Know your bishop

Here is a priest. And here is his bishop: Timothy Dolan.

Our bishop in northern Colorado is Samuel Aquila. Aquila's knee-jerk response to the George Floyd mess was to castigate his own flock for "racism", and to commend protests against it (i.e. against whites and police). Aquila did condemn violence... eventually... when violence went against Catholic icons. It has turned out that there was more to the Floyd story. That the man's death was not a murder, but an accidental suicide, from ingesting fentanyl.

As we found out with the Covington Ckids, bishops do not intercede for the laity of this world against the Prince Of This World, when the Prince attacks the laity.

I do not recommend "boycott the archbishop's appeal". I do recommend not paying to that appeal in New York. In Kentucky. And in northern Colorado.

The Spirit flows from the Father and from the Son. On occasions when the temporal Church which his Son instituted has failed us, we must switch to "The Patriarchy" - to the priesthood of all Believers. This is not "Protestantism" - this is legitimate protest. Can Bishop Aquila command honestly otherwise?

Paraffin and Nytrox

Last week there was word about paraffin / Nytrox. This "hybrid" is recommended for Virgin Galactic "suborbital". So, for rocketing stuff off of Earth, first-stage.

As to how P/N compares with hydrazine, or those green salts - this hybrid will burn in one-bar atmo or less. They are, I think, talking lower impulse by higher thrust: they just need to get stuff off the ground.

An infamous homily on the Resurrection (and Jews)

Gregory Nyssene (and his sister Macrina) came to our attention when modern Catholics, fellow Christians, and friends unearthed the Nyssene family antagonism to late-classical (chattel) slavery. Gregory is exactly the sort of Church Father I mean when I praise such as having been guided by God to guide our Church. Kevin MacDonald cites Gregory instead on the Jews, which comments I prefer not to repeat here.

MacDonald quotes a translation by Moshe Lazar, "The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery" ed. Sander Gilman and Steven Katz, Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York and London: New York University Press, September 1991), 2.36f; 47. Lazar fn. 36 puts this to Homilies on the Resurrection #5. JP Migne had it in PG 46.685 and... yeah, in In Christi Resurrectionem orat. quin., 683f: patroni diaboli, progenies viperarum and the rest of it.

Gregory of Nyssa had rather a lot of pseudepigraphic "testimonies against the Jews" foisted upon him. I find this particular text among those Patristic quotes disputed in scholarship - although, of course, not all late-antique quotes on this theme are so disputed, cf. Chrysostom. This one is also known by the fourth Easter Sermon (out of three!); and by "In luciferam sanctam domini resurrectionem". Our scholars reassign it to Amphilochius of Iconium. Although I haven't yet uncovered why.

As to how this Fifth Homily ended up with Gregory: its comments about "vipers" features also in an authentic sermon against usury (pdf) although here, our man does not attack the Jews but rather cites them. Just like Michael Hudson.

None of this much goes against MacDonald's point which is the state of antiJewish discourse in fourth-century orthodox Christendom. But let us leave Saint Gregory out of it.

REF 9/5: Roger Pearse points to Cardinal Jean Daniélou in Recherches de Science Religieuse 55 (1967), 151. So, "Bulletin D'Histoire des Origines Chrétiennes", 88-151.

Molle Guillaume has problems

I am (very) late getting to this, but 8 July a (white, of course) researcher of Polynesia Molle Guillaume raised the PROBLEMATIC!! flag against Ioannides'... story of two nonEuropeans getting together without white help. I missed it at the time. h/t Colavito. (Colavito's blog was Da Shiznit in July 2013 and is hardly looked at now. I am going through this blog for anything interesting.)

I hadn't noticed from the Nature article that Thor Heyerdahl was cited. Since I am no specialist in Polynesia, I couldn't tell you which other scholarship Ioannides or Guillaume should be citing (or not). Just on the general principle that more scholarship is better than less, that's annoying on Ioannides' part. However I didn't interpret that Heyerdahl was followed. Last July I'd interpreted that the Polynesians got to the Marquesas first, and then the two peoples met. I didn't venture how.

As for Ioannides' alleged "racism", what the fuck. No, seriously; how is weighing one post-Asian people against another post-Asian people racist, unless you are a Polynesian or a Bolivian nationalist. Or if you are a white guy grabbling for status by raising a Twitter rabble.

Guillaume also picks some scabs, rather feigns butthurt that Ioannides doesn't pick 'em, about the 1980s sampling process because personal trajectories matter and it's 2020 bro.

If this is the current attitude of Polynesian research, I can see why Ioannides didn't want much to do with it.

Salvation

A few months back I got a(n unsolicited) envelope in the mail, from "G.O.D" (sic) at PO 1412 in Longmont. In it were two tracts, "HOW CAN WE KNOW WE'LL GO TO HEAVEN?" and "Are You Pro Choice?". I'd been meaning to post about this but other interests and events popped up. And my subconscious wrestled with how to deal with this farrago.

Also enclosed was a white cardboard square:

"Gods Chosen One"
President
Donald J Trump

Trump 2020

The reverse had Please Prey For The President And Our Nation ... God Says "If You Dont Support Our President You Are Committing Spiritual Treason... The President Is Our Only Chance To Deter The End Of The World.... But I shan't be talking about that here. As for the Tract League's play for NARAL I, er, agree with it. Although as usual it has that dissonance between "don't abort" and "come to Jesus! He will forgive anyway".

I'm interested here in the first tract. That's Randy Alcorn, author of Lord Foulgrin's Letters. It is what it says it is: assurance of eternal bliss, if and only if the reader accept the writer's premises. Here the canon is the Protestant scriptural canon as Alcorn interprets it - yes, Titus; no 1-2 Peter, Jude, nor James. If you don't accept that canon, the tract won't work.

Alcorn's main problem is the same problem of the mediaeval Church. By shifting your focus to the next world, Alcorn like the sellers of Indulgences makes a power-play for your life in this one. Extra ecclasiam nullus salus.

I, er, agree with that too. But the likes of Alcorn misunderstand it.

The gods who interact with this cosmos, to the extent they care about sentient life in it, enlist us, also, to care about sentient life in it. That is real, tangible caring - caritas in the Latin. Any god that enlists us for nothing more or less than "spreading His Word" - a slate of circularly-contained assertions - has motives other than our benefit. Especially if it involves accepting a flawed text, like the Qurân, as axiomatic. A god that would have us adopt lies is a demon. Alcorn, like too many Christians, is a diabolist.

Happily for us Catholics, we own the Truth. Our scripture, mostly shared with Protestants, is the foundation of living Tradition, inextricable from that. The letter of Saint Clement to the Romans, and the letters of Saint Ignatius, are not in the Bible - there being only so much room in a single codex we can physically carry about with us. But these "apostolic Fathers" were inspired by God in equal and, in places, even superior measure. That respect for unborn life, alluded above, is famously "only" implicit in basal Scripture but is made clear in the Didache and later Patristics.

We Catholics also own the Theodosian Creed and, more to the point, its formula for the Divine. That is what has saved us: that the Spirit flows from the Father and from the Son. Here is separated Security from Information, as software gurus like Yarvin have put it. Protestantism has tried, by canonising a book; here, only following the footsteps of Muhammad.

Without this creed, we don't own a Church to stand by itself through all ages. Like Alcorn we should be enslaved - or, like the "New Atheists", we escape our chains only to be lost in the desert.

Christianity is not about saving our own souls - although we are assured that will happen, that we will be saints like Kayla Mueller. Christianity is about saving humanity and human life right here, at home. God loves us here. It is for our happiness here that the Council of Chalcedon rediscovered the Creed. It is for our happiness here that we even had Chalcedon, or Nicaea before that. And it is for our happiness here that Christ instituted His Church.

If we are not saved inside this Church, headquartered at the Vatican presently, I am open to alternate options. But you'll have to show your work.

Xcel Energy scam

I got one of those robocalls about Xcel preparing to cut off my energy. It is Saturday; Xcel do not call by phone on a Saturday. So I learn from Xcel's scam alert (pdf).

I looked up the number. It's for a man and a woman under different last names sharing a home in Niwot. Certainly not an Xcel number and, to be frank, it looks spoofed. They are more likely victims of a scam, past and present, than its direct perpetrators. So I shan't be linking the number here.

It has been a rotten morning but, I believe, I've just made it that bit less rotten - by not falling for this.

Illegal set operation failed

Main PC has "Network, No Internet". WiFi has "Connected, No Internet". All lights green; flashing globe. Sometimes it will work after an unplug and replug; It'll be blue... for awhile. When the internet fails, the blue light might falsely stay on, but eventually the lights will catch up with the failure. Windows 10 troubleshooting hits "no Internet access" although my network is fine - it recommends rebooting the modem.

This started in earnest Saturday 22 August 2020. Wednesday PM 26 August was bad - I had to drive into work. This morning was the worst: over four hours. My car happens to be engine-malfunctioning so I cannot drive anymore.

My ISP (Comcast) always blames the modem. Local Arris allows login : http://192.168.0.1/home.asp and then Status>Event Log. Connectivity State should be "Operational" when things go well (like now).

Saturday 29 Aug I woke up 5:15 AM PST, and noticed a cycle from that morning. Everything had been hunky dorey last night [after going through similar]. Here is the first error after bootup:

	TLV-11 - Illegal Set operation failed;CM-MAC=...;CMTS-MAC=...;
    CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

Then three-four minutes later these together :

	TFTP failed - Request sent - No Response;CM-MAC=...;CMTS-MAC:...;
	CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
	TFTP Request Retries exceeded, CM unable to register

Sometimes I get a "notice", Tftp Init Failed - Reinitialize MAC. Notices get purged from the log over time. The Criticals are maintained, up to a certain number. Usually about 90 minutes on a morning like this morn.

8-10s after that, I get stuff like this:

	SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing;;
	CM-MAC=..;CMTS-MAC=...;CM-QOS=1.0;CM-VER=3.0;

At 6 AM, I did that reboot again; at 6:05 also got

	No Maintenance Broadcasts for Ranging opportunities received - T2 time-out;
	CM-MAC=...;CMTS-MAC:...;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

then

	Started Unicast Maintenance Ranging - No Response received - T3 time-out;
    CM-MAC=...;CMTS-MAC:...;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

It does this right after that : Honoring MDD; IP provisioning mode = IPv6. That "MDD Notice" is associated with a manual restart and, this morning, Illegal Set again.

Anyway, since I'm on the Arris system, I doubt the problem is in my modem and it is certainly not in this PC. There are apparently laws about installing firmware - Xfinity does it, we don't. Spectrum and Xfinity / Comcast both think it is "noise" in my cables. It may be that the cables are faltering in this house. It may be the cables need to be shielded from other electronics.

I notice that it is always the end of August (since 2005ish) that I get connection problems. School's in?

Two aero-taxicabs

From Matt Drudge, here is a flying car from Japan. It's just eVTOL. Feh.

This one is of more interest: the bullet'plane. They promise a passenger-manifest of four to six over 4500 nautical miles at 460 mph. And without using much fuel.

That would, I think, skim off Business Class. The Mach Three would take the First Class. Why should anyone fly coach anymore? Strikes me that those old 7x7 / Airbus behemoths should just shift luggage and be piloted remotely.

Antz

Artificial photosynthesis: formic acid.

The process takes in carbon-dioxide, water, and sunlight; it releases oxygen gas and formic acid (HCOOH). The formic is a fuel itself and, if you don’t like it, it stores hydrogen for other fuels. Mainly we use that acid as a preservative in animal-feed: think cereals. There’s a sideline in tanneries. And other uses, in active study.

The new process doesn’t leave byproducts as pollutants. Best I can tell, the main old process is for producing acetic vinegar, from which, formic IS the byproduct (and methanol).

It does require hydrogen, in the form of water, so this is for CO2 / water planets only, not for Venus or our Moon. Not that energy is a problem over Venus. Preserving food is not much of a problem over Venus, given that its growing season is pretty much permanent and that it is, er, not exactly biota-friendly ambience. Although one does expect it will be helpful in brining supplies for the trip home. It’s the other chemical processes we might have our eye on.

EFFICIENCIES 2/9/24: The acid electrolyte.

SEQUEL 1/12/2021: this same lab has acetic from carbon-monoxide.

Lie-down-til-its-safe-o-saurus

h/t hbdchick: Sleeping through the P/T. Lystrosaurus, one of them Mammal-Like Reptiles. Often cited as the winners of this event, "when pigs ruled the earth". Pre-Carnian.

On sawing through their tusks, their ivory turns out to be ringed. These specimens lived far to the south - even past the Antarctic Circle. And in fact some fossils are found in what we call Antarctica today.

The early Triassic was warm - there was assuredly enough carbon-dioxide - but, as the article points out, the Earth was tilted the same, so had the same seasons. Shorter days but the same year (so more days per year). Even if it doesn't snow too hard the winters are still dark and trees don't grow.

The article implies that some animals had already learnt to hibernate through the worst winters. An animal like that would interpret the Great Dying as "winter" and react accordingly. They survived; the trilobite did not.

Scelidosaurus

193 million years ago a dinosaur roamed old Wessex; 160 years ago this dinosaur was dug up and sketched, as the “Scelidosaur”. But, as with Schliemann at Hisarlik, this was done before the standards were set down.

Unlike with Schliemann, the original remains were not destroyed. (The preparatory papers on it, further, didn’t fly into flights of fancy.) So now a full study is made in accordance with the best current knowledge of how the “bird hipped” and the “lizard hipped” clades worked, soon after the Triassic extinction. (Since 2017 we branch off a "sauropod" group during the Triassic; the first lizard hipped dinos. Their bird-hip siblings later gave rise to therapods. Therapods although sometimes looking like lizard-hips include actual birds. Anyway Scelidosaur is not a therapod, just a bird hip.)

This guy (or girl) turns out to be an ancestor to the famed Ankylosaur, he of the knobbly tail. The ancestor to the Stegosaur will have branched off before 193 mya although, it is a bird hip as well.

Why the Azores?

Why did the Vikings swing out to the Azores (h/t turtle)? In those Sargasso days, they weren't aiming at the New World. They had no way of knowing that the Vinland wasn't just another Greenland, ending to the south.

Here's a possibility: they were there for Madeira and the Canaries... for African (Berber!) slaves. More likely for Christians ripped off the coasts of Galicia, Asturias, and Leon. The Vikings were impressive slave-traders. Almost as enthusiastic as the Sephardim.

The linked article allows that the thraell was, applied to fellow Norse, an indenture like the Hebrew 'abd; that's likely how it started. But then the Vikings got themselves hooked into the Islamic / Sephardic networks. And then they brought some slaves home.

A good project for Madeira, Canaries, and Azores archaeologists might be to scout about their islands for trace of a prehispanic holding-pen. The Muslims didn't know of any out there - they didn't need 'em, having plenty at home in Andalusia and Morocco. But the Vikings needed a base. An island as remote as the Flores would be perfect.

PROGRESS 10/7/21: Pico and Corvo.

The Indochina Mesolithic megadrought

For the Cis-Sunda folk amongst us: the third-millennium BC drought. This spur of Asia is fed by the Indian Ocean monsoon system... in other millennia. Southeast Asia actually has TWO missing millennia here, 6000-4000 BC; looking like a population crash in the hunter-gatherer economy. There followed a shift to the Neolithic village; but in between, most assume, people starved.

Michael Griffiths and Kathleen Johnson (and ever-present Et Al.) went looking at speleothems, because wood isn't preserved well down there. From it, Johnson's part of the team collaborated with Francesco Pausata from Montreal to find a correlation with the Sahara 6000-4000 BC, a pleasant savanna before that.

They used also Carbon-14. They were still calibrating the carbon with IntCal13, not owning IntCal20; but usually '20 just gets you a more-informed lack of confidence.

The correlation - they say - is because, with more dust blowing off the Sahara, the Indian ocean to the east was cooler. It was a vast El Niño. I'd thought Sahara mostly blows over the Sahara's other ocean, witness Hurricane Laura; and that Africa (and Central America) got mountains to trap the rest. I take it Quantity Has Quality Of Her Own.

Diamond battery, brought to you by unicorn

Self-charging batteries, the NDB company promises. Marketed for electric aircraft - specifically the eVTOL, which is a sort-of helicopter drone.

As for the charging, by "self" they mean "air" which is oxygen.

But the core of it is "isotopes" - that is, something with a wonky number of neutrons... that is, radioactivity. Elsewhere I see they're talking Carbon-14. They're shielding these isotopes with your basic C-12 diamond. Which, I am told, has to be grown organically over a long long time. But never mind that. Is this something that charges by pulling in oxygen, or by internal radioactive decay?

The decay would be into Nitrogen-14. I am told that "dopes" the crystal and makes it, well, brittle and impure.

Thunderf00t LOLs hard at the story. I cannot say I'm impressed either.

Common sense is usually sense

The "lay person" is some dood with 99-100 for an IQ. He, or she (at the mean, the sexes are the same) lives by a basic set of rules to keep him/her alive. Then they run across Teh Scientific Literature.

It turns out that Jane and Joe Blow are pretty good at detecting bullshit. They can get a whiff if a study is going to be replicated or not.

I figure that even high-IQ people become Mr and Ms Blow in such fields as the high-IQers haven't made their focus. Here: psychology and sociology. Humans are evolved to understand other humans.

Let's expand that, on the China Virus. I am a decided midwit in virology. I own some basic information that exhaled air is moist, that floating liquid-droplets are called "aerosols", how water-droplets bear microbes, and how these emulsions transmit. So do a lot of people, I'd even say most people, although they mightn't have the purty words I got for it all. From that, back in March, I concluded that masks work to prevent the transmission of an airborne virus. I was ahead of the CDC and the WHO, in those days.

The scientists had their dispute and, at the end, they assured me I was right. Well, duh. Any rando could have told them.

(Unless they're Republicans - although, as often, the RNC convention isn't paying attention. The sad irony of our culture, is that the educated people close to Trump are forced to work around their own base.)

Muhammad Hamidullah considered harmful

I first ran across Muhammad Hamidullah when he "edited" a "Sahifah" of Abu-Hurayra sayings, claimed from the first century AH. This was the only work of Hamidullah I've read directly; I would do that in October 2005. I wasn't impressed at the time. The work's subject turned out to be an excerpt which some mediaeval Muslim had compiled from 'Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf. In other words, it is no independent source; of interest only to editors of 'Abd al-Razzaq, worthy as that calling is.

Around that time I caught wind of "The Jewish Background of the Battles of Jamal and Şiffin", Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 36 (1982), 235-51. I never did read this one; but David Cook in Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Darwin, 2002), 41 deemed that a full-blown conspiracy fantasy. And in 2013, looking around for reference to the Almoravid age of exploration, Colavito evaluated his piece in the Journal of the Muslim Students’ Association (1968). The MSA were peddling false texts at me as late as the 1990s. For Hamidullah, any port in a storm would do.

Three strikes, he's out. Do not cite Hamidullah. Do not trust Beware anyone citing Hamidullah. Hamidullah is a kâdhib so is to be matruk.

EXCEPTION 11/16: Ugi Suharto argues for the Sahifa, doing better at it than did Hamidullah himself. Still: a plus for him.

The Mugharrarun

Hamidullah translates Idrisi:

The Commander of the Muslims Ali ibn Yusuf ibn Tashfin sent his admiral Ahmad ibn Umar, better known under the name of Raqsh al-Auzz to attack a certain island in the Atlantic, but he died before doing that. [...] Beyond this ocean of fogs it is not known what exists there. Nobody has the sure knowledge of it, because it is very difficult to traverse it. Its atmosphere is foggy, its waves are very strong, its dangers are perilous, its beasts are terrible, and its winds are full of tempests. There are many islands, some of which are inhabited, others are submerged. No navigator traverses them but bypasses them remaining near their coast. [...]

I find nothing controversial here - so far. This description of an inhospitable [Atlantic] "Ocean" is not so different from what Mas'udi had summarised of his Zaman in the Prairies d'Or. That we have the name of an explorer is unusual. Although, we must temper our enthusiasm by noting this man was more of a Von Ulm than a Colombo.

Later on, I found the Arabic on Islamport. Here's Hamidullah:

And it was from the town of Lishbûna [=Lisbon] that the adventurers set out known under the name of Mugharrarun [H. "Mughamarin", Adventurers], penetrated the ocean of fogs and wanted to know what it contained and where it ended.

Still fair enough, best I can tell. "Buccaneers" might do for an alternate translation. It's a similar setup to the Khashkhash story but probably different. And we know the whole western coast of Iberia was AND IS more Moorish even than al-Andalus itself. What Hamidullah doesn't tell us, is that here the explorers... don't get past the main obstacle. Here is the Google-assisted translation:

And they have in the city of Lisbon near the hot baths [=the Alfama], a path attributed to them as the Road Of The Mugharrarun, running to the edge of town. Once upon a time here gathered eight men, all first-cousins. They built a galleon and filled it with water and provisions fit to suffice them for months. Then they entered the sea at the beginning of the eastern wind, so they sailed about eleven days. They arrived at a sea of thick waves, stinking darkness, much haze and little light. They ascertained danger, so they trimmed their sails in the other direction and ran with the sea southward.
So they went out to the island of sheep. There the sheep could not be counted; and they were molting, with neither a shepherd nor a watcher. They traveled to the island, and they descended on it, and they found a spring of running water and a wild fig tree on it. So they took one of these sheep and slaughtered it, but they found the meat inedible. So they flayed the [sheeps'] hides and went south for twelve [more] days...

Or maybe they just sheared the survivors; I don't care, here. Anyway Hamidullah picks up afterward:

After sailing for twelve more days they perceived an island that seemed to be inhabited, and there were cultivated fields. They sailed that way to see what it contained. But soon barques encircled them and made them prisoners, and transported them to a miserable hamlet situated on the coast. There they landed. The navigators saw there people with red skin; there was not much hair on their body, the hair of their head was straight, and they were of high stature. Their women were of an extraordinary beauty.

"Red", to an Arab historian, means redneck. It means "white". Everyone who's read Sulayman Bashear knows that.

To sum up, Hamidullah wanted you to think that they'd met the Red Skins. But the intermediating text is clearly talking about islands of sheep; there were no sheep in the Caribbean. Hamidullah also stops before the eight men meet people speaking intelligible "Berber" and, also, Arabic. These islands are the Canaries - and Hamidullah knew it. Before they got to the Îles des Rednecques, we might suspect the men reached the Azores and/or Madeira: assuming some earlier explorer had dropped sheep off there, as Western explorers later did with goats and/or pigs, and as Polynesians did with chickens. Idrisi didn't imply anything else.

Before that, inasmuch as this ship ran into polluted water, that could well be the Sargasso. That is an achievement in itself. But Hamidullah deliberately withheld that information. Because he's a kâdhib.

Viking mice

There aren't ruins or remains prior to the late-mediaeval Portuguese in the Azores or in Madeira. There are, however, mice. S. I. Gabriel, M. L. Mathias and J. B. Searle wrote about them in 2014.

The study marks the Madeira mice as Danes. Terceira in the Azores hosts Norwegian mice, "Clade F". Santa Maria also has Clade F mice but these're not (yet) assigned to Norway specifically. Clade F also inhabits the Gaeltacht and Iceland, which the Vikings also colonised - famously Dublin.

Danes and Flemings did assist the Portuguese and Spaniards in the Age Of Discovery, as "Dulmo" - Von Ulm - illustrated in 1487. However, it is not clear to these three authors how their mice should have so dominated Portuguese mice in the islands mentioned, as Portuguese mice dominate other Azores (which could well be Lishbûnati mice, whichever). It is even less clear to the authors how Scandinavian mice could have sailed over there without human help.

We do know of Viking raids into the Islamic side of Iberia. Most famed was that against Išbīliya (Seville) AD 844. The raiders had to row up the Guadalquivir for that. The Irish remembered that Dublin (a Viking city then) sent a raid still further 860ish, against Morocco. The Muslims didn't record whence the ships came but they did know they were "Majus" - "fire worshippers" - who hit Nekor.

More likely to the researchers (and to me) is that various crews of Viking disembarked at the islands mentioned, and not at the other Azores. From there they chose not to sing the sagas of the great rodent colonies they'd successfully installed, for whatever reason. Unless that's what the Irish overheard in Dublin...

Cessna, again

H/t MisHum (if you ignore the anti distancing pander/snark): the remote control aeroplane. Add to the battery and we are getting somewhere.

Here on Erf, this has just made redundant every would-be hijacker of a commercial flight. Sorry Zawahiri! Unless they are in league with a hacker on the ground... but, that will take more work.

Over Venus, I believe that communication is why we install our depots at L1 (especially) and L2. Energy beamers I'd considered, but abandoned.

"Coming soon I guess"

Davidski has related a teaser for some genetics out of old Thrace. Has to do with Ezero, 3300-2700 BC. The genetics are coming... RSN, as Slashdotters used to say.

Modern Bulgarians don't have much left of this genome, but they do retain 5-10% (they say). As to the rest, early Bronze Age Thrace men were R1a-Z93. The Fatyanovo line of Aryan.

The implication was with the Hittites, ancient Anatolia and the Trojans. Taken linguistically, I am not buying it for the Anatolian languages. Most linguists believe that what would become Anatolian and Indo-European broke apart before 3300 BC, maybe long before. The Trojans on the other hand, I might believe were protoPhrygian / protoArmenian. Which would align them with Ezero.

The commenters express frustration at the confused summary of these findings, and Davidski himself finds hard to accept that these results shall be published formally not until 2021. So, be careful citing any of this.

Iberia and the vast western ocean

Armando Cortesão credits a 1424 map of the Atlantic, as being a map of the Americas. As usual I popped off a comment and am doing the research later.

Best I can garner, the Catholic states in mediaeval Atlantic Iberia ("Spain" did not exist) including, but not exclusively, the Portugal rump frequently bumped into Atlantic islands. Before the Catholics, the Almoravid court to their south (which still owned Lisbon, until Afonso I 1147) sent thither one Ahmad Ibn 'Umar, "Raqsh al-Auzz". Of these lands the Canaries were known to the Romans but lost to the West over the Dark Ages. Other islands flitted in and out of legend; Islamic Lisbon for her part (probably after Raqsh) had (re?)discovered the "Sargasso Sea". The "Seven Cities" was a consistent myth in these days - that there existed a western civilisation, southwest of the Sargasso. And that is where the Cities remained: in fantasyland.

Prince Henry is the man whom the Portuguese credit with bringing some order to these legends, nailing down the exact positions of the Azores and Madeira. The Flores island, slightly further west, slightly later. But as noted the sailors had long suspected that such lands were out there, before Henry; and they insisted that not all the lands were accounted for, after Henry.

Over the AD 1470s festered that dispute over the Castilian Succession, breaking out into open war 1475. At stake here was whether there was even going to be a "Portugal" or a "Spain", and what their shape should be. The war ended with a coastal Portugal facing west; and a Spain facing north, southwest, Mediterranean, and European. Portugal also ended up with Madeira and the Azores, giving them a head start at the Volta do Mar.

That the Portuguese remained adamant that, yes, the Seven Cities / Antilles were still out there, hints (to me) that some west-Iberian sailor(s) had found some Neolithic establishment on the South American coast. Perhaps on the Orinoco. Likely not Amazon though. One does wonder about the Postclassic Maya...

The more-publicised Portuguese trips west of the Azores didn't go all that great. The Dulmo[=Ferdinand d'Ulm]-Estreito 1487 expedition was infamous here. The West Africa navigations were going better so, that's what Portugal's royals concentrated on. The Portugal 1487 failure is telling me that Portugal 1492 had lost confidence in her own maps. (AFTERTHOUGHT 8/25: did nautical guilds keep maps which they withheld from the King...?)

This is a long way toward saying that although we can allow for (very!) sporadic Iberian hits on the Venezuela / Brasil coast... I should not call them Portuguese. Portugal qua Portugal is a fifteenth-century construction that failed to follow up on the old Iberian probes and failed to extend Henry's discoveries. Until after 1492.

Mao's famine

Godfree Roberts has redirected Unz readers to that earlier Cultural Revolution. His take turns out to be a part of Roberts' "China 2020" series, here on Mao apologetic. This apologia starts at the "Great Leap Forward" so-called. Here's a take.

Mao's career in the 1960s, after Stalin's death, has some parallels to Stalin's 1930s. First, the Party presides over a famine in the provinces; some years later, the Party's leader purges the Party. Roberts, back in 2017 and now, argues that Mao dindu-nuffin except good. I propose to use the evidence Roberts gathers for the late 1960s to evaluate how Mao was doing earlier.

Here is the state of China later:

By 1966, the Communist Party had been in power for sixteen years but, behind its successes lurked a guilty secret: eighty percent of rural Chinese remained semi-destitute, illiterate, without access to basic needs, education or medical care. The Revolution had changed little beyond ownership of their tiny plots, which remained subject to the vicissitudes of weather and fortune.

Rural China was, of course, where the famine hit earlier. This quote shines light on what the countryside was like 1959. Roberts himself admits The newly-landed peasants gave the plan a mixed reception: a third of villages radically socialized their lives (some, like Huaxi Village, still do so) a third simply went along with it and a third dragged their feet or rejected it outright.

Roberts credits Mao pre-Famine with a vast increase in population and life-expectancy over the 1950s. I would see, mainly, the dissemination of Western and Soviet science through the Chinese literate class - which Mao had, now, united. This new lore made farms more efficient - some of them. Roberts doesn't break down which third of the farmers worked better: the Maoist third, the lip-service third or the reactionary running dog third.

Because among the foreign theorists whose work Mao had accepted were, as noted, Soviets: and among them, was Trofim Lysenko. Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts reports Mao's mandate of Close Planting. It didn't work. Roberts tells us nothing of Close Planting.

Either way "efficiency" is good for the people at large; but not good for the small-scale farm: his crop is now cheaper. More food was available to the rural worker... but, after a few years, he could no longer afford it. Redundant farmers flooded to seek different work and, in days before telecommuting, that meant they had to throng to the centres of food-distribution. To the cities. The non-redundant farmers were, of course, the farmers who did NOT listen to Mao.

This time of upheaval was not fault-tolerant and Nature conspired to deliver to Mao his first test, in a drought. Mao had set himself up for this over the 1950s, as the man in charge.

Becker further lets us in on how official photography was faked in the 1960 countryside. Roberts makes hay instead over a misfiled (1946) photograph in Frank Dikotter(sic)'s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe. This, apparently, was excused by that none could find a good photograph of the famine. But so what? Roberts himself agrees there was a famine; Roberts blames the US in part for embargoing grain. Whether there exists a good photograph is immaterial to the statement, "China suffered a famine under Mao". This faux-pas might discredit Dikötter and it certainly discredits his publisher. But Dikötter is not our only source. Already mentioned is Becker; Roberts lets others swipe at Becker for him. Not that those others do much better - but at least they admit the Great Leap Forward's failure. I don't suppose anybody's even looked at Tombstone.

Roberts is doing, in short, bafflegab. He beats around the fact of a famine, he blames others, he snipes at researchers' integrity when they report on impolitic facts, he doesn't address other research. Above all he doesn't even tell us where a relevant ideology might be to blame for the failure of crops.

Well... that's Unz for you.

That China had any food at all in the early 1960s is certainly because of that lucky third who ignored Mao's diktat, and farmed according to tradition and/or to Western (not Soviet) standards. These farmers posed an embarrassment to Mao's honour which, I suspect, the Cultural Revolution avenged.

North Sea adventures

I got sidetracked into SF author Fred Pohl's theory of a fourteenth-century expedition to the New World. I hadn't heard this shocking theory before. On further investigation, this theory has indeed since been deemed tripe, by anyone luckless enough to run across it again. You gotta take care when reading Pohl. However.

The theory comes from the Zeno family in AD sixteenth-century Italy. The Zenos had lifted tall-tales of the North Sea, two centuries and more prior. There exist some fine resources on mediaeval North Sea exploration and piracy. During the Hundred Year War especially, what the Caribbean would become in the sixteenth century, so was the North-Baltic sea complex in the fourteenth.

Phillippe Dollinger in 1970 singled out the Vitalienbrüder, that these bros had explored up to the Caspian Mountains and there met savage tribes. Although, pace some people - that points rather to river explorations in Mongol Russia. East, not west. Somewhat like Rurik out of Kiev. More like how his forefathers got to Kiev in the first place.

To sum up: along the Tuchmanist line that the fourteenth century represented Europe's totter toward a Later Antiquity and a Dark Age, happily re-righted; these North Sea shenanigans represent a revival of the Viking age. If any went astray and landed in Newfie, I'd not be shocked. But it seems that none of them came back to tell of it. There was plenty of fun and loot to be had raiding Picardy.

As for Hy-Brasil: at a guess, these were Bristol fish stories, cod specifically. Maps were not good before the Galilean telescope. After that first hundred mile offshore, the 1325 AD navigator was making stuff up. I do agree that John Jay in the late fifteenth century had set anchor furthest west since the Eriksons. I don't think he found the Porcupine Bank although I won't rule out that this Bank once had outcrops enough to annoy Iron Age fishermen.

BOF00041

BOF00041 is a long-dead bog oak (Quercus) in Bodegraven at the Netherlands. It was one of four dug up there, and of the two dated: of its 186 rings, one spans the Thera eruption. Margot Kuitems, Johannes van der Plicht, and Esther Jansma use it to evaluate the new IntCal20. doi 10.1017/RDC.2020.23.

Apparently Dutch swamp oaks correspond to trees all over the Low Germany.

Anyway what the two Dutchwomen and one Dutchman conclude from BOF00041 is that it does confirm to raise the IntCal13 Thera-era chronology... but not by much, in the Netherland anyway. The implication is that 1600 BC is a good approximation for the climate downturn (and revival).

Johannes van der Plicht and others have (open access) recent developments in calibration. IntCal13 was 1619–08 BC (68.2% confidence) stretched 1625–04 calBC (95.4% confidence). IntCal20 pushes the range ahead in time... but reduces assurance: 1612–1592 BC, wider 1617–1578. As often they were wrong in 2013 but more confident in their (wrong) result.

IntCal is here!

Here is the latest international radiocarbon calibration: IntCal20. It was going to be "IntCal19" but, clearly, it got delayed too far. I've been awaiting this for at least a year.

We learn here that these are northern nations. The Global South uses SHCal; the oceans, MarineCal. The various articles are in 12 August Radiocarbon - back to 53 kBC. Reimer's is the main one - open access no less!

Tree-rings take us to 11900 BC, in the Bølling/Allerød = Heinrich Stadial 1 before the Younger Dryas (10900) and contemporary Clovis. IntCal20 would move Laacher See 11000s BC: prior to the YD. Before that they use speleothems: cave-formations, like stalactites.

The changes to the IntCal13 dataset involve Amstel Castle, which couldn't be salvaged so is herewith deleted; and a Kodiak tree "correction", which turned out not to be an outlier so is rehabilitated. Some Irish Oak is now demoted to a "comparison", ancillary role; other Irish Oak was accidentally omitted from '13 so, now, introduced. IntCal20 also take into account the recently-found C-14 spikes.

Oh, and Thera's here! Or "Most-Beautiful", for Canaanites; "Round", in the Hellenic legendarium. That's in other articles in this issue.

I get the general impression that from the Bronze Age on back, this calibration is More Accurate, Less Precise. Perhaps why I had to be informed by commenter rando Dearieme and not by, say, Saraceni.

Uber

The free-commerce side of the Internet has been mourning over the end of Uber (and Lyft) in California. Vox Day has offered an alternate take.

I do not use the word "Capitalism" here. As best I can track the term Karl Marx invented it as an insult. Later, social-Darwinists took it on as a troll. To the extent "Capitalism" bears meaning, it is evil - as a whole. If I break it down into constituent parts, some parts are good and some parts... aren't. The good parts include privately-owned capital and the shift of ethics to the human person. The bad parts include maturity transformation (="paper money", "fractional reserve banking"; cf. Moldbug), indefinitely-prolonged compound interest (cf. Hudson), and free trade across national borders. Perhaps "Capitalism" can be saved if restricted to the good parts.

Which is not to leave the Socialists off the hook. The truer term for Socialism is: Sovereign Slavery. And that brings us back to California, with its "exit tax". A long, yuuge wall is on its way up along the Sierras and Mojave. But anyway.

Vox Day differs from free-commerce idealists/-ologues in recognising that (1) men are not born equal and (2) that does not always make the men on-the-outs deplorable. Ayn Rand accepted inequality but despised the non-Alphas, as only a woman can. Vox Day recognises that different sorts of men are tools for the task. Not all men should be Alphas; there are tasks which Alphas suck at, like taking time to do a specific task. More people are natural Betas: they can break down Alpha commands and delegate the actual work to others. More still are "Deltas", who like to do the job. So let them do the job, and reward them for a job well done.

This leaves "Gammas" and Omegas, who could join the hierarchy - but subvert it (Gamma) or abandon it (Omega). These and only these are worthy of contempt. But inasumuch as they represent character-flaws those so afflicted may learn to overcome their programming.

The heart of a labour movement is in Delta Rights. (Tragically it has been Gammas who too-often lead them.) Alphas if they are successful find themselves insulated from Delta life down-pit in the mines; Betas adhere to the Alphas and flatter them in this. "If the Deltas don't like it they can leave", say they. Well maybe. But the mine worker trained only for mining will leave for - what exactly: another mine? Burger King? Yang's UBI? Social-Security disability is always popular. So's heroin.

Vox Day directs would-be pro-Uber commenters to the Abadilla dockets, first. Absolutely fair: the burden of proof is always on those who reject the court's opinion. Who knows - as with Roe v Wade the judge could be wrong. But first you must prove it. Until then the judges' opinion stands, in this case that Uber exploits low-prospect workers in contradiction to California law.

As for what the future holds: the law may one day change in California, but I'd not wait long for that. Californians may instead develop robots to do most of the ferrywork. Historically, when workers cannot be enslaved anymore, mechanisation has replaced them. In the meantime Uber may be replaced with a more worker-friendly business-model. Like the taxi, which we'd survived using for decades before Uber became a thing.

RAEPSHARE 9/3/21: Saurabh Sharma speaketh. These companies are not your buddies. Seems like a good plan overall, to register drivers with their points of call, Austin in his case.

On to Europe

Last year I looked at millet in central Asia - "Inner Asia Mountain Corridor", specifically. Millet was, those Kiel researchers thought, animal fodder and maybe bait for birds.

Kiel is now looking further west and later. From the 2700 BC Kazakh steppe, to the 1500 BC Pannonian. Here they don't see it left for the animals; its Bronze-Age humans would eat it too.

Bronze-Age Millet wasn't brought by Yamnaya. The Yamnaya had made Europe Indo-, millennia before. Greece was already Greek and almost Linear-B by then; Italy was certainly Italic. And I don't think either peninsula needed millet at that latitude. Some other factor drove the Europeans (across the Alps and Balkans) to this crop.

Was it Thera?

HELVETIA 2/3/21: The transalpine Gauls had it 1300-800 BC. It was wheat before that. The article suggests the switch to millet wasn't voluntary; they had a larger population in LBA but suffered a drought.

Green salty propellant

Nicolas Rasmont, Emil J. Broemmelsiek, and Joshua L. Rovey at Illinois propose a "salt-based" propellant, under megapascal-range pressure (Earth pressure is 100 kPa, so five times that or more). FAM-110A so-called: a green double-salt ionic liquid consisting of 41% wt. 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate and 59% wt. hydroxylammonium nitrate. "Imidazole" means carbon / nitrogen, which I didn't know; "ethyl" and "methyl" are, as we all should know, carbon and hydrogen. These "salts", then, are wholly non-metallic. DOI 10.1016/j.combustflame.2020.04.014.

COLOUR INTO SPACE 5/3/22: "Green" is a figure of speech. Hydroxylammonium nitrate, or AF-M315E, has salmon hue. NASA was already testing this as of the time of poasting, although maybe not with this 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate.

They are looking to smaller satellites; also, as a replacement for hydrazine which, you'll remember from Europa Report, is poison. The pressurising agent is nitrogen gas but assuredly they can use helium where that's more economic, like on the Moon. I am unsure if the nitrogen is mixed with the two reagents - I expect, not, as it would dilute the mix. And they are looking to deep space, raising the specific-impulse... I don't think they are rocketing stuff out a major planet's well, like Branson promises.

For Venus, that's moot. The ambient pressure gets into the 500 kPa range at, what, 35 km altitude and below. At 3 mPA = 30 bar, where the burn rate is reliable (0.142 ± 0.029 m/s): 17 km on down. Said atmosphere, CO₂ and N₂, is additionally inert. No need for added gas down here! And besides the hydrogen, all the other elements are readily available in the air and haze. Rasmont's crew does warn against water intake from the atmosphere, but on Venus - LOL.

A more serious question here would be, at what temperature do these (pressurised) reagents spontaneously combine in the heat - or, if separate, decompose and/or turn to gas. I'd fill the fuel-tanks in a chilled pressurised environment; the tanks themselves would be insulative. Except where they're ignited. Which is done when I open the bay doors to the outside.

Considering Venus' insane drag, I don't see this being blasted from the surface. To get from surface to cloud, Venereans use balloons and/or tethered kites. I wonder instead about jet turbines.

The 1531 Project

Whilst I'm catching up on my reading, I am now finishing up Tom Holland's Dominion. Holland takes the dyothelete, Carolingian, Catholic approach in its first movements; moving to a Protestant direction when that kicks in AD ~1500. Dominion has bearing on the postHuntingdon debates on American (and Western) identity.

Here is V-DARE looking, from the outside, on Ahmari. (And on David French, but forget that guy.) Ahmari argues for a Hispano-Catholic founding of the Americas. It would be impolite to call Ahmari a Columbianist; he would look to de las Casas, to the missionary Church, and to Charles V Habsburg. Ahmari's axial year is AD 1531, when Our Lady appeared before Juan Diego.

V-DARE is, itself, named after the 1587 plantation, specifically the Dare family's natal-tourism. Virginia herself likely grew up to marry an indigene, presumably a Croatoan neighbour. V-DARE tends not to dwell upon that sequel.

Holland argues that the (US-)American project, following on the English-dissenter New England roots, is integral to Western Europe's long reckoning with Rhineland Catholicism, going back to the late 700s AD. And Counter-Reformed Catholicism survived outside the Germanic nations - actually, even inside them. Between these lines there was always permeability: critics of slavery and of Indian relocations were fully able to learn Spanish and to translate de las Casas.

This permeability, likewise, made it easy for Catholics in the Atlantic seaboard - starting with Maryland (before there was Mason/Dixon, there was the Chesapeake) - to argue for their equality (at least) with other Americans. What were "American" arguments, but the same Catholic arguments of Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa?

UPDATE 8/25: V-DARE's antecedent. Anti-Papist paranoia has deep roots in American WASPy communitarianism.

The 1587 Project

Case closed: Roanoke.

Sir Walter Raleigh visited the "Virginia", so named after his lady Elizabeth, 1584 (Chesapeake) and 1585 (Roanoke, where he planted a colony). In 1587, he ordered another "plantation" as Anglos then termed it, back to Chesapeake, in the care of John White and with a spare ship lest they need to send word back home. White's ships instead, by the perfidy of their (Portuguese) navigator Fernandez, ended up at Roanoke. Where they found the ruin of the 1585 expedition.

In the process these men, er, freed the slaves. Those slaves would be the Croatoans, then oppressed by the Secotans. That plantation didn't do well otherwise - partly due to White's oafish mismanagement of Indian affairs - so it sent White back to England for help.

The Big Mystery was that when John White finally returned for that fourth visit, 1590, the village had a few changes to it. It now had a palisade... and was deserted. (The Spaniards had, perhaps, recorded its ruin already by 1588.) Here instead were a few notes to posterity: "CROATOAN" and "CRO". White figured this meant he should go looking for those Croatoans but one of those Atlantic hurricanes loomed, and his crew did an Alexander-At-India on him. Basically: "we're going home, with you as captain or without you".

That war with Spain was picking up over the 1590s, which the Spanish won, so there weren't more trips out to Virginia until those fumblings around Jamestown 1609 (which also near-ended with white-marooning). Once the English (finally) had put down real roots there, John Lawson got back down south to the Roanoke / Croatoan area - by then, earmarked for the "Carolina" colonies. On Hatteras Island, at some remote distance from the shoreline, he found blue-eyed Indians with an oral tradition adamant that they were English.

So the circumstantial evidence was always strong that the Roanoke plantation went-injun. There just wasn't the physical archaeology for it. Now, there is. I should still like to see the genetics however.

As to why the Croatoans welcomed these settlers: the English, I think, had made a point of befriending that particular tribe, against its enemies; and of sticking to their friendship. They also brought long-term helpful supplies: pigs, and expertise in handling them. They didn't bring disease - because earlier expeditions had done that for them (d'oh!). They didn't insist the locals drink milk with them (unlike the Norse). The colonists didn't behave like El Dorado plunderers as did the Jamestown authorities and, to be honest, as had earlier English expeditions. They didn't practice slavery. As proto-Cavaliers they weren't insistent on their religion except in being religiously English. [UPDATE 10/6: Raleigh himself was an Epicure.] And they brought women - unlike the Spaniards in Hispaniola, the Anglos weren't here to rape some folk.

From the Croatoan / Hatteran perspective: there weren't all that many immigrants, there weren't more coming anytime soon, these particular immigrants were a decent lot, they spoke the Atlantic trade-language, and they could be sequestered on some island offshore. Hey, why not. Plus blue eyes are kewt.

Lawson doesn't tell us if the following Hatteras metis generations bothered to keep up the English tongue - my guess is, they probably did, but by 1700 all the other Indians had learnt it too, so Lawson didn't see fit to note it. Either way Hatteras didn't think to adapt either tongue to an alphabet. They didn't (anymore) own a forge or a smelting furnace; perhaps, because they lacked the ores to smelt.

Power Hungry revisited

In 2011 I bought Robert Bryce, Power Hungry. I didn't finish it. A couple nights ago I noticed news about a power shortage in America's sunniest state. So I watched... what I'll call "Gibbs Moore", in the spirit of Blood And Gore. I figured Sunday a good day to see how Bryce has held up.

Bryce's book is a series of rants capped by a sustained argument on behalf of energy-density, which (in inverse) is also called alpha. Bryce hates biomass fuel, and believes that wind is a boondoggle. We are all agreed that coal is a menace [UPDATE 10/26/21: maybe less so in future]. The Third World should be using more natural gas and oil. Ultimately we as humans all should be looking to nuclear fission. Paving the way here, as of 2010 in Bryce's eyes, were Iran and France, who have that gas-to-nuclear (technical) pipeline.

After spending the last year looking at, exactly, solar and wind and nuclear as pertinent to our sister planet, Venus: I have some thoughts.

Wind is, indeed, a boondoggle, on Earth. It always will be, on Earth. And "biomass" means burning forests which, as Gibbs Moore point out, is the antithesis of Green. Biomass is Green-consumptive energy. (BTW to Hell with Van Jones, who started out a 9/11 troofer and hasn't got any better since.) And Bryce holds up on greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar, likewise, cannot work at Earth surface altitudes - here is where Gibbs Moore steps in. The reason for that: solar works in a cloudless sky. That's probably desert, and deserts get sandy. The wind blows the sand right over your panel. Deserts also feature temperature extremes which - given rigid silicon - crack those panels, besides. Bryce was too optimistic about solar in 2010; he approved exactly the CA boondoggle which Gibbs Moore mocks, and which is now failing to help CA today.

Bryce also fell down on batteries - here, too cynical. Bryce was (and still is) in his rights to scoff at the electric-car promises of the past. But these are the days we have batteries pushing aeroplanes in flight. Bryce was in his rights to complain about battery material cost: lithium, here. But we might not even need lithium in the near future (Venus might but Earth won't). We might be on sodium or aluminium.

As Bryce looks approvingly at fission power, he casts a glance at the "thorium" reactor. He doesn't glance very hard at it. This, in truth, is a Uranium 233 reactor. U-233 can still be used to set us up the bomb. But that perhaps is a nitpick. UPDATE 7/26/21: Here's China's way out of having to breed and ship Uranium: the molten salt process.

A decade later I can still recommend Bryce's book, in parts. Likewise I recommend Planet of the Humans, in parts. I suggest: watch the movie first. Then read Parts I, III, and IV of Bryce, skipping most of II. To paraphrase the caliph 'Umar (ra): what in Part II agrees with PotH is redundant; what in Part II disagrees with PotH (and with me) is wrong. Electric capacity beyond petrol is coming.

In the meantime, if some "Green!" outfit is recommending biomass (or wind, or even solar) in any shape, reject it. If it is recommending fuel efficiency or (especially) nuclear, accept it. Coal or oil or natural-gas... just make sure they're limiting what true pollutants they are putting out there.

COMMENT 8/18: Coal drop. Started at about the same time Bryce published that book.

Charging stations

'Toccurs to me, when I was looking at charging-stations in L1 or in orbit, that said tech could be used just as well by balloons floating 70 km over the Venerean surface. In particular over the equator where I be flyin' the Forever Flotilla. Given the low pressures at the altitude: quite literally, the horizon is the limit.

The balloons soak up solar and charge just enough battery to keep the beacons on, during the long darkside night. Otherwise in daylight they beam over the power to the aerofoils - supplementing how the aerofoils charge their own, stronger batteries.

These satellites they are proposing for Earth are designed for low-alpha, high-efficiency, and low overall weight. Exactly what we can use for balloons - not necessarily polar.

We might even get Republicans on board with this. The free market can absolutely work in the great sky over Venus, to compete over the best balloons to beam the best energy.

Bill Gates' preferred vaccine

The Washington Post has a sitrep on the Corona vaccines. It explains the four types in the three-phase pipeline before approval.

The inactive virus is the best-known, it being a direct descendant of the smallpox inoculations of the eighteenth century. For whatever reason this field has been ceded to China. There's also "subunit" - that is, segments of viral protein. These vaccines are all phase-one except for, again, a Chinese effort.

Viral-vectored looks fun: they take a harmless virus, give it select outward-facing features of the virus we care about, and send that Brontosaurus into our immune-system. Phase Threes are in China YET AGAIN but also in Oxford.

Where Bill steps in is in his role in CureVac. CureVac by name're not actually in the WaPo article. But their field - nucleic-acid research - is represented: this is the famed Moderna third-phase, also Pfizer. Nucleic acids are, of course, DNA and RNA. Bill is involved in other vaccination projects as well, most notably for polio in India, until the Indian government decided it was time to kick out the training-wheels and go it alone. (And no, Bill's Foundation was not kicked out - the cow people love the man.)

The reason for the distrust (well, one reason, beyond classic Right paranoia) is that we, er, haven't any such vaccine yet. By that I mean: we have no *NA vaccines against any disease. CureVac were on a rabies RNA-vaccine before 2020 started: Phase One, at that. Which, if it ever did work, was going to veterinarians and not to your PCP.

So the RNA vaccine on humans isn't just untested technology, it is untested biology. Until Moderna and Pfizer this very summer, that is.

I suggest this vaccine be nonmandatory as yet. Fortunately others exist. If the Chinese (mostly) choose to let us in on their full process...

On a side note. If you object to the available vaccines to disease X, and if you don't want lockdowns: your activism needs to be placed in masking, social-distancing, and moving activities out of doors. Also, in frequent (=cheap) tests. Otherwise you are literally a vector of the disease, yourself; like a mosquito for malaria. If you consider this dehumanising rhetoric, then put some thought into being pro-human.

Eemian

The Hadley Centre has a model for the Eemian which they call the LIG. DOI 10.1038/s41558-020-0865-2.

They are looking at spring and June-July in our Arctic. Apparently pools of water can form inside the ice. These pools - by Rayleigh - lower the glacial albedo and drive up the warming. Until all the ice melts.

This model predicts permanent(ish) North Atlantic Passage by 2035 - admittedly, exactly the answer that "Green New Dealers" want, which new deal proposes to deliver more moneys to the Hadley Centre. So, take all that as you will. Still: as applied to explaining the Eemian, it has more predictive power than the silly and tendentious Hockey Stick models those Epstein clients stuck to us over that second Bush Administration.

Time was when I used to care that scientody was so abused, for the Left; but these times are more of the times when the Right rejects the whole method and views "Science" as some sort of Satanic farce. These are the times when we're being asked to choose abusers. Of these, the soi-disant scientists are at least showing their work. So I am more inclined to them.

East Persia

Inspired by Brown Pundits I am currently reading Richard Eaton's India in the Persianate Age. This is a history of the Indies 1000-1765, which we call "India" and which Hindu nationalists call "Bharat". I use the plural because the peninsula and the valleys north of it comprise a diverse place, more so in the Middle Ages. (I don't know if Razib has read this one yet but he does approve Eaton 1993 on Bengal... where he's from.)

Eaton doesn't like that we call this era "mediaeval". He also doesn't like that we call it "Islamic" nor even "Islamicate". I think he's a bit touchy on the former. But then, I'm of a sort that rather prefers mediaeval civilisation. Many Britons still live in a Protestant tradition, which tradition I have rejected.

Eaton is, I concede, in his rights to concentrate on a definition which makes the most sense of the time and place. As the title promises, he is here to explain "Islamic" rule in India as more Persian than anything else. Specifically: post-Samanid.

Over on our side of the Indus and Khyber, the ninth-century Samanids had revived the Middle Persian tradition, but in Arabic script and in Islamic(ate) culture. The book gets around to the Samanids in the conclusion to its first chapter, focusing on Bal'ami's adaptation of Ibn Jarir Tabari (already Iran-centric) and on Firdawsi's Shahnameh. Eaton could have added the Letter of Tansar but, perhaps, this had to be introduced to India later, through that later Tabarite Ibn Isfandiyar.

Eaton's book is a corrective to "Islamophobic" discourse in and around India. At the same time Eaton is not a smarmy apologist like Covey or Moller. As working in the postSamanid era, his book doesn't have to address the disaster of Umawi and early-'Abbasi rule up to 180 / 800. The Samanids had two centuries of Islam behind them to piece civilisation back together. Similar patterns would hold eastward.

In Samanid discourse, the caliph commands Muslim spiritual life and standardises the law. Command and law-enforcement are the domain of the sultan. The caliph - Eaton doesn't say, but I will - retains the role of the Nestorian catholicos.

To the extent Islam inflicted deleterious effect in India, it was in flattering bandit kings like the Ghaznavids: that when they plundered peaceful foreigners, the alien deserved it for his "infidelity". The Ghaznavids didn't at first try to rule India; they were using the land to fund their adventure against western lands, then occupied by the Seljuq Turks. (Timur Khan would do likewise.) The Ghaznavids lost and fled into India - there, basically going native and doing nothing to advance Islam there. The Ghurids in Central Asia, more successful there at first, eventually suffered the same fate and followed the Ghaznavids to India too.

One truly Islamic tradition which these dynasts brought was the Mamlûkate - the slave-soldiery, set to become sultans in their own right. One such (Turkish) slave was Iltutmish, whom Eaton credits with bringing Islam to the transIndian lands - at any rate, what the Samanids had labeled as "Islam". His reign and his successors coincided with the Choresmian and then Mongol invasions of south central Asia from the north. So waves of Iranians, Turks, and other mostly-Muslim refugees, often with a long literate tradition, flooded into the sultanate throughout the seventh / thirteenth century.

Because these Muslim migrants were intelligent and competent, and often under sultanate protection as property, thirteenth century Islamicate rule turned out well for their "free" Hindi subjects... for the most part, and at first. These Muslims quit playing the eldorado game in India, now keeping the silver in-house. Islam taught the rulers to rule, and to be in no hurry to proselytise. Thus they settled on their own language, which was Persian, leaving Sanskrit and the local prakrits to the Hindus.

Worst off in this regime were the Buddhists, who had already lost the support of the people and were now - as landlords and (functional) atheists - a fat target for revenue-hungry Muslims. I suspect similar for what few Nestorians had reached this far: I mean, if the sultan already had a faraway papacy in the Baghdad caliph; what point in another, Christian one?

Also the Muslims could not avoid that good shahs and rajas were bad Muslims. Any given sultan's Muslim advisors are recorded as complaining bitterly that (per Barani) the sultan had allowed so many pagans (=Hindus) to become wealthy and powerful whilst coreligionists were left a-begging at the gates. Thus the Unprincipled Exception, that hypocrisy which alloweth diverse peoples to coexist. Some sultans, indeed, made effort to rule Islamically. `Alâ'd-dîn Khalaji was a case in point: banning alcohol and private charities, and jacking up the land-tax. His régime didn't long survive the man. But others' would.

At the club or at the pub or -

Today Jessica Saraceni treated Archaeology readers to syphilis (and yaws)... to Charlotte Hartley's article thereabouts, that is. Itself referring to VeneraVerena Schuenemann. Who might have got it from Agnes.

The bacterium in question is the Treponema - rather, bacteria-plural. The ladies inform us that this bug has strains: some we know, some that may have caused some disease nobody remembers for its own symptoms. These fifteenth-century strains are (now) found together in the deepest Baltic - Finland/Estonia - as well as in the Habsburg Netherlands where we'd expect it. They suggest it was a Lithuanian disease - perhaps brought to Riga, Danzig, Koenigsburg, and Memel upon the German encroachments into Old Prussia.

These instances of the bacteria remind me of what they found of TB over at Lund a couple centuries later. The late 1400s was an age of exploration, of lands and of women. Old Prussia is, yes, possible. But the Portuguese were also probing Africa. Even for the Americas, Columbus' maiden voyage is just the first we know about. I don't think it be idle nationalism that the Portuguese had made some quiet explorations southwest beforehand.

Given how yaws is tropical, I don't see its origins in Lithuania. It follows that I doubt the rest of 'em here, as well. I'd narrow the Treponema origin to Kongo or Amazon. The Portuguese did the rest, either way.

Lightweight solar cells in space

... for seven minutes in space, anyway. So reports Joule in a press-release widely bandied about.

The solar cells we're used to on Earth, and for that matter in space, are silicon wafers. They are hard, rigid, and heavy. They're working pretty well in a static environment that doesn't move around much. But Every Gram Counts when getting them off the ground, or even out of LEO where the space factory's at.

In other words, instead of by efficiency (watts per watt taken from the Sun) they judge by alpha (watts per cell's weight). If we're flying (or floating) then lower alpha means more room for actual freight. For that perovskite and organic cells look better. And they're more flexible too: they don't crack as fast.

It turns out that with perovskite we mightn't even be sacrificing efficiency. Another cool feature about the cells they just launched is that they take light even from Earth's reflection. I'd been hoping to do that over Venus' .75 albedo.

The next test is in "actual" space: in orbit.

UPDATE 12/7/22: Okay it wasn't going to last in orbit. NOW the test can be in orbit.

Concentrating sunlight to Venus

You knew this was coming: how to beam sunlight, to Venus. You'd think it was the one planet in our Solar System which didn't need more radiation but, if you've been paying attention . . .

[LOGISTIC 11/23] First we have to get these stations over there. But by then we should be old hands at assembling solar power stations over Earth. Just raise modular cells from Earth or, better, from our Moon; come Hohmann time, run what we got over to Venus, and assemble them there. As modulars, the load is light enough they can be rushed over faster and/or off-Hohmann if needed.

The staticpoints over Venus' clouds which can count on steady sunlight are the poles. This might also help the "Forever Flotilla", alongside the charging-station balloons.

Either way: we park the main solar-redirecting satellite at the L1 libration-point. Best at the long halo, Lagrange over Lissajous. That's a bit far for tight-beaming but I reckon it can hit a true-orbiting satellite - several such satellites, even. (We do need somehow to ensure the Sun's streaming wind doesn't push the thing onto Venus; my plan for L2 requires a supply of propellant.)

Propose a set of polar-orbiters. Each such satellite opens a sail. We're adjusting inclination, famously the hard part of Kepler. Sails are opened around the orbital nodes, which would be the sidereal poles in this case.

Its orbit stays circular, of course; also, expect a high orbit, minimising delta-V so the width of the sail. Its orbit, thus nudged, is always orthogonal to the sun's light. Being thus always at right-angles to the sun, it can rise to the full "capture orbit" at 616000 km semimajor. This also keeps it out of the true satellites' way. It might fall victim to Hohmann space-junk but meh, just put up another one. The junk won't stay there.

The polar-solar can pass its own perma-sunlight, and that L1 beam, on to the north pole. Then, let's say an hour later, to the south; and back again. The highest flyers can pass the light or at least communications on to frigid L2. UPDATE 1/12/2021: Maybe not the light.

The Bishop's last sigh

Bishop Peder Winstrup of Lund died of tuberculosis AD 1679. He is now telling us his secrets, to Susanna Sabin et al. Monica Green has a most-impressive Twitter thread on that topic.

The mycobacteria-tuberculoses in Winstrup's lungs are in the L4 lineage. This aligns with Uganda and Cameroon. There also exist some Pannonian remains: later but also early-modern, Magyar Hungarian - not so aligned. Sabin's crew notes other crews' backtracing of tuberculosis from the Romans. So, Lund got his bug not from a European reservoir but, perhaps, from the Atlantic trade of his own day. The bug itself arose from the Neolithic and in [east-?] Africa.

(American TB came from sealions. F'ing sealions.)

I suppose the Romans had it, for their part, from the Suez port Pelusium and/or Garamantia. Maybe the Late Antique slave-trade did it.

Linothorax

LOL cloth armour amirite? Those silly Aztecs!

For analogous plant-cloth armour, on April 2013 the Aldrete family tried linen. This was the Hellenistic-era armour which Alexander wore to the Orient. Alexander discovered what Hernán Cortés found for himself: against mobile archers, metal plate just makes you a standing target. Not to mention that you have to schlep it over mountains even to get to the battlefield.

To block slow missiles, you need cloth. You dodge the worst and shrug off the rest. (Against gunshot it doesn't help of course, but then neither does plate or chain anymore.) The Aldretes didn't test this on each other; they let Scott Bartell take this one for the team, as it were. Luckily the armour worked.

Maybe Crassus should have considered that.

Beaming power from space

As the title says, the SSPIDR researchers propose beaming power from space (h/t Green @Insty).

It's not new tech, but that not-new tech required gallium: expensive, and set to be more so. The Spider Men say they can make do with alumin(i)um now. Aluminium is expensive only in energy-cost. Exactly which costs, this tech is set to lower. Of course it requires satellites too, also expensive to get up there... but a lot less so these days.

They're tight-beaming this to specific locations, even to military forward-operating-bases. This suggests low-Earth-orbit satellites, beaming to the charging station every two hours over the maybe 15 minutes it's in line-of-sight. (It's hyphens or 3LAs, style cops; choose one.)

After 15000 BC in Venice

The news today comes from Eurogenes: Villabruna but pre-IndoEuropean. This new finding is from the latest Pleistocene, first half of the 15th millennium BC. The region is Riparo Tagliente around Venice. "Epigravettian" which means, here, post- [UPDATE 5/5/22 east]. This guy's peeps had run the Gravettian peeps off the Adriatic.

The paper is Bartolini et al., "Early Alpine occupation backdates westward human migration in Late Glacial Europe". His mother was in the U4'9 clade, related to "Ursula" (but not "Katrine") of the Daughters of Eve. Father was I2 like, er, that Austrian guy.

As Davidski notes, this isn't the J type male or (other) J type female typical of the Neolithic Farmer. (Not Aryan neither but that goes wi'out sayin', dunnit.) Bartolini thinks he got here from the Balkans which then, note, was an extension of Anatolia. The seas were lower then.

R homeland

The "R" Y-chromosome featured in Mal'ta Boy, in Siberia. R1 is ancestor to Indo-Europeans... and to North Americans. Already at the beginning of our Holocene, R1a had split off in the Russias. I sometimes slip up and consider R1b, R2b. So: how about those other R's?

R2 clusters in Central Asia and Pakistan. These regions also have the miscellaneous R*, Mal'ta aside. Also during ice ages I expect populations to stick with the warmer, more-sheltered regions.

At a guess, Mal'ta was peripheral to R's Pleistocene homeland. That homeland was the greater northern Iran between the Caspian and the Aral. The domestication of the dog and [UPDATE 1/25/21: then] Solutrean technology (from the Catalan coast) allowed R1 to expand permanently into the Baltic (R1a), the Danube (R1b) and Siberia (R1-Bering). Meanwhile R2 and the rest stayed home.

The victory of Paris

Last April I got directed to Robespierre and his immediate memory in Directory France. It occurred to me that for all my reading on Catharism and French Catholicism, I had only a junior-high understanding of the Revolution. I bought Simon Schama's Citizens I think that very month and then I, er, failed to read it.

A family-member beat me to it. So I've been catching up, June and July. I am toward the end: the Committee of Public Safety has centralised the government (Schama sees Saint-Just as the Lenin of this régime), and quelled the federalist and royalist rebellions. Robespierre is still a relative moderate, a Jeffersonian Deist where the others - in their madness - are worshipping reified Classical Roman ideals.

Schama had to argue the Vendée case, which modern historians now accept. Every now and then Schama does pause his narrative to settle modern scholarly scores. I am un-fond of such excursions. I suppose in the 1980s writers didn't know better.

One facet which intrigues me here is how disorganised was the opposition. It seems not to have occurred to the Jacobins' many enemies that they stood a better chance if they united. The Vendée wasted its effort on a siege of Nantes. Nantes itself seems like it had little love for the Revolution, given how hard the Parisians purged it. But the Girondins, who became federalists contra Paris, stubbornly held that they were still republicans and secularists. Those Vendée reactionaries were Not Their Sort.

Paris suffered her own divisions. But once the anti-Jacobins had arrayed themselves against Paris, first among the royalists and then among the Girondins, Paris united behind the most cohesively pro-Paris party. That party was Jacobin.

Given all that, the counter-Revolution needed to define itself as non-Parisian. From that, it needed to unite its provinces. Given that Ludvig von Fresen was already King Louis XVII of the Vendée in spirit (and, more to the point, on their assignat currency), a federalist constitutional-monarchy on the Habsburg model seems a natural compromise. The counter-revolution also needed a man to head it - it needed a Franco. It didn't ever get one. General Dumouriez might have become one, given five more months, but short-term he was compromised by tacit Prusso-Austrian support, and couldn't get near the capital.

That leads to another problem: that foreigners were attacking the frontiers at the time. The Jacobins, holding the capital, could pose as the patriots whilst the provinces were Endangering The Patrie. When the patriots started winning those battles in the east, the rebellions west and south were left, like Dumouriez, compromised. I suppose if the Prussians and Austrians afield had enjoyed better logistical support, the Revolution would have ended up like the Paris Commune in 1871. But Bismarck wasn't born yet.

The Revolution had to implode by itself, first. Only much later, could Napoleon step in.

UPDATE 10/31/21: What everyone suspected of "Louis XVII" is probably true.

Helicopters over Venus

Let's consider the helicopter: what it is for. We'll start with sanity-check type stuff before we get into the maths.

Helicopters take cargo from the surface and move it over short distances, close to land, in high-pressure atmosphere without much wind. They also can hover. The basic summary is that they hover no higher than 3 km, although they can fly 8 km. If they are close to ground - that is, on a mountain - they are able to do some hovering higher than 3 km. Also, over Mars (h/t Reynolds).

Over Venus, I am not seeing clearly where we'd want a helicopter in its Marslike altitudes. Maybe the poles. Where we got balloons for that. (UPDATE 5/20/23: maybe both?)

Further down, the headwinds get serious. Here too I see little point in a 'copter to carry freight above the clouds. In the cloud (= farm) layers we have Earth sealevel airpressures and (relatively) sedate moving-targets. But I doubt that the floating balloons want furiously-spinning blades in the ambient fog.

I think the helicopter comes into its own, as on Earth, at the surface. UPDATE 8/9 PM: It can also assist hoisting the heavier, industrial bubbles.

The laws of nations between religions

OnePeterFive offers Andrew Latham's reading-list of international theory in Christendom. It starts with Augustine, back in Latin Late Antiquity. Then the mediaevals: John of Paris, Aquinas, Dante, and Pierre Dubois [the Scholastic].

I pointed out there that Machiavelli's antecedent was none of these. To understand Ol' Nicky, you must go to the North African tradition, of Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun (pdf) had abandoned Greek political theory and compiled a theory of his own, on pure power-politics. He owed nothing to the Latin tradition of course... but he also shows overt scorn for the Arabic tradition. Nicky just takes Ibn Khaldun's theory, and swaps its Islamic(ate) examples for European Classical and Italian examples.

(As we see in Iran today, Islamic republicans have leaned upon Plato. This was true in mediaeval Islam as well.)

A question we might have is, how come Islam has relied so little on Christian thought. I'd propose, as paradox, precisely because Islam is so Christian at base. But not Latin; 'tis Byzantine, and Miaphysite (the Orient had some Sasaniana in there as well). Islam was religiously idealist, holding onto tropes of an ultimate imperium. And they didn't own much access to Latin.

It may be that Dante owes his monarchical theory to the same Last Empire ideal. Although he'd never admit to owing anything to Islam, as Nicky would owe to one particular Muslim.

La Bouchet East

Hubisz, Williams, and Siepel in their sea of percentages notes that Denisovans were 1% paraHuman. The trio date these strands to about the same time and presume about the same event, with about the same counterparty. Likely Homo Erectus.

We don't directly have the Erectus genome. The three just know he met some sort of Denisovan. Stephanie Pappas writes, a million years ago when the Denisovans... didn't yet exist. The actual paper is more clear about "divergence time" and "migration time"; the million year span refers to t_div. t_mig - when Sup>Den happened - was after 225 kya. If we were to go look, Sulawesi looks promising.

Of course 225 kya falls into the same La Bouchet when Sundaland was subject to flooding. While Neanders were enjoying themselves west, paraDenisova got in on it east.

La Bouchet West

Last night the online geneticists linked to Stephanie Pappas among others. (Apparently Melissa J. Hubisz, Amy L. Williams, and Adam Siepel had hacked Excel.)

This constrains papers from back to 2013 on the various intermixings between Neander up to Vindija, scattered Denisovae, various versions of human, and Homo Erectus. Neander DNA is well-constrained by now, such that we can find it easily in our own genomes. 25% of the whole thing (Vindija clan) can be reconstructed from its scattered remnants.

Here we learn that early humans had mixed with Neanders 300-200 kya: they left that in the Neander genome. There's a limit to what may be found directly without direct DNA. The mix overlaps La Bouchet 240-230 kya - a sort of Indian Summer in the Pleistocene, sharply broken by a freeze before it could really get going. The initial warmth would have enticed some Africans, out; the freeze would have run them back home. Except for the hybrids, left in Eurasia.

This latest article doesn't talk about the later Eemian migrations when hybrids did trickle into Africa.

These first humans and the Neanders who lerrrved them left some remains in Greece (210 kya) and Israel (180 kya). They didn't get further east; they left no trace among the Denisovans.