Ilopango

AD 431, boom. Give or take.

There was some musing over the past decade or so that this mountain in (what is now) El Salvador went boom a century later. That would mark it as the sun-blotter in Justinian's time. Apparently... no. AD 430ish would be Valentinian III, Theodosius II, and maybe Attila.

The article says that most of the Maya - clustering north of all this - didn't care about this one. They also insist that the temperatures cooled in the southern hemisphere, not north. I doubt the tropical winds work like that. So: back to Chichon.

AFRICA 2/14/21: I can however wonder about AD 400s West Africa. Maybe the whole equatorial band.

Something in the wine

Peter Watson's Great Divide has long pointed to the Old World as having "progressed" from psychotropic drugs, picked up by hunter-gatherers; to alcohol, brewed by farmers. Brian Muraresku asks whether shamanism lasted that bit longer.

This idea sounds 1970s. Indeed that's about when John Allegro and Morton Smith hit Judaism and Christianity, respectively. Inevitably Allegro was deemed a fraud and Smith, Problematic. Other, more serious researchers got tarred by association and, then, along came Nancy Reagan. But, as they say, now it's 2020.

Judaism and Christianity are officially in the Neolithic tradition where we ingest wine for our shamanistic urges. Unofficially, Muraresku points out Hippolytus attacking drug-infusions in the wine. This means that "too many" people were spiking it.

The cerveza, that trashy Celtic beer the poorer classes got in Spain, sometimes didn't even need the spiking. The Ergot fungus does things to one's head. Maybe vin plonk in Gaul had ergot, too. Lower-caste Roman subjects sometimes attended Jewish and then Christian services on account they needed a doctor, which trade Jews and Greeks abroad often took, indeed founding hospitals for the indigent.

Suppose these was something funny in the Seder wines in the early 30s AD...

UPDATE 3/20/21: Quillette burbles about The Patriarchy, and cites Nixey unironically. "Hard pass", as they say - until someone else attempts this topic, someone who's not Richard Spencer. Might have to be Tim O'Neill.

Why Luther wasn't stopped

In another time and/or at another place, nobody serious would have accepted Martin Luther's obvious misreading. But these were the 1500s AD and the place was Germany.

The locals had long rankled at Latins calling them barbarous. Also Germans, like Italians, lacked a state willing and able to dictate terms to clerics in their lands such as the French and English had. When a German like Otto had become king or like Ludwig even a powerful king; their tendency was to meddle in Italy and to take the Papacy, or at least like Ludwig a "Papacy". The Popes Alexander VI and Julius II were too powerful to allow that. So the Germans found themselves too strong to listen to a Roman pope but too weak to get the pope to listen to them.

The balance did change over the 1520s - in the German favour. Charles V, indeed, was able to invade Rome. But by then many Germans in his train were Protestant.

Martin Luther's gospel

Wiker and Hahn move on to the German baptised after Saint Martin, who consecrated himself to the Church in the name of Saint Anne mother of Mary. If those two authors have it right, The Pagan Servitude of the Church rereads the Gospels and Paul on the Eucharist.

In earliest (known) Christianity, Jesus held a last meal with his disciples involving bread and wine. The Gospels have it as a Passover Seder. Paul in 1 Cor 10-11 discusses a communal meal of rememberance, the most important Christian ritual, in which one joins in the body of the Church by consuming Jesus' body present in the Host. The Eucharist precedes this Scripture; this Scripture assumes it, to legislate conduct concerning it. See here.

For Martin, Jesus is not present in the Mass but presides over it. The key is the Testament, God's promise to us. Martin prefers this Latin over the more ambiguous Greek Diatheke behind it. The words of Christ... are the true eating and drinking. So we may as well not have a Eucharist at all.

In terms Martin, the vulgarian, can appreciate: this is retarded. In the Gospel According To Martin, when you relate the words, you commemorate the Last Supper. The Evangelists were telling us the exact opposite - Christ himself called us to the Supper that we may commemorate our Lord (and His words).

Machiavel's tafsir

Wiker-Hahn rated Nicky Machiavelli worthy of a chapter on secular biblical exegesis. They're right. Although they don't like him.

Machiavelli proposed to treat the Bible as a pagan work dedicated to a pagan god, just a jealous one. De Principatibus figured Moses as the same as Cyrus, and the Torah like Xenophon's Cyropaedia. To that end, Machiavelli conducted an eisegesis - reading his view of power-politics into the Torah's account of Moses' career. Wiker and Hahn end this chapter castigating Machiavelli for that.

Machiavelli didn't even publish De Principatibus, as such; he distributed secret copies in samizdata form to fellow Italian elites. Some final version did get published - after his death. Rather like an Islamic Imam, cf. Malik with his Muwatta.

Debunking the Bible wasn't precisely Machiavelli's own intent. Although he approved William of Ockham, nobody since William had (yet) built the tools for a true exegesis, and our man didn't care. Machiavelli's assumption was wholly philosophical. He took for granted that Christianity was inferior to Latin paganism, arguing that point in his Livy discourses. Hence, for the JudaeoChristian text, his resort to eisegesis.

For De Principatibus, Machiavelli proposed instead that the Prince use the ambient religious canon to mollify his subjects' prejudices and to borrow as a "political language", as Bernard Lewis would put it. Machiavelli would assuredly approve someone else we know.

There is a direct line from Machiavelli to Western atheist disputation, and thence to Robert Spencer's The Truth about Muhammad. More direct perhaps from Machiavelli to Irving and Carlyle. The line to true exegesis - to Did Muhammad Exist? - is indirect at best.

L2 with more energy

I want SVL2-Lissajous for a volatiles-depot. I figure the Russians will want it too. (Once they are done retaking Anatolia for Orthodoxy...)

With a hat tip to "Jay Manifold" - Maksim Shirobokov, Sergey Trofimov, and Mikhail Ovchinnikov, "On the design of a space telescope orbit around the Sun–Venus L2 point" doi 10.1016/j.asr.2019.12.022. They look to a longer halo orbit, orthogonal to the ecliptic, to maximise solar energy. They've taken other planets' gravity into account, as well.

I assume this orbit will work - since these three researchers have done maths, and all. Although they haven't accounted for Venus' own wind. If there are errors the Russkis can use some of that extra energy to push the MacGuffin ("telescope") back to stability. Maybe they stow some propellant on-board. Maybe they're plotting for a couple decades before replacing it all.

I remain uncertain that this orbit is worth the trouble. If we have a volatiles depot at L2, can we not just burn the fuel right there? And later on we should have polar relay stations to beam additional energy thither.

Suppose we use the S-T-O trajectory to refuel L2's energy batteries, when the relays aren't operational.

WORTH THE TROUBLE 1/12/2021: Parking orbit for visitors.

A selection of saints

Reading lists is boring, and "listicles" are the basickest of blog-bitchery. But I'm on mine own time here sooo... once again.

We are all agreed on the Apostles and the New Testament authors, at least those who aren't pseudonyms. (Even there e.g. "1 Peter" might not be by actual Cephas, but it is still good.)

I appreciate Clement for, perhaps, presiding over the Roman letter to Corinth. Next up, Ignatius, for insisting on the Eucharist. Jerome brought the Jewish Bible to the Latins. Augustine insisted on human reason and compassion as core to Christianity. Gregory and Macrina of Nyssa rejected slavery and (in Gregory's case) usury. Maximus suffered for dyotheletism in the Faith.

There are obviously many more saints - several popes named "Gregory" were magni indeed - these are just the ones coming to mind at this present moment. I'm also leaving aside canonical saints whom I dispute. Although: I'll divulge here that I do pray salla Allâhu 'alâ for Nestorius, William of Ockham, and Erasmus. ALSO 12/14/2021: Throw in Robert of Lincoln, and Richard Simón. And why not John and Christopher Tolkien?

Of those saints whom the Church has beatified, I do not say even these were perfect wo/men. Jerome (discl.: my patron) was an absolute dick to his opponents, even to Augustine. As for Augustine, he himself confessed to us more of his own sins than we strictly needed to know. Maximus could have chosen his battles better, given the state of the Mediterranean at the time he was preaching. But these failings were personal or tactical. Overall they knew the real enemy, an enemy across time; and they knew the real Faith, which is eternal.

And our Faith has never been a faith for the perfect.

You don't have to be perfect to be a saint. You just have to love one another and to keep G-d's Commandments, as one saint once put it.

Pope Honorius II

If Catholicism means anything, it is dyotheletism. The Spirit flows from the Father and from the Son. The Christian State and the Christian Church are equal partners in Eunomia - we are the true eunomians. Ludwig of Bavaria was as wrong as was John XXII of Avignon.

One definition of The State is "the monopoly on lawful force". This, I posit, is monotheletism so heresy. As Catholics, we should insist on a countervail, where the ordinary Believer, also, owns means of force.

Strictures apply, as in all things. A Believer should not ask for uncontrollable war-weapons like, say, a lab for infectious disease nor a nuclear bomb. For my part I'm not questioning the 1689 Bill Of Rights which allows to Protestants the right to bear arms. I do not subscribe to Protestantism but I appreciate they keep us honest.

It is, however, the duty of our Church to act as our advocates against State power. She must never take the side of the State as it seeks to disarm her Believers. The resident of Saint Peter's Chair, presently, has failed in this.

We've had a monothelete Roman Bishop before. We survived that heretic; we'll survive this one. It might take another oecumenical synod - like that which Pope Martin called to the Lateran against the Avignon of his day, in Constantinople.

Wycliffe's legacy

Long ago my mother bought me a book about, I don't remember which, Tyndale or Wycliffe. Whichever it was about I didn't read it (sorry!) and have since lost it. Hahn-Wiker is probably going to discuss both. Right now I am reading its long chapter about Wycliffe.

The time in question is the score of years AD 1370s-80s. The king, Edward III, wasn't doing much kinging and his heir the future Richard II was a child. Over the mid 1370s John of Gaunt was doing much of the work... which he did badly, where it mattered, over in France. There was a "Good Parliament" 1376 which took control of the kingdom from John, but John grabbled it back. John ended up as effective regent on Richard's behalf. John's regency by the way overlaps the Catholic schism when Avignon seceded from Rome.

Wycliffe, it seems, had two phases in his theological life. In his first phase, he proposed (a slightly autistic) tiered hermeneutic of Scripture. For him true Scripture was Christ, and the texts were valuable only in pointing to Him. So far, so inoffensive to Catholics, although perhaps overcomplicated. But then came 1381.

Wycliffe, for whatever reason - I suspect brain damage - demoted the Eucharist. This, finally, gave both Popes reason to write him out of the Faith (although he could still attend Mass apparently). Then came Wat Tyler's Revolt which Wycliffe basically supported. Teenaged Richard II, finally coming into his own as royal, played the revolt along until he could crush it - which he did. Wycliffe wrote some embittered tirades against, well, everything and stroked out a couple years later.

The late Wycliffe still had friends in university. The King, for his part, married Anne of Bohemia - who owned a (Czech) vernacular Bible. These friends composed the famous "Wycliffe" Bible in English. (Wycliffe knew no Greek or Hebrew, so had been unable to translate it all himself.) As the Wycliffite Bible and Wycliffe's own teachings leaked out of academe, other dissidents picked them up and formed a sect whom its enemies named "Lollards". Some Bohemians in Anne's entourage got wind of it all too, and brought it to Prague.

Richard was in a tough spot. There was much in Lollardism and even more in early Wycliffe that could be of use to him, in struggles between the nobility, the church, and the commons. And Richard was, as mentioned, quite an intelligent and canny young man. But Lollardism was not something that he could really control.

European monarchism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

Having read Ed West, I'm off to attempt Hahn and Wiker, Politicizing the Bible... again.

The first chapter concerns that Calamitous Fourteenth Century, as Tuchman would have it. After 1316, Pope John XXII maintained the "temporary" sojourn in Avignon. That, and John XXII's grandiose ambitions for the Papacy, allowed for a crisis of legitimacy elsewhere. The German kings in particular took John XXII for a heretic. One Ludwig got Bavaria and Bohemia on his side, subdued the Habsburg claimant and... invaded Rome. He even set up his own pet Pope there, Nicholas V.

For some reason historians do not count this as a "papal schism". For them, Nicholas is just an antipope. Based in Rome. Well okay then.

Because John XXII was unable to get his (inevitable) excommunication to stick across the Rhône and Rhine, Ludwig opened his realm to any philosopher on the outs with Avignon. Hahn and Wiker point here to Marsilius of Padua, sort of the Pope's mirror image - where the Pope asserted that the Papacy ruled over kings, Marsilius would have kings rule over their church. I get the impression Marsilius would have excelled in Byzantium... had the Fourth Crusade gone otherwise.

William of Ockham was another dissident against Avignon; he ended up in Ludwig's land too, basically following and moderating Marsilius. William figured that that to do commentary on Scripture requires an impartial expert in Scripture. His work, I find admirable. I am unsure why Dante's De Monarchia 1313 does not feature as a third influence on Ludwig's thought and praxis.

I also wonder how come Hahn and Wiker do not know Giles of Rome, as precedent to all the above. Ed West (p. 254 - unindexed, boo!) certainly thinks Giles an influence on Richard II and on Wycliffe. Which should affect Hahn & Wiker's second chapter.

As to Wycliffe's times, the 1377 publication of al-Muqaddimah is a milestone unmentioned here. As to that, perhaps Europe was too busy digesting Avicenna and (especially) Averroes to accept a third Islamic-themed freethinker. (Many think Machiavelli had some access to Ibn Khaldun, but many don't.)

Books read under LOCKDOWN

As years go, 2020 has treated me... okay. I haven't entered many stores, excepting the local grocery and a single bookshop in Estes Park. I have also steered clear of White People Coffee (you know which I mean). This makes for an excellent opportunity to finish the books I own already. I set up folding-chair in public parks, under tree and away from the crowds of course.

I may as well list the books, here:

• Simon Schama, Citizens
• Ed West, Iron, Fire and Ice
• Robert Bryce, Power Hungry
• Robert Gerwarth, November 1918
• Robin Wright, The Last Great Revolution
• R. Alan Covey, Inca Apocalypse
• Lewis Dartnell, Origins
• William Gordon East, The Geography behind History
• David Carballo, Collision of Worlds
• Tom Holland, Dominion
• Michael Hudson, And forgive them their debts...

Not bad for a half year. (Er - also, Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson, The Lost Gospel, in February. Let's forget I read that one...)

I'd bought or been gifted maybe half of these last Christmas or soon after, and the other half I acquired at Estes. Bryce was the only book from some previous year; I had to pick it up again after seeing Planet of the Humans. Hudson came from Amazon.

The makings of Islamic intolerance

Some studies on "dhimmitude" have been released, or reviewed, on academia.edu: Mirza's "Dhimma Agreements" and Sahner's Christian Martyrs (reviewed Shoemaker).

What these papers get us are sources independent of the Islamic tradition, on the Arab elite's relationship with subjects.

Mirza sketches out the treaty-literature. She credits Joseph Schacht that the treaties often hold dhimma as synonym for 'ahd and even for amân. These are, therefore, diplomatic terms and not religious. Mirza bolsters Schacht that the treaties precede Islamic apartheid. (We ignore the "Ashtinameh" so-called, here.)

Sahner meanwhile looks to the Christian tradition of martyrdom. The Arabs intermittently sought to pry important Christians away from their faith. They took more seriously fellow Arabs who abandoned the ruling ideology, or Christians who propagandised against it in public. It is here, Sahner says, that we look for apostasy and blasphemy hudûd - Islam has come to assign these offences to the laws of war.

I think Islam, as the Sunnis interpret it, came up with any of these ideas at early-'Abbâsî al-Madina. Ibn Ishaq compiled a biography of the Prophet to backdate such laws into the earliest possible time, and (where possible) to align them with Jewish Biblical law. His contemporary Malik bin Anas - despite some mutual animosity - did similar in his legal manual called Muwatta, although Malik was more careful to credit the intervening 'Umarids and Madinese consensus. Shaybani seized hold of the Muwatta's first draught and canonised the bulk of it for the Baghdad caliphate.

The Shi'ites, Ibadites, and various fringe movements didn't accept these texts but even these had to account for them.

Magmatic ores

Every few days I check in on /r/worldbuilding/. Last night they delivered me to Artifexian's youtube. Here, the Irish-accented German host discusses ores. Mostly for Earth.

Other planets do not have plate tectonics. There is no surface water for it. Europa, ocean planet over an active core, is the exception: it might well have undersea plant-equivalents (but not photosynthetic!), so banded-iron and black-smokers. But, of course, we're here for Venus.

Without water nor free oxygen, as far as we know ever, crystalline ores are not available on Venus. But one process remains: magmatic.

A whip-'round the Internet turns up the "Great Dyke" in Rhodesia. It is not an earthwork; Old Zimbabwe did have those, but this isn't one. It is a "lipolith", an igneous intrusion layered-over. It all formed 2575 Mya - when Earth was more Venuslike. We did have oceans then, even with oxygen; but this craton didn't.

What the Dyke offered to the Rhodesians who found it was platinum-group metals. The most famed of these metals include gold, copper, and mercury. Considering how mercury amalgamates with the rest, I'm unsurprised at that. In Venus they'll probably be sulfides. The Dyke also has chromium, and nickel/ cobalt/ iron (sulfides).

On Venus, we look for similar in the tesserae.

Protestants are better at childrearing

At least, the heretics're better at rearing others' children:

Adults who attended Protestant schools are more than twice as likely to be in an intact marriage as those who attended public schools. They are also about 50% less likely than public-school attendees to have a child out of wedlock.... Catholic-school attendees are about 30% less likely to have had a child out of wedlock than those who attended public schools.

Inasmuch as the data supports the WEIRD fringe against the core I'd love to read HBDChick's take on this.

Some of this is self-selection. If you're Protestant and you don't want to expose little Thurston to us Papists, you are either rich or else you are very invested in making sure your kids turn out okay.

I'd not mind if someone did a deep data delve (as Lakofka might put it) into the Catholic schools... of Europe. Is there a Lotharing way of teaching, between central France and the Rhineland? Much of Muh Protestant Work Effic seems to work even better for the historically-Catholic Bundesrepublik. But these people (Trump family aside) tended to stay home. Our Catholics have come from Ireland, southern Italy, and lately from the wider Spanish Empire.

(I am part Irish myself, so, lay off me. I am here trying to figure out how to educate my cousins better.)

Another takeaway is that "public education" in America (and Germany) is, itself, Protestant in origin. Just read those hilarious editorial cartoons from 1900ish starring Uncle Sam facing off the hordes of Italian immigrants. The Onion's cartoonist has made much hay with these. The Blaine Amendments worked and now, here we are. How did it all go wrong...?

BACKDATE (and hat tip)

Teabagging Venus

We're being invited to Calypso (pdf). There's a discussion at Instapundit.

Notion here is to float an island at altitude 50-55km, and dangle a payload below the haze tier at 20ish km where it's still electronic-friendly. They want close mapping of tesserae, to start.

Some Earth companies (unnamed) are capable of tethering the twain. They figure they got acid-resistance sussed.

I think 50km is still in the clouds. Also, there is a pressure differential across these altitudes, so wind shear applies. One reason why they want up to 40 km of rope - which will pull down the balloon.

As for why the tether in the first place: they're planning on teabagging the gondola into altitudes too hot for long term electronics. They pull it all up again to cool the electronics. "Reel" it, they say, with a winch... somewhere. Top or bottom. Or both. Pulling the teabag back up will exert much (more) tension on the rope.

For most materials, including the fabled Kevlar, the rope itself degrades at high temperature. DuPont make that product for which they offer a technical guide. Reeled in, the rope should be no warmer than 420 K. It can reel out to 700 K before degradation. And yes sulfuric acid eats away at it in hours, at 420 K. Unlike heated electronics, physical damage doesn't fix itself. I assume we want to lower the teabag more than once. Does the top balloon have means to fix corroded and stretched-out Kevlar? or Zylon? T1100G . . . ?

Either way, the balloon is being dragged into the cloud layer, so it is not taking full sunlight, and it is subject to acid droplets. Not to mention that it will be in nightside for days on end, depending on latitude. I don't believe they'll want this for the erratic 60+ arctic circles much less either polar maelstrom.

PROSPECTING 9/24: Veins of the earth.

Can someone define "lockdown"?

I constantly hear about THE LOCKDOWN. All from the American Right, the so-called Rugged Individualists.

There is no lockdown in America.

Oh, sure; there are security measures. Some of them don't work. Some of them are near-farcical. But they do not rise to a "lockdown". If you want a state which seems serious about slowing this disease (and others), here is Commie California. You'll note that the measures differ from county to county.

If "lockdown" has any meaning it's what happens in a prison when all the inmates are locked in their own cells, maybe even chained to the floor. Is that happening? Is it happening across every county in every United State?

No?

Then it is not a lockdown. Don't call it that.

How the Russians take a planet

Dmitry Rogozin says Putin owns Venus. By right of landing robots on it.

It's debatable legally. The US did most of the mapping, starting with Puerto Rico in 1967 (they found Maxwell) and especially with Magellan and Pioneer orbiters. Venera did help, da. But then we get into the question of to what extent was the Soviet Union, Russian; or a mostly-criminal enterprise of ethnics ruling over Russians. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev all end in the Ukraine -ev, nyet?

Less questionable is how Russia - or anyone - would enforce a claim on a whole planet. Unfortunately here I can find bottlenecks: SVL2 is one clear gateway. Unless / until Venus gets high-altitude warehouse-balloons and cheap propulsion into orbit.

Even getting there (cheaply or quickly) can be monopolised. There's a recurrent window of opportunity, called the Hohmann, from any orbit to another orbit. Say the Glorious Trump Space Force launches a payload from Earth (or the Moon, whatever). Russia's going to launch to the same trajectory. Likely at the same time. The same goes for the faster, more expensive trajectories but maybe here we can work around the schedule.

'Tis all so much wind until someone actually sends sufficient materiel over there to assemble colonies.

Monk and castle

The (anti)chronologist Gunnar Heinsohn has fans over at Unz. Without getting into that anonymous essayist's essays, Heinsohn does draw our attention to a "tenth century collapse".

Usually this gets blended with the Roman crisis of the third century and the disastrous sixth-to-seventh centuries, as THE DARK AGE - it is in the interest of blending them, to shorten the span, that Heinsohn writes. Prodding around the Internet I confirm that, yes, this tenth century was bad. But I am not here to defend nor to debate Heinsohn. (To disclose, I think he's a clown.)

I am here to evaluate why civil order collapsed again in the West over that tenth century. As to that, I found an essay by one Declan Mills (pdf): this offers a Robert Drews argument, that it came about due to an engineering revolution.

The Angevins in old Neustria, "West Francia" now named, had discovered the Castle.

The Castle hurled Francia back to the Iron Age of briga hillforts. Every band of ruffians near fertile land, upon construction of a castle, was now a laird. The man in Aachen or Paris holding the title of "king" was no longer able to exert his will.

Obviously this meant pure misery for all the Santo Pocos under the local Guapo. The system was unpopular but, luckily, in those days there existed a countervail: a shared religious establishment. I don't even mean the Roman Curia, for once - the Vatican was Theophylact and mostly rotten itself. The West now had the Benedictines. This meant a revolution in society. Barons who accepted a Benedictine role in social-services survived, whilst those barons who didn't were excommunicated as tyrants and faced peasant strikes.

LITERATURE 10/2: Razib speaks - The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century has a lot of citations of John Julius Norwich. If that doesn’t say something to you, basically there is a lot of personal biography. The title may seem to promise a deep structural understanding of what happened in the 10th century, but the book is mostly a detailed diplomatic history. People, battles, and treaties. There’s more structural/social stuff at the end. Save the best for last?

Shalom, Stephen Cohen

There are those who are praying for doctrinaire Leftist and racial hypocrite Ruth Ginsberg. For her, my prayers are mine own. But another liberal Jew died recently, and for him I'd speak my peace here.

I'd been vaguely aware of Stephen Cohen from the 1980s. He was one of many liberals at the time who sought détente with the Soviet Union. I was Underage B&, as 4chan puts it, so didn't pay much attention; I was also antiSoviet, so filed him under my "people not to read" file.

And so it went through the 1990s, when I found Cohen in The Nation, a very Left rag I didn't bother with (and still don't). In 2015ish I found Cohen again... but now, to my shock, in Right media. Once again he was preaching détente, with respect to Putin. (I'd thought I saw him speak at the Jaipur festival that September, but - looking back - I seem to be mistaken. PDF.)

Based on my wholly-impressionistic observations, Cohen was consistent. Cohen wanted one thing out of this world: peace between these United States and all the Russias. That, throughout his career, he mostly got.

And so did we. Our Third World War never went nuclear, bomb-tests and Chernobyl aside. Further: if the "war on [Islamic] terror" was our Fourth, I understand that Cohen was better advised than the neocons on how to prosecute that.

May his memory be a blessing.

Mesopotamian universalism

A previous blog once pointed to the cult of Anshar. The Assyrians promulgated this as the "original" name for their totem Asshur - Anshar was universalist. Certainly once they started moving their capitol around, to Dar-Sharrukin and Nineveh (now Mosul), it made sense. But then the Assyrians lost.

Michael C A Macdonald, mostly known for Arabic linguistics alongside Ahmad al-Jallad, has been linking a series of papers by Paul-Alain Beaulieu. These papers track Late Babylonian typoi. They sketch out, between them, Mesopotamian royal attempts to coöpt Assyrian universalism.

In "Official and Vernacular Languages", Beaulieu points out that as Assyria grew, the peoples their imperium grew into tended Semitic. The Neo-Assyrian language, although a vital one, was weak in literature and unspoken outside the heartland. (Think of it as Portuguese, against the Latin of the Classical Babylonian from Hammurabi's time.) The strongest Semites were the Canaani offshoot along the Euphrates - called Aramaeans, sometimes theomorphised as "Amurru", sometimes called Chaldaean. The Babylonians themselves abandoned their ancestral tongue and switched to this Aramaic. This frustrated the Assyrian kings still speaking their daughter language. Later of course a Chaldaean clan took over Babylon's own palace.

Beaulieu in "Nabonidus the Mad King" sketches an attempt at a top-down revolution. Nabonidus proposed to make the moon the high god of Babylon. The Babylonians interpreted this as a neo-Ansharism, foreign to Babylonian ways, which of course it was. It further didn't help that the moon has always been interpreted with erratic behaviour and bloodletting, sometimes with disease, especially here lycanthropy. Beaulieu does try to salvage this king's contemporary image, that the chroniclers did not name him mad at the time. But for my part, I suspect the Book Of Daniel has it about right. If it barks and quacks like a madman . . .

Then there's "Yahwistic names". Fifth-century Babylon, when it was Persian-run, was diverse, and sported a "Judaeopolis" near Nippur. I figure - sure, we all knew that already. Of interest here is that Babylon, it seems, finally took universalism to heart. People quit putting "Bel" and "Nabu" in their names here, and used "Anu" instead. (Could they actually see Uranus in the heavens...?) Beaulieu sees the hand of Ahura Mazda, in the form of the Achaemenid monarchy. I don't say general "Persian" here on account that, after Cambyses, Babylon tried to rebel under a Nabuchadrezzar or two. And "middle of the fifth century" points to Artaxerxes I Longhand and/or late Xerxes.

All this, Beaulieu notes, has implications for the proposed dates of ideological Hebrew texts. If the text disdains the gods of heaven, it reacts to Fertile Crescent ideology with an especial eye toward the east. If it touts YHWH as Gott im Himmel, we've got the long hand of Ahasuerus. ("Ahasuerus" is Xerxes but his traits blend to Artaxerxes I.)

The sane universe

Richard Spencer (LA) 16 September mused on the relationship between math and reality. He proposed it is logic that needs to be owned.

Spencer sees human observations of reality as preceding mathematics. He mocks (apparently) that mathematics originated and exists in the netherworld of forms; thus, he denies that. From there he proceeds to OWN Christians who perform awe at the alignment of mathematics and our reality.

It turns out there exists a field of mathematical epistemology: the "Metamathematics", some call it. From starting axioms we can define a field, and can tell within it what is sense and what is nonsense. We won't ever exhaust mathematical possibility; Kurt Goedel proved that. But we do know this: mathematics is the science of sanity. Mathematics works the same across all sane universes.

A "sane" universe is a universe subject to cause and effect. Our universe expresses sanity by physical dimension one of which dimensions is time. Time locks the spatial dimensions by the speed of light. We happen to inhabit a 3-manifold. Other universes may have other rules; Thurston, Hamilton, and Perelman constrain those universes' geometries in 3-manifolds like our own. As long as one dimension is time and owns a speed-of-light principle, a universe constructed within that x-manifold is sane.

My point is that mathematics exists irrespective of some monkey's ability to solve a quadratic equation. Plato and Pythagoras got it right on that much.

It is possible that Spencer hasn't thought all this through. It is possible he doesn't understand it. It is possible he knows and is lying (I'll be charitable and say, to himself). I don't know which and, I'll be honest, don't care. His philosophy is nuts. Don't follow it.

Jacques d'Euse

Right now everyone in the world is a Vatican Conclave expert. Why should this blog be any better.

Richard Spencer (ritual imprecations may apply) thinks the Senate Republicans will accept a textualist - fetishist, in his view. Lee Fang sees pro-business economic libertarianism, also. Cernovich asks whether Estrada is too old.

Consider the Caretaker Pope argument. When the Curia is divided but don't want a schism, their instinct is to put off the decision until, G-d willing, there is less division. This points them to someone older and, perhaps, more malleable.

Because of the hypocrisy

American pariah Richard Spencer observes: Conservatives struggle to see reality as it is. Everything is viewed through a political lens. That statement is, obviously, true. Leaving aside Spencer's own broken relationship with reality.

Conservatives are the mirror-image of Democrats. Relevant to today: if Team Blue is in power, we don't confirm judges until after the election; if Team Red, may as well hold the vote NAO. After all we just had hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. We can add Barbara Lagao.

How can we tell a basic bitch? His feed is full of HYPOCRISY dunking on the other primary-colour.

Why Richard Spencer gets punched

We're supposed to see Richard Spencer as a pariah. If you go to his Twitter, most posts are mobbed by performative hate - because he is a Nazi, and Nazis get punched. Major politicians and media-figures have declared it so. We are left uncertain as to when the open season gets closed. Perhaps when someone finally executes him (it won't be called a murder). Perhaps, like Cromwell, afterward.

So let's look at this Emmanuel Goldstein philosophically. Spencer does have a philosophy. Sometimes he runs a series on that - there, rebutting William Lane Craig. I admit difficulty to make out what Spencerism is. It's still worth our time.

Last February Shane Burley pointed to a larger philosophical milieu. A lot of it is mystical / Romantic woo, Marianne Williamson in whiteface. (Burley could here have added how CounterCurrents promoted Kyle Bristow's - not Barstow's - Solutrean stupidity.) To the extent Spencer promotes "reality" and even cites classical science (although we must get back to this), I don't hold Spencer responsible for these excesses.

One thing Spencerism is not: Conservative. Spencer has observations of their reality: it's blinkered. In particular Spencer mocks the Conservative penchant for bedtime stories.

More concerning is that Spencer doesn't believe in the sanctity of written contracts. He sneers at such who do: text fetishist. He doesn't even believe in math(s).

I have no desire to punch Spencer nor to watch him get punched. I'd go further and say there should be written laws against punching him, and that taxpayers should support an armed force to enforce those laws. It's Spencer who seems to disagree.

Laws protecting the likes of Spencer fall under protectives against "cruelty to animals". The man may personally be insane. Don't punch him but, for G-d's sake and for his own, don't let him vote.

BACKDATE 9/20

The Triassic was no fun

If we were wondering how come life took so long to recuperate after the Permian 252ish Mya, here's the Carnian Extinction. Or "Pluvial Episode" within that 237-27 Mya span, 234-2 Mya. "Pluvial" means it rained for two million years. They say Wrangellia Large Igneous Province - igneous means volcano.

Asteroids did hit - later, during the dark age. Manicouagan.

So they had good records for the Carnian. They didn't, perhaps, have the perspective for the Carnian, given that dark age later.

As mass-extinctions go, I don't think the Carnian Pluvial will be unseating the Big Five. It looks about the same tier as Paleocene / Eocene, or maybe the Late Permian (as opposed to, End Permian). Leaving aside the one we're currently in.

Tessera

Some news about Venus' tesserae. They're rugged badlands, first noted by the Soviet Union when they were messing up their radar. Paul Byrne's press release comes with an image from Tellus Regio ("Regio" means "highland" here), which hosts one (or more - see below) of these formations. The conclusion: they formed ~750 Mya, and are layered. On the assumption that Venus was waterless even then, the authors conclude: volcano.

They don't know if Venus then was waterless. Some studies claim Venus used to be moist. Recent studies see phospane in the sky and wonder if there is (now!) life over this planet, and if it came from Venus or else hitched from our planet.

Other research has looked in on Tellus particularly. I give to you M.S. Gilmore and J.W. Head doi 10.1016/j.pss.2018.02.001 from two years back: "Morphology and deformational history of Tellus Regio, Venus: Evidence for assembly and collision". First came three independent tesserae; then the three collided to form this Regio. This agrees with Byrne inasmuch as tesserae are ancient and other formations, secondary. For those speculating about sediments however, I'd not uplift my hopes: this Regio is associated with shifting crust later - mantle downwelling per Gilmore-Head. I think it kicked off its career with geothermics earlier.

Tellus itself isn't one of our more famed Regiones. It is nothing like Ishtar let alone Maxwell. I am unsure it even breaches the supercritical ocean, at 3 km over the surface. But elsewhere: tesserae underlie the bulk of Ishtar and Aphrodite both.

If Ishtar is mostly a basalt, bubbled up from the mantle, this implies the mining should be rich there.

Let's get pissed

Nice going, idiots.

It is important to have the perspective, that R rates in bars and restaurants aren't as high as in some places. Nursing homes (mentioned), construction (I didn't know), and we can add meatpackers (unmentioned) are, indeed, danger-zones and Essential Occupations. An inquiry can also be held into why Nashville's drinky/diney R was lower. Failure in contact-tracing / reporting? Asymptomatic carriers? or maybe the punters just did what I do, and eat outside or else hit the place when there are fewer customers.

But first we need to have honesty. Nashville's action looks like cowardice lest Conservatives Pounce, like cats. So let the conservatives chase that laser-pointer; their claims have been proven bullshit so often that nobody pays attention anymore excepting conservatives. Except that now you've pointed the laser at your own foot.

By withholding evidence.

I expect a whole lot of moderates who'd been avoiding a night out will, now, hit the town. And more restaurant staff will shuck their masks preparing and serving the cocktails. The rates of spread will rise - and will be reported but nobody will believe you.

The horse was domesticated in the steppes

I'd thought we knew this already from Mallory and Anthony and other IndoHittiteEuropean scholars. h/t Davidski.

But no, apparently For many years, scientists have believed that the horse was first domesticated in Anatolia approximately 5,500 years ago.

Was this Cavalli-Sforza? C-S seems like he's the IndoEuropean Thompson, except not (nearly) as toxic. He came very close to being right. And where he was wrong you could see how he got wrong in that way. Certainly the Anatolian languages are in a family, related to IndoEuropean; and certainly there was a large Anatolia / Balkans shared farming culture, with much influence on agricultural societies in the Neolithic Europe beyond.

But still: it should have been clear at the time that Anatolian was an early spinoff - a sister, I would say - not to be used in the reconstruction of IndoEuropean as such. (It is excellent at triangulating IndoEuropean; use it for that.)

IndoEuropean qua IndoEuropean was a steppe language spoken by a steppe culture among - as we now know for sure - steppe animals.

Músa og manna

Razib and Nature talk Viking.

What comes out here, already hinted by other studies - like those about mice - is that North Germanic although basically one language was already three people in the Viking Age. Hence why they still ain't united. Afield the Swedes went east, the Danes went to eastern Britain, and the Norwegians with their Clade F mice went to Ireland and Iceland.

The studies are interested that the Vikings were dark-haired. Unlike Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir (who, of course, is part Irish). Another point, by laymen unappreciated: Modern Greenland, Danish currently, is the result of a secondary colonisation from modern Denmark.

Mignonnes

I held off on the basic-bitch takes against Mignonnes aka Cuties, at least here. I admit to revulsion at Netflix' paedotastic cover; I certainly approved 4chan's call to block it. Anyway now E;R has the real review, and the real explanation on why conservatives (especially) dislike it. It turns out that the conservatives are right, for once. Perhaps by accident.

This movie isn't about normalising noncery, at least it wasn't about such when it was just a French indie. The CheesePizza - as noted elsewhere - falls along that Pretty Baby borderline, not to mention all those creepy MTV videos over the 1980s. Or heck, Little Miss Sunshine (disclosure: this one, I've watched).

E;R observes what's at work here in Mignonnes is its aim: undermining the conservative family. The movie picks on Senegalese Islam in France, but by extension applies to all those petty bourgeois communities. The movie proposes to contrast Islam - conservatism - with this form of dance so as to demonstrate them as mirrors of each other. It doesn't help Islam's case that it does, in fact, peg the Age Of Consent (much) lower than we do in the West.

As for Netflix, they're in on it. What the French liberals say about "Islam", and what they mean to do to it; American liberals say and mean la même chose for Christians.

NEW WORD 9/17: Let's give a Chuck Dodgson Award to Gregory the Tall for mediaite attempts to spin this abomination: "paedophistry".

Uranian moon density

Usually we Earthlings are embarrassed by a planet named "Uranus". It is also the Penultimate Planet, before the Neptune - Plutino resonance marking the true end of the planetary system. Of itself, the planet is much less dynamic than the stormy Neptune which Event Horizon has immortalised. The planet was trending in Twitter yesterday, largely because it's visible to human eyesight and Islamicate-tech telescoping for once. (The Muslims never saw it. As usual for them: so close yet so far.) But there was more news.

The Herschel Space Observatory rediscovered Uranus' five moons in the infrared. Bill Herschel had discovered infrared, and moons Titania and Oberon, in the first place so it all well lives up to the man's legacy. The rediscovery wasn't redundant, as you might think; this showed the moons were hotter than they "should" be.

Really what this has done is to constrain the five moons' capacity for heat retention. That is: with their known density, we have a hint to their composition. The answer is: Plutolike. They're rocky, with a layer of ice as ice is defined in the outer system.

We'll still have Uranus

Dr Metzger is touting lunar bases as an economic boon. Currently Elon Musk wants at it for the tourists. But it all comes with a warning - light pollution.

Currently we can just about see George's Planet during a new moon. James Geach, Centre for Astrophysics Research at the University of Hertfordshire: Unless we are very careful, the more 'industrial' activity we see in space, the harder it will be to have clear views of the deep cosmos. That is, new moons will be a feature Of The Past. But I require more evidence to buy into this.

The lunar settlements will be underground in lava-tubes, to protect from micrometeors and radiation. Also the new moons are Fourteen Days Of Night, energy-poor; I expect Earthlings to take shifts and to jet back home as the twilight wanes east to west. Who wants to stay longer in low-G to get crippled? Of those human longhaulers left behind, many may even go into hibernation.

To the extent we care about Earth-based astronomy, this timeline will host telescopes on that fabled Dark Side Of The Moon. No clouds, no atmosphere, no bright objects in the way (here, Earth). Crater Tsiolkovsky looks good for this. Also the southern polar basin which, I believe, is also free of sunlight and full of (icy) water.

UPDATE 9/16: I'd worry instead about the United Nations' base around ELL1.

The fall of Tel Kabri

Before the west Semitic split between Canaanite and Aramaic, a people inhabited Tel Kabri in the western Galilee. "Tel" means "artificial hill" so, it is not inhabited now. Michael Lazar, Eric H. Cline, Roey Nickelsberg, Ruth Shahack-Gross, and Assaf Yasur-Landau have a paper out explaining why not: earthquake.

The archaeological horizon is Middle Bronze Age IIB, 1700ish BC. This is the era of Hammurabi's dynasty in Babylon, and Assyrian colonies in southeast Anatolia. The main Canaani contemporary was Hazor; Lazar's paper notes Ashkelon too, which I think followed the Canaani culture then, and I should add Damascus. (Jericho's "Sultan IV" destruction, per Wiki: 1617-1530 BC. All over the place.) Second Intermediate, for Egypt; I'd add the delta fell under Dynasty XIV which was Canaani. In those days the Semites waxed mighty in the land of Tel Kabri.

The future south-Syria had just entered into a boom time; 1750-1550 BC marks increased rainfall in this area and an expansion of the Salt Sea.

It is the very lack of Egypt/Canaan conflict (or of internal reasons for strife) in this era that human violence is deemed unlikely. And indeed: no arrows, no fire, and no combat injuries on the dead. It is as if the palace simply collapsed. Figuratively and literally.

Lazar's team point to later cuneiform omen-tablets in Nuzi, admittedly in paraSemitic Akkadian, that when an earthquake occurred a certain time of the year, it would lead to civilisational collapse. The team don't count those tablets as a memory of a past specific event in Nuzi, nor even point where the earthquake damaged any contemporary Syrian site. This is more the impressionism of the west Near Eastern mind, that it should follow similar lines.

'Tis also possible the water supply dried up, but honestly this site could have carved aqueducts; as noted, this was a pleasantly moist era. I suggest instead that the site's vassals and serfs picked their moment to revolt. Either that or Hazor and/or Damascus took their chance. The cityfolk couldn't organise in time so scattered. If there was a fight it didn't take place in Tel Kabri.

BACKDATE 9/15. UPDATE 10/27/21: Occurs to me that Tall (Tel) Hammam burned around 1650 BC; they blame Jericho IV on that too. Admittedly some distance southwest, and their conflagrations aren't deemed earthquake.

Black planet

Some years ago some small planets were detected around 55 Cancri. 55 Cancri was at the time thought to be a high-carbon star; moreover, innermost planet e was deemed high-radius for its mass. A flurry of papers came out asking if this planet was carbon; the books Exoplanets and Planet Factory evaluated these. Elizabeth Howell offered a summary of this science in 2017. Last I looked (today) they're wondering whether Lavaworld or Cyanideia.

But if 55 Cancri e isn't diamond planet, the models they were juggling back in 2012 are equally plausible for some other planet, perhaps hiding among other stars.

To constrain the process here is "Oxidation of the Interiors of Carbide Exoplanets". Authors: Harrison Allen-Sutter, Emily Garhart, Kurt Leinenweber and S-H "Dan" Shim of Arizona State; Vitali Prakapenka and Eran Greenberg of the University of Chicago. I found out when ScienceDaily relayed its 9 September press-release.

They think that a water ice planet infused with silicon-carbide will, once it accretes enough mass, crush the ice and carbide. (They allow for an iron core at the base of it all.) Released will be silicon-dioxide, one pure carbon molecule, and two hydrogens. The silica is of course just sand - glass, rather - and the carbon will crush into diamond that high pressure. They also allow for magnesium-carbide, but that doesn't change the base chemistry here. Hydrogen escapes, or maybe joins with looser carbon soot for methane.

As they point out, methane (like hydrogen) is a "reducing agent" - as the metallurgists put it. Any free oxygen here will burn. The point of this star-system is that it hasn't much oxygen, and our planet is binding what little it's got into glass. What happens here at the end is a carbon-iron alloy core, silica-diamond mantle binding up a lot of water. The initial crust would be silica (and, er, magnesia) but above that I'll call it different: black soot and graphite. Very thick methane atmosphere, with some proportion of carbon dioxide and monoxide which I'll get to.

I expect comets and hydrous meteors to deliver additional water. This water pools if this planet migrates to our habitable-zone... rather, slightly outside it, because methane is a greenhouse gas. Inward (or just later as the star ages and heats), the new water boils and joins this thick atmosphere; if our planet stays outward, it's a big static Antarctic glacier.

There are no tectonics. I further suspect this iron-carbon core is stiff and cannot spin like our purer iron core does. It's not as dense and the authors are looking at 2-8 Earth masses... so, the planet is big. That affects escape-velocity. The weak magnetic field is on the surface or beneath it.

If this unprotected planet is in the habitable-zone, the sun is breaking its methane back to soot and hydrogen like Venus. And the surface albedo of charcoal-world is super low. Any surface water evaporates if it doesn't just plain boil; that vapour is getting broken to atomics too. Which does free the oxygen... to un-reduce the hydrocarbons. There's no ozone. I don't know if the planet is keeping its free hydrogen but if so, it's clustering in its highest atmosphere and is mostly deuterium.

At the end, I expect a carbon-dioxide sheath over a black cinder planet. Some nitrogen. Few and wispy clouds, nightside. Trace water-vapour heavily deuteric. Hey, at least the acid is very weak; and it might be cooler. Oh, and copious craters in this black soil.

Colorado's culture of bullying

I noticed a surge of anti-bullying campaigns during Obama's first term. Under Kevin Jennings the "safe schools" impetus quickly turned into a paedo grooming campaign; then Dan Savage toured schools to bully Christians - as with all Leninists, who/whom. We did, at least, get a Lee Hirsch documentary about the phenomenon that was only slightly rainbow-flag.

StopBullying.gov is, now, standforthesilent.org. They're here in Colorado. They tell me we're in the top ten states for child suicides so, tier 11-20 out of 100.

As to what causes it, Colorado (now) has high income stratification and also a political monoculture. I do not think that public schools are safe spaces for conservatives or Christians here, or for simple autists. To the extent that bullying is vigilante punishment, I'd not trust the conservative counties in reverse, either.

The (partial) shutdown of school campi has, likely, saved many introverts' lives. Although depression has spiked among the more neurotypical.

I'd also bear in mind that depression and suicides are not always sparked by bullying or at least not that alone. Alcohol and cannabis are legal in Colorado, and for teenagers a black-market exists. These chemicals (and MDMA) are not good for developing brains.

The Mass over Venus

OnePeterFive looks at how we conduct the Eucharist on Mars or on the Moon.

So far I've looked at the calendar for Venus, which I expect Earth / Venus relations to force to that synodic year. The Orthodox may well set up a liturgical calendar for that - they've broken with Earth's calendar before. More exactly, the Pope Gregory had imposed a seasonal calendar. The old "Julian" calendar better matches the 365.25636 day sidereal period, which period is that which Venus needs for Earth traffic - tho', still, at best a compromise. To follow the Orthodox, the Catholics may allow for a Synodal Rite for those staying on Venus for the long term.

I agree that priests will be part-time until sufficient colony space is expanded to support non-engineers. Floated, for Venus.

A good point is made that Fire Restrictions are in place in any low-oxygen environment. Although for Venus' clouds, photosynthesis of oxygen is not so hard: energy is near-free and CO₂ abounds at bar pressure or higher. Hydrogen is the Venerean rarity; but not such that we'd ban holy water.

For Venus' burials, the ossuarial rite is preferred. Preserving the flesh for nutrients is canon. Heat and pressure aren't a problem - for the clouds, though, we do wish to protect from acid. As for storage of the bones some go back to Earth of course but for locals, including the bishop: floating cemeteries. Maybe in parks, maybe void of oxygen.

Those who were our countrymen

Today is an anniversary. I don't have much new to report on Islamic origins so I'll look at a current foreign invader, which has inflicted 64 9/11s upon Americans since it arrived here. Law kariha al-kâfirûna.

Mike Cernovich doesn't like dehumanising rhetoric. He bans to call people "pigs" in his Twitter. Fair enough. Now let's look at the REOPEN NAO contingent, for their use of rhetoric.

We know how to limit this alien's spread: wear masks, distance, and - when available - take the shot. To the extent these Don't Work, it's usually because they're not being applied. To the extent Mandates Don't Work that's on those not following the mandate. If one points this out, he is named "Karen"; if one announces she is following these instructions, she's called a "sheep". (But don't call them misogynists or homophobes!)

Worst are those who utter let your chains rest lightly. It turns out that this (Samuel Adams) quote continues - may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

To my fellow American citizens, who work to protect and save American lives, just remember this: you are the patriots, the maskless chestbeaters are not. You are pro-life, they are not. To whatever their protestations of past patriotism, even if they served this nation in war: they are not patriots anymore. They bring marg bar America with their actions, whatever their stolen English words. They are no Adams; they are Arnold.

And when they lie in a hospital bed gasping, their prayer shall be - exactly - Arnold's: that their posterity forget them.

Chauvin

I cannot say I have been following the Minneapolis case, except that the notion that Derek Chauvin "murdered" Floyd is laughable and that the Trump Campaign are poltroons to give air to that meme. Ja'Ron Smith should have been fired long, long ago. And Trump should have been impeached this May.

A few facts have come out in the last week. To whit: George Floyd was a courier of narcotics in 2019 who got away with it then by ingesting the evidence and surviving. That foreshadows what the MN coroner reported this past 2020 spring. Since Floyd accidentally killed himself (he may have had CoVID sequelae as well), no wilful homicide charge can stick to anyone else. Likewise I should blame CoVID if someone infected died of "organ failure" in the hospital. (For that I would blame Republican voters and antifa.)

Another strange wrinkle is Chauvin, the Head Whiteboi In Charge of that crime-scene, throwing his underlings under the police-van on account they got there first and didn't handle it perfect. In my capacity as erstwhile [Houston] juror: by bickering amongst themselves, ... this defence(s) stands to piss off the jury. Evidence will, however, come out that nobody at this scene wanted Floyd to die.

These cops' careers are ruined on account everyone involved has demonstrated their unfitness for this service. They will assuredly lose in a Floyd-family civil suit. They won't be able to pay any of these dues but meh.

It was arguably Negligent Homicide all 'round. If the MN DA office were asking for that verdict, they'd probably get it - just because the defendants are all backbiters. Unfortunately for the DA, the prosecution're asking for a murder verdict and on that much, the facts are clear. It was no such thing.

Caenozoic climate

Via the turtle, Thomas Westerhold et al. "An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years" doi 10.1126/science.aba6853.

They're looking at plankton-shell formations, "benthic foraminifera". They hold records of carbon and oxygen isotopes. Such work been done before but - they say - it was only good from 34 mya to now. This one spans back to the latest Cretaceous and, yes, they do see Chicxulub 66 mya in there. But it's nowhere near as drastic as the Palaeocene / Eocene hot spike 56 mya, interestingly. h/t Ineffable Island.

Palaeocene was a "warmhouse" 5 C higher than now; followed, after the spike, by the 56-47 kya "hothouse" aka Climate Optimum. Then within this same Eocene, Warmhouse II - 47-34 mya. Oligocene-Miocene is marked "Coolhouse" until 3.3 mya when we enter the Icehouse but, as noted, we already knew that.

The Miocene hosts the middle-Miocene transition at 13.9 mya. That's West Antarctica, attracting ice so raising that half this planet's albedo. The counterpodal Arctic has no landmass on this scale (Baffin? Greenland? ...Svalbard -?) so the northern hemisphere is marked by instability.

A dark age in Peruvian genetics

Runs-of-homogyzosity specified in the Andes (h/t hbdchick). Brought to you by Harald Ringbauer and Matthias Steinrücken again, plus Lars Fehren-Schmitz and (who else) David Reich; doi 10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.072.

Under the Huari, the Andes intermarried up and down the length of the chain. This stopped around 1000 AD, after which arose close-kin unions from 9% to 46%. That is: clans surged, inbreeding with themselves. The Incas reinstituted an empire but, as we know, it didn't last long before the Pizarros involved themselves and the Andes went back to chaos.

When the Spaniards start taking notes, they note a clan system called Ayllu. Ayllu was not universal, but it was common. Likely resurging under the Inca Civil War. Ringbauer's ring don't see Ayllu in postHuari coastal states like the Chimu / ChanChan which ran her own empire.

This backs up that the Huari was an empire, and that the Fourth Age afterward - in the mountains - was a dark age.

Sardinia founder event

Razib looks at Rémi Tournebize, Gillian Chu, Priya Moorjani about Founder Events - when a new population is formed by a subset of individuals from a larger one or when the original population goes through a reduction in size due to a bottleneck. Razib points out the Basques, whose founder-event was under Rome (or maybe reacting to Carthage, Rome, and nearby Gauls). Secondary State Formation mayhap.

These three find a Founder Event for Sardinia too. I'd thought the latest such Event was when the Punic Africa swamped its population. I'd also assumed the IndoEuropean DNA here was light.

But no: ~3,400-4,900 years ago [2900-1400 BC] ... coincident with the appearance of the Beaker culture on the island. So I'm looking at something like Villanova or, indeed, those Basques before Rome when/where an Indo-European blood elite brings in cultural elements, but doesn't change the DNA except along the male lineages. Probably doesn't change the language either. As to that drastic Punic change, perhaps that was drawn out so not counting as a founding event.

Minoan math

We still do not own Linear A literacy, but we are doing better toward Linear A numeracy. Fractions, three days ago. Michele Corazza, Silvia Ferrara, Barbara Montecchi, Fabio Tamburini, Miguel Valério from Bologna.

The press release boasts the method can help us make remarkable progress into explaining some unresolved issues tied to ancient scripts that are still undeciphered. That is a bit much I think. This to me looks like an outgrowth of the method Elamite scholars used for pre-cuneiform Susa III. We still cannot read that (we don't know if it's even Elamite), but we can follow their maths. Although it is good to have one method successfully used for another script, especially a script as inconsistent as Linear A.

Corazza's dataset is 1600-1450 BC. This is post-Thera, whence tablets are best preserved; also, it avoids the possibility of characters changing over the long span of Minoan civilisation and the length of the Cretan island. Preservation is not nearly as good as Linear B's - and yes, damage was a problem for Corazza's team.

The lowest fraction is 1/60. This implies a Sumerian origin, assuredly mediated via Ebla or some other (para?)Semitic. The Minoan fraction for a tenth (/tithe) in turn carried over to the Mycenaeans.

This agrees well with Ester Salgarella, Aegean Linear Script (s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B which, based on what I see on Google Books, argues for several local Linear As and one standard Linear B, or as close to one as doesn't stymie modern readers. Linear B, from the "LH II" horizon, developed from the latest "LM IB" Knossian A. Thera being LM IA.

Are Joachim Burger and Daniel Wegmann hiding something?

Davidski: Warriors from at least two different populations fought in the Tollense Valley battle. Davidski wanted the genotype data but on that... the lead authors, Joachim Burger and Daniel Wegmann, aren't replying to my emails.

Despite them Davidski was able to do as they did with the Dead Sea Scrolls in the early 1990s: he reverse-engineered these data from the ("BAM") files. Davidski couldn't get us attire, weapons, circumstances of death from the BAM. But Davidski can tell us that wholly separate ethnoi were at this bridge: I2, R1a, R1b. Contradicting the Burger-Wegmann paper. Entirely.

I think that how the Dead Sea researchers (didn't) handle their data up to 1990 was a scandal. I think that Strugnell and Allegro and their team delayed us all - Christian and Jew alike - a full generation.

Burger and Wegmann - or the researchers under them - need to get us this information, or at least to divulge some status on how they are collating this information.

Failing that, we need to know what they're hiding and why they think they need to hide it. Maybe we need to ask the German government.

MOAR 10/28: Noncombatants included porters. Armies travel with porters of course. But women don't do the heaviest porting, and children get ported. And even male porters don't fight; so why kill them, rather than tell them Meet Yer New Boss? Whatever happened at the actual battle was one-sided - if there even was a battle; of the 145 corpses identified so far (often southern Europe) at least the porters were plain murdered. The victims may have been a merchant caravan and those, usually, are foreign. Assuredly that would explain why so few drank milk.

Bad vaccines

We have nineeight vaccines in Phase 3 last I looked. And Tsar Putin, inflicting Phase 3 upon all the Russias.

Russia's vaccine isn't doing great [h/t]. Not that the Lancet is always the best source, but.

As for the "Oxford Vaccine", that can be filed away with the "Oxford Institute" sending me Scientology literature back in 1997/8. It was already problematic in its Phase One but they said nahh it'll be fiine. So now lookit.

Michael Mina asks why the focus on the Spike antigen. If one or two vaccines have problems, if all the vaccines do pretty much the same - that impinges on the others. Barring the attenuated-virus / inoculation methods.

I am no fan of inoculation myself. It's just "let a bunch get the disease and we'll fix 'em in hospital!!" except with a pinprick. Once there... well, Convalescent Plasma doesn't help. Focused vaccines are, still, the best route to Herd Immunity which I expect.

How stupid was Sturgis?

Obviously masks work, and so does distancing and also fresh air. The Sturgis event, where hundreds of thousands of old white fools assembled to LARP with their motorbikes, was stupid. The question I must ask is - how stupid.

A paper came out claiming 250,000 new infections. I didn't post on the topic on account it was Too Bad To Be True - I am not a Jimmo Patterico who pounces on whatever bullshit makes DRUMPF look bad (and neither is hbdchick - h/t to her again). So here is a study to question the numbers.

Whether mask and distancing mandates work is another question. Well documented is Peru which issued more mandates than Grindr. Except that nobody Peruvian followed any of them.

Our virus-prevention strategy has to be toward social shaming. Sure, you are allowed to scratch your arse and to pick your nose in public. You are allowed to gorge yourself into an obese waddling mess. You are allowed to dress up like a prostitute and to dye your hair several shades of purple. But don't expect a pleasant first impression from others of us, when you do.

How governments (and churches) shift the culture is difficult, especially when such establishments nod to events similarly stupid. (And evil, which Sturgis isn't.)

Stajnia

A late entry for content: Andrea Picin and friends add one more Neander to the throng. This molar, S5000, comes from Stajnia Cave in Poland - so, not so far from the Neander Thal itself. h/t hbdchick.

The culture is "Micoquian", layer MIS 5a. This, Picin's crew date 80–70 kBC. Since said crew nowhere speak of its Y chromosome, I assume she's a girl. Her mitochondrion is, I think, ancestrally one of ours like many postEemian Neanders. She's closest to Mezmaiskaya Cave 1, that being Adygea in old Circassia. Anyway we're talking Poland - and this Euxinelike turns out unlike the Neanders to its west.

The shared maternal ancestor of Mezmaiskaya, Stajnia, and the western Neanders broke off 170 kya with a wider band 203–138 kya (201–136 kBC for what that's worth). Then, 152 (124–182) kya: Mezmaiskaya-Stajnia broke from the rest. All before the Eemian 123 kya and when those western Neanders actually lived 120 kya. That Ice Age coast would have been further from the Mezmaiskaya cave than it is now, but not very. S5000 at 80–70 kBC is younger than the westerners, but - the paper observes - the oldest in the Baltic.

It's an interesting move from the Euxine to the Baltic watershed... foreshadowing the Indo-European journey.

After 70 kBC, Stajnia isn't in scope, except as a constraint. The paper observes Neander populations crashing until 55 kBC. It blames the climate. The population expanded back into the north European forest - but not into the Med. This paper thinks the northern Alps and the Pannonian were the Neanders' refugia. But I'd have left that to an appendix.

Antifa as cartel

Back in the late 2000s, Barrett Brown (an early, Left-ish Cernovich) backed out of some commentary against the Mexican cartels. For Barrett, the cartels' ability to project force - even into America - was just that good. I propose to compare Antifaschistische Aktion today to a cartel 2008.

#MythCon which allows free discourse - that IDW again - must hire extra security and not against the Right.

Antifa have deep organisational structure. They employed their 4GW tactics successfully in Minneapolis when they took over a police precinct. They now conduct assassinations knowing the local cops won't stop them nor will the "Reformist DA" prosecute them. A few years ago one Hodgkinson, a man with ties with Senator Dick Durbin, attempted a mass extermination of Republican leaders and donors, severely wounding Rep. Steve Scalise.

On the assumption of antifa's cartel power, it is difficult to get impartial journalism out of a Mostly Peaceful Protest. The above accounts come from independent reportage - often ex-military. Antifa allows information of "police brutality" to get out - they cherish such data. They clamp down on footage of whatever events might have led up to the brutality. In case those stories get memoryholed here's Vox Day here, here, here.

Antifa-aligned authorities seek, as in Istanbul 1955, to purify their voting base. This is a long game of securing the cities for the Left, and cowing the rest.

Weimar comparisons

Dr Niall Ferguson pulls rank, in his capacity as Weimar Ph.D., to explore some comparisons. He's mostly right, however where he's wrong he's wrong in the same direction.

Ferguson is foremostly wrong about his assessment of Trump's relationship with the troops. Yes, the Clinton / Bush / Obama generation of generals - the board of Theranos - hate him... to the point of dishonour. I note the Duffel Blog has hit self-satisfied America without touching the allegation itself. Out on the self-identified Right, nobody believes The Atlantic. I chalk this up to Ferguson living in the soi-disant "intellectual dark web" of free-speech signatories, on account of Ace Of Spades and Cernovich having cooties.

Ferguson further has not updated his Weimar scholarly CV to include Gerwarth, who despite his multitudinous faults does explain Weimar's strength. Germans didn't abandon democracy until the early 1930s. Through the 1920s they didn't even get to toleration of an antidemocratic Putsch as did the Russians - witness Kapp.

Not least, Ferguson poo-poos the violence in the cities. He treats the Proud Boys, the Boogaloos, and various militias as a gaggle of disorganised clowns, vigilantes, and lone-wolves. (Benjamin Ryan Teeter of the Boogaloo is, by his own description, a "left Anarchist" who blasts obscenities at Trump and has a thing for Hamas.) With one exception, Ferguson's right. One.

Now let's talk reparations, that part of Versailles which the Germans deemed the most egregious injustice. Against America - classic Americana, specifically - reparations are on the ballot in November. We've been paying them out since the 1960s in the form of "affirmative action" and the handover of major cities, but Kamala Harris and other Californians would make this more explicit. Dismanting Structural Racism, they call it. This President recognised this theory and formally pulled his government from it. Think of the issue as a rubber band being pulled back - the D ticket this year will let it spring.

We are not Weimar. Trump is not our Man On The White Horse. But Weimar is coming, and I hear the hooves.

The rescue station

Venus - central location - supplies the primary rescue team for the solar-system. The Royal Navy, if you like. As to where that Navy's based:

Earth and Mars each will have a fleet to patrol environs but as far as sending a "torch ship" to rendezvous with an errant liner like the Aniara, only Venus can count on being the closest at worst position. Okay okay: Mercury's a bit better but that's uncomfortably far in Sol's well - and its radiation. Venus' own Hilda might be a compromise; it can be supplied more easily from the planet and her Lagranges.

The issue with a Torch Ship is like what we saw in Event Horizon - high acceleration, so high gravity. This blog is in the habit of measuring that in meters-per-second-squared and calling that lower-case "g". Earth is 9.8 (I live in Colorado so, I never mind that "9.80665" autismo); Venus (cloud-deck), 8.7. Too high g and a man gets "G-LoC", loss-of-consciousness. There was a movie about that. Not as good a movie as Aniara.

That's a point in Venus' favour, that its d00dz are accustomed to high(ish) acceleration. It's just that Earthers are better. Even we're not as good as we need.

Since the nozzle would be pointed at the Sun, pushing outbound: here is the best, if not only, site in the inner Solar System to test and use Bob Zubrin's saltwater nuke. Or to collect antihydrogen for microfission thereby the Fusion Orion.

I suggest that Venus have a space-station and/or space-station levels to acclimatise people to higher g. As in: from birth. These people will be born and bred short and (very) stout, to staff Torch Ships. That's home base. The rescue station, which these people staff in shifts, is the higher-radiation Hilda. Parked at the stone Rama version of O'Neill, I assume.

Serbian names in a Walloon land

The southern edge of our Romania was, aforetimes, the Wallachia. The first links the land to a language; the latter, to a people. The people were Romanised Celts: walloons, as the Belgians call them.

This implies that Wallachia was a throughly Dacian and/or Latin land as far as local records take it. So it interested me a couple weeks back when Old European Culture found Yugo-Slavic toponyms here.

I am on record as seeing much of our Serbia as ancestrally Albanian. However as I reread that post, it concentrated on the Ibër. Wallachia lies to the east of that, along the Byzantine Danube.

I'll start with a philology of "Wallachia". Other cognates are "Welsh" and "Wallace". The basal word is German. The Goths ruled the region up to the AD 500s or so but the Avars and Slavs kicked 'em out, so I don't see this exonym sticking. The Vikings and Old English(!) got to the Crimea but I don't think they settled the Danube. In the late Middle Ages, plenty of German-speaking lords settled across that old Habsburg transylvania. The Wallacians had already separated from the Kingdom of Hungary and, when the Habsburgs had Hungary, those lands stayed just out of their reach - until the Great War debacle. So I see "Wallachia" as a Habsburg imposition.

As I dig up the primary sources, Wiki offers this in AD 1485: Haec Inscriptio ex Valachico in Latinam versa est sed Rex Ruthenica Lingua scriptam accepta. It's a (Slavic) Pole saying it, but his world is increasingly Central European - hence the Latin - which explains his recourse to a German exonym. Here is a local "Wallachic" language, not "Ruthene" =Slavic. In 1534, one Tranquillo Andronico notes the Wallaces as speaking Romance. Scholars agree that this people did not switch from, say, Celtic in those fifty years; that they were in 1485 already walloons speaking a form of our Romanian.

Adding to the mix, Romanian has a sister: Aromanian, sometimes "Vlach". (Wallaces again!) Aromanian clusters along Greece's northern border, both sides, mostly west. Where Romanian (and Moglen) took on Slavic, Aromanian took on Greek. The split is vaguely dated: AD 800-1200. I know not if Aromanian shares in the Balkan Sprachbund with Albanian, Romanian, and Yugoslav - I assume, yes. Given Aromanian's Greek loans, implicitly late Greek; I see Basil II's hand in this.

Before anyone answers what all this Yugoslav is doing in Wallachian toponyms, I'd first answer: to what degree is Aromanian a Balkan language, and how did it attract its Sprachbund elements; and, what's the history of Greek loanwords into Aromanian? I also want to know when and why this German term "Vlach" got applied to Aromanians far from Habsburg influence, deep in the Ottoman Europe.

Fuel of the Franks

That dustup in 1200 BC Tollense provides a wide snapshot of the LBA North. Some researchers figured - hey, they're the ancestors of modern White People, how's their lactose tolerance? We can test Cochran and Harpending on this!

(We don't, here, need to discuss "Indo-European" theories. We actually have the people - never mind pots, nor other forms of language.)

Joachim Burger presents the results - 92.9% were weaned. Lactase persistence existed but was uncommon and not - yet - a factor of Darwinian "Selection". In retrospect perhaps the Black Forest and the fisheries weren't the space for animal husbandry; milk in bulk comes from cows. (Also from sheep and goats, but those hilly areas are populated by... hillmen. Impoverished, depopulated, clannish, don't fight well far past their hills. Incas excepted.) Cows need pasture and most lowlands are earmarked for human-edible crops.

Another commenter counter-proposes AD 800-1000. Notable span - Charlemagne's Austrasia.

Here I wonder about the Low Countries reclaimed from the old Doggerland plain. Salt flats are poor for crops but might support grasses. The 7.1% drift toward this new European Rajasthan. Breaking out into Europe with the Franks, especially that greatest Frank.

BEWARE 9/6: Davidski has words. He is an expert in genetic structure on which job this paper these authors fall down. Now, my post here doesn't care about the structure going in; it is about the structure going out. Still: for those seeking a more refined snapshot of the ethnicities arrayed at Tollense, they'll need to await a new, corrective paper.

MOAR 10/28: Merchant massacre! If they were Southern European then that would explain the low lactase.

The first phase of the German Revolution, 1916-18

I propose more depth to the German Revolution: from 1916. All based on what facts I find in Gerwarth.

In 1916 the Kaiser Wilhelm II turned his Reich over to the generals. The generals - as we know - won the East but not in time to feed the West. There the 1918 advance stalled - then retreated.

In summer 1918 the Kaiser formalised his now-constitutional-monarch status by handing his authority to the parliament(s) except for the war effort. Of course Germany was by then only a war effort so this political move was rightly derided as a feint. During the peace negotiations, coinciding with the midterm election-cycle in the US, the emissaries were given to understand that there could be no peace with an unrepresentative regime.

That November all the principalities in the Reich rebelled against the Kaiser and his field-army; the Kaiser - then in occupied Belgium - abdicated and fled.

[SEPARATED from the armband post.]

The Munich debacle

Gerwarth devotes pp. 11.173-83 to the communists' adventure in Munich. He titles that "Democracy Besieged". His own narrative undercuts its title.

Ludwig III lost his throne in the revolution(s). He was succeeded by a red armband, the infamous Kurt Eisner. Gerwarth rehabilitates this particular armband somewhat: although he was USPD, he wasn't KPD. He'd issued a slate of "Stalwart Kamarad, Let Us Nationalise The Means Of Production!!" edicts... which the rest of Bavaria laughed off. You see, Bavaria was pretty much Austria North, with Munich for its Vienna. The local farmers were a Catholic and conservative bunch who weren't about to surrender the (literal) fruits of their labours to cityfolk (i.e., Jews) without fair compensation.

After two months of local Fail, and seeing how the armbands were a-faring elsewhere (badly); Eisner chose to be a mensch and in January called an election. His crew got spanked. Eisner took the L and held out as a minority representative, under Hoffman's moderate Left government.

Unfortunately for Eisner, and for Munich, violence followed. He got murdered and various factions in the city took sides. A "Soviet" was declared. Some non-Soviets became hostages; others, led by Hoffman, fled. Hoffman did what they did in Berlin: he called in the Freikorps... and the Weimar government. "Look at what those RUSSIANS *wink* and FOREIGNERS *dogwhistle* are doing to OUR *winkity-whistle* fair city."

The Soviet government back in Munich "executed" - murdered - several hostages, Lenin style. Gerwarth chooses this moment to smear the dead as Thule-Society and aristocrats, as if that excuses the crime. No defence convinced Munich's burgers; instead they concluded that here were more Bolsheviks, thus proving the Freikorps right.

The Freikorps subsequently proved the commies right, but that didn't matter because after they were done there weren't so many commies in Munich. The surviving Bavarians blamed the armbands for everything and the region became stalwartly anti-Left.

Here, Gerwarth is too kind to the Soviet... to the edge of ethics. The Soviet had left no democracy to besiege; the democracy - Hoffman's legally-elected government - did the besieging. I recommend the summary in Black Book of Communism over the summary here.

Bundesrepublik against Prussia

Scheidemann had already declared a Republic in Berlin the previous November, against Ebert's wishes, and Ebert had a point that this may have been premature. Then there came an election and the Republic was declared again, but not in Berlin. It was in Weimar.

Weimar was supposed to symbolise a rebirth of German Occident-facing Kultur, against Prussian militarism. The Prussians and militarists chose to interpret this site as an insult. As Gerwarth warns us, we cannot let 1930s propaganda influence our assessment of 1919. Still.

HBDChick is another source Gerwarth should have used and didn't. She could explain how the divisions across the Elbe are real - real before the Berlin Wall.

1919 Weimar is the ancestor to Bundesrepublik Bonn.

I commend the French to "thank" that the Bundesrepublik didn't form at the time, perhaps even including the Germanophone pieces of now-defunct Austria. (No less a liberal than Ebert was promoting Anschluss in 1919.) I recall somewhere - Belloc maybe - a claim that Clemenceau the laïcist nixed at Versailles the possibility of a [Catholic] German state along the Rhine. Further research points otherwise, for instance McCrum "French Rhineland Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919" (1978), doi 10.2307/2638928 - one more article Gerwarth didn't read. Abel and Bryant record how the French cut off the Rhineland as a "separate state" under French occupation. It wasn't that the French opposed a Rhineland Catholic state... it's that the French tried to create one, by force.

These Germans truly desired autonomy from Berlin, and may have accepted independence; but not at the pleasure of Paris.

The battle for Berlin

I cannot rightly judge from Gerwarth's text who putsch-ed whom. It may not matter.

Gerwarth does state this much: Liebknecht's side of the Left - the Spartakists - shattered their sinn-fein shell of a party, the USPD, forming instead the Kommunist Party KPD which scorned the democratic process. Ebert and Scheidemann then ordered troops against a naval cadre allied with the KPD. The Republic lost, and the KPD counterattack took over some important buildings. Ebert saw this as a repeat of how the Bolsheviks took all Petrograd the previous year.

So Ebert called in the Freikorps. In this battle between two fundamentally antidemocratic forces, the Right could at least pretend to be shoring up democracy which, I repeat, most Germans wanted. The Freikorps won - without taking prisoners for trial. Inter enim arma, mein gute Kamerad.

Gerwarth doesn't like it but he must admit the KPD would have behaved no better.

THE OTHER GIRL 10/3: I didn't know what to make of Fraulein Rozalia. Now I know enough to be contemptuously dismissive.