure it's Punics and not just plain JEWS? Seriously, we see "shekel" being memed all over 4chan to this day. Those guys accent the former syllable but maybe the traders of the Roman Empire went with the latter. Especially if they were Judaeo-Berber... as would kick off from Casablanca.