Siderophobia

Nathan Cofnas got things to say 'bout THE JOOS.

I will preface this post, because I must, to disclose that legally I am Jewish but by religious choice, am now Catholic. This means that I disagree with the Judaic claim to salvation-history, which contradicts the Catholics'. I also must be fair when I think about Jews in the past who done messed it up, most recently Béla Kun. I ran a series a few months ago on Mark Cohen's perspective on Islamic rule, which I hope I was fair about, because I really did appreciate Cohen's work.

As for historic antiSemites in my adopted tradition: I had to put in a good word for John so-called Chrysostom where he opposed the truly evil Cyril; although, I do not consider the truly good Gregory of Nyssa in Chrysostom's ranks. Some of the Patristic attacks concerned the practice of usury unfortunately lawful for Talmud Jews when applied to outsiders. Gregory, so far as I have read him, did not himself write so far as to blame the Jewish bloodline. Chrysostom, most agree, went that extra mile, to his shame.

What I find in Kevin MacDonald's circles is a form of siderophilia. Iron loves iron, and other metals of that sort; in an iron meteorite, you will always find nickel as well. In MacDonald's circles you will find Vox Day and Ron Unz. Alongside the wishes that one could go back in time and drown American Jewry in the Atlantic - which makes one wonder about, forward in time - one also finds the theories that masks do not stop the coronavirus and that vaccines are deadly. One finds other theories here as well, equally noxious.

The "association fallacy"? Maybe. But in these days of plague, Israel did better than most nations. I should sooner associate with Jews than with antiSemites, despite my apostasy.

Baishiya Woman

Via hbdchick, Tibet may have its missing link. This is a Denisovan - not a para'Sovan like the Melanesia got - in Baishiya Cave. This is in Tibet proper, 60kBC.

As noted, it's not (yet) obvious that the Tibetans today mated with these girls up in Tibet. After all, their mitochondrion is not found in modern Tibetans. It is getting more obvious that, at least, the Tibetans followed these tribes up there, before or after doing the thing, presumably spawning males among the Tibetans.

Curium-247

Whilst I'm (still) figuring Lambert curves, without much luck - here's a piece on primordial Curium. This got me, er, curious. Because I didn't think we had any. Benoit Côté et al. doi 10.1126/science.aba1111

Curium-247 is the isotope in question and is, it turns out, not very radioactive. Half of it will decay to our dear friend ²³⁵U ... after 15.6 million years. This is still a short time from the perspective of a 4567 million year old solar-system so, as noted, I do not expect to see any today. I do expect the Uranium-235 in its grave but Côté's team say more; they've found the traces of the original. Alongside Iridium-129 which decays about the same.

I read that the Curium / Iridium ratio found in meteorites looks a lot like the ratio of their decay-product. So these elements have not been subjected to further baryon irradiation in space. Further, when these elements were created in the first place, the Curium wasn't created in any great quantity. This is telling Côté that the Creator (as it were) was stingy with His neutrons. He concludes: not a neutron-star merger.

I wonder about using any neutron emitter to create some Curium-247 right here today, or at least in some orbital factory. Besides firing it off for the usual Atomic Rockets, it might be good in a power-generating reactor.

Cm-247 stores for a long time, as noted, so isn't a hazard in small doses. And when it decays it decays into something you can still use. As I look around I see that its own critical mass is 7 kg (pdf): compare U-235 at 52 kg or even U-233 "thorium" at 15 kg. (Take that, NuScale!) Out in space every one of these masses decreases if you goose it with a little antimatter.

One issue of course is that whatever hits something with one neutron will likely hit it with a second neutron, especially if the target sticks around... which Curium-247 will do. Cm-248 also sticks around, 348000 years here, and she has some research value; but she is not useful for blowing sh!t up, like fusion rockets. And a third neutron will make californium which will fire more neutrons around the place and really mess you up.

Circling back to the original post, perhaps one reason we don't see Cm-247 in high doses today may well be exactly because wherever it collected into 7 kg packages, it went boom. That might put neutron-stars back on the table.

UPDATE 7/27: considering NuScale. VERY belatedly . . .

Manifold manoeuvres in the dark

Oliver Morrison has a master's thesis: "Use of Manifolds in the Insertion of Ballistic Cycler Trajectories".

We have all been assuming a craft in orbit around Earth, or on Earth, to get to Mars by a Hohmann or cycler trajectory. From Earth to Mars, Hohmann is bad enough for delta-V and cyclers are worse. You must do a "direct burn" - against a trajectory of longer amplitude than a Hohmann would be. So high thrust; damn the impulse. Hence Zubrin's warning that Bush and Ibn Saud will soak you on the shuttle fee. Elon Musk is assuming as much, too; from getting straight off Earth into a Mars Hohmann with his Starship. I was talking up tethers not long ago to get from orbit on out, or even Orion from northern Baffin Island. Gravity wells are a pain, yo.

What Morrison offers which is new: if (somehow) we've started from [Solar-Earth's] L2 halo, and we're going not for one-and-done Hohmann but for "S1L1-B" (Earth-Mars n=2): we might save on delta-V at least on that cycler. Morrison wonders what if someone's got a spaceship factory up in L2. L2 is metastable and its halo will kick you out if not station-kept. Morrison says: if you want into a cycler trajectory, find the planet's station at solar L2 halo, disconnect the craft, and let the halo's manifold do the work.

Same might hold for L1, or for Lyapunov or Lissajous closer to the nexus; but Morrison's not looking at these. Earth-Moon L2 looks interesting, as well. Morrison cited R. P. Russell and C. A. Ocampo but not, I think, 2006 "Optimization of a Broad Class of Ephemeris Model Earth-Mars Cyclers"; they'd endorsed S1L1 and Aldrin, adding only another n=2 "8.049gGf2" to be launched July 2042.

My site is all about SVL2 so... Venus-Earth might have a non-Hohmann cycler analogue. [UPDATE 3/1: If we ever get a delta-V under 10 km/s...]

This implies that high-mass cycler construction be done in L2, whence delta-V costs are least; and that low-mass shuttles should take Earthlings (and Loonies, and Venerean-orbitals) to L2. Once off L2 the cycler doesn't return to L2, because drrrr it's a cycler which needs gravity-wells to correct its trajectory.

Lambert's boomerang

On topic of cyclers I am revisiting James M. Longuski 2002 (pdf). For this purpose I am not looking at a permanent cycler - just a trajectory where Planet A boosts cargo that goes by B and comes back.

Longuski starts with these six axiomata, which I abstract out thusly:

1. The [A-B] synodic period S is [some rational fraction of A’s sidereal years].
2. [A]’s orbit, [B’s] orbit, and the cycler trajectory lie in the ecliptic plane.
3. [A] and [B] have circular orbits.
4. The cycler trajectory is conic and prograde (direct).
5. Only [A] has sufficient mass to provide gravity-assist maneuvers.
6. Gravity-assist maneuvers occur instantaneously.

For Earth-Venus, the S fraction is 13/8 Earth years. For Venus years, we need 583.92/224.701 = 2.59865; 13/5 would do it.

Axiom 2 gave Longuski a two-dimensional system, which for Venus and Earth happens only once every 243 Julian years. (For Earth and Mars, his third assumption comes close to killing his project...)

Venus' mass at Venus Express's 250 km is inferior to Earth's at that height. I read #5 as "only Venus has nothing we care about crashing a large artificial asteroid into". If we are using Venus for a gravity-well then my beloved SVL2, although also hitting ecliptic in halo, is a million km high at a right angle to Venus' orbit: pretty darn safe, the safer the closer I huddle Lissajous.

Per Longuski, This is a Lambert problem. Given [natural] n, we want to find a solution R(t) to the two-body problem that connects R₁ = (1, 0) to R₂ = (cos(2πnS), sin(2πnS)) in a time of flight T = nS. R₂ although an oversimplification for E-M is not so bad for V-E.

Each n - number of synods - has multiple solutions. I expect the venerable Hollister cycler for a n=1. And here any astrologer can tell you that n=5 is, exactly, that metonic with the Hohmann orbits: 13 Venus years, 8 Earth years wherein Earth can expect a return on its fourth year. For that what McConaghy and Longuski say about Earth-Mars is equally applicable to Venus-Earth:

Since taxi spacecraft must rendezvous with the cycler spacecraft as it passes A and B, we want the A V_∞ and the B V_∞ to be as small as possible. This typically rules out trajectories with a small number of revs (r) per repeat interval. The orbit that achieves the lowest possible sum of V_∞ at A and V_∞ at B is the Hohmann transfer orbit.

You can see why Hop David loves this one. Some course-correction is needed, so from Earth its first run by Venus has to run into the well; same with its next go 'round Earth. Not, though, notably far down the well; I think even Earth's geostationary satellites might be safe, and Venus just has statites which float anywhere.

SHORTFALL 3/4: I can follow their work now. For circular orbits (admittedly not the case for Mars) I dispute only aphelion. I target outer planet's L1 as if it were a planet too.

Chad Galactic

Zimmerman has a roundup of space news, mostly on companies not going to space this week.

Yesterday Casey had dropped by his own blog for the first time this year trashing NASA's Senate Launch System, which even Senators don't want anymore. Today we learn Bezos' Blue Origin is delayed. UPDATE 2/26: extra-virgin Galactic is not busting its space cherry; Tim Ellis is still vaporware. At least muh boiz Rocket Lab are out of the headlines...

Tomorrow we might be seeing SpaceX doing another Starship launch. We don't expect it to land, but they're getting a lot of experience in doing anything but land. [UPDATE: Probably Tuesday. Landing the thing is a... thing, and it's windy. So, Elon needs to account for wind.]

This may well explain how come Bezos Press aka Washington Post is running hitpieces on Musk and his company, and why the US's 3LAs are mounting Serious Investigations. Nice company ya got there.

Marrying Pluto with Venus

I am musing about the unobtainia around a Pluto Ramjet for a low-density mostly carbon-dioxide atmosphere. The Project's design in the 1950s was for Tory II-A, a solid reactor running about in the 1500s K (Wiki: 2330 °F). The SLAM ladz had a "Tory III" lined up before the whole project was cancelled... for Earth. Here we are at the Venus blog. Let's talk Tory IV.

I am wondering if I can raise its temperature, for an alternative to chemical scram. Higher temperature means faster exhaust, which I will need to raise my ramjet to higher altitudes and speeds. Aiming to catch up to Mach 28.

We don't need Coors anymore. The 21st Century ramjet's nuclear core can be surrounded with tantalum-hafnium-carbide (TaHfC) which stays solid up to 4488 K. This allows a liquid core, like LARS UPDATE 7/27 but that's silly - luckily, we can probably get a vapourised core out of most heavy metals below this temp.

As for the Venerean ambience, ToughSF a couple years back did a relevant piece, on reverting global warming. At 3000-4000 K the ramjet would be breaking the atmo into carbon monoxide and oxygen. Above 4000 K: pure carbon and oxygen. Hence ToughSF's interest.

As they say for NERVA, the propellant is the coolant. Either way I'll want oxygen ions not to corrode my ceramic - nor carbon to clog the exhaust with soot. I don't care as much about neutrons. I only want the thing up for maybe 48 hours.

The molten core would start to cluster further back but at its cruising speed would sink to the bottom - leaving a low-pressure vapour at the top like the empty part of a thermometer. To keep the core more evenly distributed around the ring: consider spinning it. There is certainly the incoming air to turn the fan. This does slow the exhaust a bit, and it adds mass - the heat-resistant ceramic also, I hear, is dense. To mitigate, we add magnets to keep the ions, maybe even the neutrons, where they should be - outside. And we can siphon electricity for the cockpit.

Overall this design doesn't look like Mach 28. It looks more like a Mach 8. Still a rival for the scramjet and it will stay up longer and higher. A platform, in low atmospheric pressure, to push the Lightcraft rocket(s) toward Mach 28.

UPDATE 3/19: Compartments, with low critical masses. 7/27: LOL! Let's skip right to vapour.

Like it or not

On topic of societal-theory Phys.org (h/t Ineffable Island) has an... interesting heading. Like it or not, history shows that taxes and bureaucracy are cornerstones of democracy. Possibly prepended after initial submission.

This is the speech of power masquerading as the speech of objectivity. The people who wrote this statement side with "taxes" (on you) and with the rule of the Bureaux (over you). "Democracy" is just how they sweeten the pill at the end but they don't like democracy any more than the American Founding Fathers did (excepting maybe such lightweights as Jefferson). One scents a little sadism in their imaginarium of those who might not like their conclusion.

All the above noted, their apologia for the Deep State would work much better if they raised up - from their data - that the good Deep State be patriotic, that effective Deep States in the past cared about their nation's lives. The American Deep State sometimes cares, which is why we have better vaccine production and distribution than - say - Europe's. Sometimes, though, this kratia acts more concerned with the "bureau" than with the "demos". This is certainly the case for this article.

I do not think the American demos will stand for this contradiction - and for the Deep State's sadism toward it - eternally.

Like it, or not.

The nuclear-electric drive is dead

Robert Zubrin's 2008 How To Live On Mars in its first chapter offers three means of interplanetary transport. First, cyclers; third, riding the freight. In between the chapter mentions the nukey ride to glory. The first and last, are clear: you use quick-thrust low-impulse, like ol' Boom Boom or a tether, twice: to lock into a Hohmann or cycler (or, for faraway journeys, bi-elliptic), and then to unlock you out again. I am here looking at the second option, pp. 5-7, with continuous propulsion. That is the one Zubrin didn't like. (Well okay, he doesn't like the cyclers either; and honestly neither will anyone on Earth.)

This second option is the nuclear-electric ion-drive, which Zubrin here called out as a NASA boondoggle. It's been rattling around awhile. Zubrin calculates, or maybe remembers, that it takes a year to get to a respectable speed, and maybe another year to get back down again. By inner-planet timescales you may as well use "the" cycler - implicitly Aldrin's 146-day one.

Whilst I'm sharing, Nuclear-Electric hasn't been on my "radar" this past year. (As NASA themselves would put it.) I just don't think it can scale; unless you are lugging a massive reactor behind you, and not a very, [sunglasses] e-fission-t, reactor. For that whole genre NASA it/themself last year were looking more to solar-assisted electric. Like I was. And I want that one for inner-system station-keeping only.

NASA seem to be backing off nuclear-assisted electric. On 12 February they were talking up thermal. Ay-hup, that's our NERVA! - another concept that's been knocking around NASA awhile...

Back in September 2019, the ToughSF site considered a slew of NERVA and hybrid-NERVA. We could further consider fusion or even Zubrin's own saltwater reactor.

Back to NASA's NED: file that away with Alex Cheung's ¹¹boron/hydrogen fusion reaction which also hasn't gone anywhere since conception, the early 2000s here UPDATE 4/18/23: we might be doing better!. Each seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe 'twas even Zubrin's book helped convince NASA (belatedly) that their ion drive was for the birds. If so, I thank him.

If we do get NERVA to Mars this does, however, cost Zoob's readers some immersion into his argument. Also, I'd not advise riding the freight like a hobo if the freight isn't lined with water-ice and/or lithium hydrates. Bremsstrahlung, mein Kapitan.

When Osiris died for Kemet

Ten days ago Patrick Wyman posted on the Nile before the Kings. Long before the New-Kingdom Fir'awnûn. In fact - says Wyman - there was no Kemet, no House Of Ptah (Aigupt). There and then were tribes of herder. These entered the Neolithic only in 3800 BC, says Wyman. Up to then they built cities... for their dead. Starting 3600 BC, I guess because population-density allowed specialisation, they were mummifying their dead deliberately. Like the Chileans.

The Nile came to urbanity later than the Mesopotamia did. Maybe even than the Balkans. Therefore they got there faster. The Scorpion Kings were on the scene by 3150 BC and already, as Wyman notes, Egyptian as we'd know it.

This may explain how their Resurrected God - elsewhere barely even myth - got fossilised into the religion, and remembered. Their scribes were not so removed from their origins as first-generation farmers.

The dramojh were not of the Dark

The most consistent Legacy Of The Dragon, that is of the dramojh, was body-horror. They'd maybe or maybe not use the Seeds directly, but they more used what they had already learnt from the Seeds. The dragon-scions would occasionally also pull from outer planes (the Alabast are testimony to that) but they generally stuck with Terrakal, in-house. The dramojh also pulled from the Dark, making Verdune into a land of the undead... or so says Diamond Throne.

I'll posit here that the dramojh's relationship with the Dark, like their outerplanar games, was not core to the dramojh.

Again: Mike Mearls points the way in Mystic Secrets. Here, refer to his Herald Of Annihilation - the antirunechild. This one does pull from the Dark. Back when the dramojh were still around, a Herald might arise who pulled so much that the dramojh had to put him down. But toward the end it seems even the dramojh weren't always up to such an endeavour.

Let's say this - the dramojh did what Thomas Covenant did in The Illearth War, they tore the veil between life and death. This raised the Dark, and this was done in Verdune. That land became so unhallowed that the dramojh didn't even want to touch the place anymore; thus barring them from further west. When the dramojh were eradicated, the Death King (Legacy of the Dragon) "lived" on, in Verdune's former capital.

Who was the Death King? Perhaps he was the last Herald of Annihilation - and the first to succeed. Perhaps he was a Champion Of Darkness. Perhaps he allied with the litorians in their rebellion from the Plains. Either way, it seems befitting this Morally Ambiguous setting that his main act in life, or in "life", was to oust the dramojh from Verdune... and that the Diamond Throne would rather we all not know that.

It is going to get worse

Sarah Toy explains evil-lution to ... well, to Americans. The optimism about herdmunidy that we're hearing assumes that evolution doesn't happen.

I am fully confident in my fellow citizens, mostly conservative but not all of them, to ignore all this and to carry on carryin' on spreading this thing. Because masks don't work, END THE LOCKDOWN, it's just flu, vaccines are a Bill Gates plot to tag us for slaughter. (Interesting how, if vaccines are a globalist plot... how many globalists are jumping the queue to get that jab for themselves.)

Among those who should know better, like Professor Glenn Reynolds: don't ask them. They're too busy OWNING THE LIBS by reposting stupid stuff that the anti-covid forces were nonironically owning a year ago. The very PJM business-model is LIB-OWNING, for clicks and donations. Which Glenn Reynolds, deep down, knows.

If you are awaiting my future apology... wait longer.

The Branded

As we explicate runes in Terrakal, we first must figure the Arcana Unearthed Runechildren. Runechildren are those who, at fifth level, in place of their sixth level accept a brand from... something. The runechildren are selfless, not working toward their own heroism. Per Monte Cook canon they are forces of good. Sarel the litorian was a runechild - although, interestingly, we are not so informed about the Hanavere Trinity.

Which is not to assume all Runechildren live in mutual concord. In [the past of] Diamond Throne two runechild siblings went west and founded Verdune and Thartholan: two realms, not one. Verdune would, a few decades later, ban magic which magic includes ... runes. (The dramojh invasion in their turn would fail to observe this ban, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.) This hints that more than one rune-inscribing entity exists.

Yes there exists a rune god: Vekik. AU / DT is a structurally atheist game; Vekik is nothing more or less than a reified Pythagorean statement (we'll say the same for Johrd). Vekik is evidence for this continent having no clue as to what runes are.

There also operates a runepriest cult. They seek to make runechildren by hand. I think they're closer the mark. Mike Mearls' Mystic Secrets sketched out which backstory might make what sort of runechild.

Overall - and this is clearest with Mearls - what makes a runechild in this land does not work in accordance with what its people need most, nor with the land herself. It is, then, not The Green making them. Also of note is that they quit showing up after Sarel, and only came back after the end of the dramojh. (Although if we accept Mearls, the anti-runechild Herald did continue to appear, making deals with the Dark, often against the dramojh.)

From the AU perspective I must conclude with the dragons, that the runechildren are tied with draconic interests. If the runechildren are "good" it is only to the extent they are altruists. The movie Serenity should explain sufficiently to all comers that perfect selflessness is not perfect goodness. Or, hell; just look in AU itself at the Champion class, even the Oathsworn.

Béla Kun

Anticommunists and antisemites have some... overlap. Where they find a communist Jew, they know what to think of him. So: Béla Kohen, late of Hungary, 1918-19.

Hungary was riding high as of early 1918. The Russians were fleeing the scene, allowing Hungary a free hand to settle accounts with the Moldavia. "Romania" signed a treaty all but signing itself away to the Empire. Then came the Armistice. The tables were turned, and Hungary's leader dismissed the army. Romania, in response, (re-)enlisted her own army. In the winter of 1918/19 were many armed Romanian veterans - and Romanian-ethnic veterans of Hungary - eager for a Hungarian adventure.

Transylvania and the Pannonian Plain were the two Magyar-majority regions of the old Hungarian half-empire. Romania gobbled Transylvania right quick. Over in Budapest, the old government had entirely discredited itself. Enter Béla, returning from Lenin's Russia, calling himself post-Jewish "Kun".

Over March 1919 Béla promised only in part the red armband. Mostly what Béla promised was to reënlist the Hungarian army and to hold Hungarian territory. Unfortunately what he got, for that, was a Budapest urban militia of factory-workers.

Many analogies have been made with the Munich soviet against the rest of Bavaria. The farmers, I take it, didn't want the armband. Béla's allegiance to Lenin - admittedly overstated - made the armband personal, for the Balkan peoples. They may not have wanted to be Romanian subjects. But they wanted the nightmare from Russia so much less.

And... yeah, his name was (((Kun))), and he ruled like a Kohen. After a June coup (which didn't work), his gitz Georg Lukacs and Tibor Szamuely promulgated a Red terror that alienated even more Hungarians. Tearing down the statues of Christian saints and Magyar heroes, for instance.

You know who else didn't want the armband? The Allies / Entente, that's who. Especially after March 1919 when Liebknecht and Eisner were both on the outs, and every eye was on Munich. And then Béla made some stupid mistakes like holding onto Slovakia - as a bargaining chip - instead of resisting the Romanians. Slovakia was too close to Western(ish) nations like the Czechs and Poles. And of course over 1919 the Russians had no reach over their ukraine (soon to be the Poles' ukraine), ensuring no Soviet troops were in any position to aid in any Balkan adventure.

Under Béla the Hungarian army lost on all fronts until that Vanguard Of The Proletariat quit in July blaming ... the proles.

Béla as "Leninist", then, isn't why we should condemn him. Béla was even a patriot - if only of Hungarian soil, having proved himself no friend of Magyar blood or Christian spirit. We should condemn Béla mainly because he was an idiot and a fool.

NTR

I do not recommend looking up "NTR" on the interweb. If you know what it means, I assume you are a mainline conservative and/or a hentai afficionado; if you don't know, I am not here to convince you to become either. For the rest of you: nuclear thermal rockets. NERVA, for my older readers. For neo-NERVA UltraSafe is planning six years to demo.

Up 'til late last year I kept confusing NTR-ry with the Orion project (itself not to be confused with the Orion brand of chemical rocket); and I didn't figure out where to assign NERVA until this week. Late last Tuesday, Winchell Chung tossed up to his site another subsection, for the next generation: to do with centrifuging. Anyway, I spent some weeknights this week reading up. I am here and now trying to, er, sus it all out.

Nuclear thermal doesn't run by the pulsed explosions of an Orion. It is more like the steady plasma-ejection of an ion drive. Chung proposes a fine way to understand it (wish I'd known before this week): a nuclear reaction where they use the coolant for propellant. Toward the end, when the rocket needs to quit propelling, they still have to run the coolant through the system, to prevent overheating and a state-change, assuming they don't simply eject the core. So it takes some planning as to what gets run, when, and how quickly.

The general notion is that if propellant is hot, it goes out the nozzle faster. Faster means more momentum, by Newton's Laws; that the craft might go forward, faster. Unlike the Orion they're not looking for some massive short-term thrust to get off to orbit. They want something that accelerates to get from high Earth orbit over to some other planet, faster: usually to Mars.

Classic NERVA systems, from the [para-]Orion era to the UltraSafe era, use a solid reactor. Those designs kept/keep it all from melting down or, in zero gravity, from melting all over the place. Problem with that remains, a temperature-limit: the melting point of the nuclear metal. NERVA constrained the temperature and, with it, UltraSafe's thrust/weight ratio. Below t/w = 1, no rocket is getting off the ground. On the plus side, UltraSafe can use diluted fuel - for Uranium they call it "HALEU" - so don't deal with the AEC, just with the FAA. Classic solid NERVA needs to hitch a lift on a rocket, to get into space.

Post-NERVA liquid solutions by contrast can get themselves off the ground... if they get clearance to use higher-grade uranium (so-called "weapons grade") and nobody minds spewing fallout all over the place. With centrifuging, at least you know where the melted uranium is: on the outer edge of the 'fuge. Although this, I believe, is a solution for microgravity, not for getting off a planet which has its own "centrifuge" in ms^-2, hence why no-one cared to post its t/w for Chung. It would compete with fusion. UPDATE 2/24: Pluto II.

As efficiency goes I generally prefer the magnetic force over brute heat. If nothing else I think a magnet might direct more of my super-speedy plasma out of the engine. As I look at all the NTR options, I also cannot help but worry about melting my engine... simultaneously, about not melting my engine, for when the neutrons start corroding it. Space Chernobyl, as the meme goes; like all the best memes, it's more true than not.

NERVA did, however, get you 49000 N of thrust against Ebrahimi's best-case 100 N and it provides its own energy-supply. We can assume similar for UltraSafe. "Efficiency" for overall speed is all well and good... for the outer planets. Inwardly we need acceleration and deceleration; we need higher thrust. Venus is an inner planet. UPDATE 2/22: NASA is now leaning NERVA for Mars too.

These solutions might end up being tested in space once we're already better-located in space. I do note that nobody is keen on "weapons grade" nuclear fuel here on Earth. That will assuredly change when Mars and/or the Belt have room to play in. Nobody here's in any position to stop a Martian from using Martian ores for Martian interests . . .

... at which point, we'll need to research this stuff too; to keep Mars from, well, subjecting us to NTR.

Cygnus X-1

I first read 'bout Cygnus X-1 in the earliest 1980s. It was the poster-entity for Black Holes. I didn't know at the time but apparently Stephen Hawking, the poster-boy for 'hole research, didn't approve X-1 over the whole 1980s. (He surrendered.)

So James Miller-Jones sicced his team and the VLArray on this monster, between May 29 and June 3, 2016. Almost five years later their results are in. Where Betelgeuse is closer to us, so dimmer; X-1 has proven out further, and stronger. Twenty-one solar masses!

X-1 was found in the first place because it was orbiting, and sucking protons off, a supergiant, sixty sols. Now this team has constrained some Kepler: 0.2 AU semimajor from barycentre, 5.5 day period. Pretty epic. Much mutually-closer than the Sol-Mercury.

Wonder if that system's supernova was visible to our ancestors. Wonder when the still-shining companion will follow it.

Re that Cygnus X-1 is spinning incredibly quickly—very close to the speed of light - that cannot mean orbit. For that you go to "Cygnus X-1 contains a 21-solar mass black hole – implications for massive star winds" (pdf). That spin parameter 0.97+ (1 is c) is inferred from spectral fitting of the X-ray continuum. I actually didn't know you could find black hole spin (which is oblateness) until it merged with some other high-mass entity. Good to find out.

Exotic runes from beyond the great steppe

Let's look at another tension in Arcana Unearthed / Diamond Throne. Let's look at runes.

Monte Cook rather notoriously likes magic. The 3.5 edition, to which AU reacts, did magic bad. Cook made sure to make Hasbro feel bad. Cook unleased... several alternatives, in AU.

The superhero with innate ability is here the "Witch". Those who do magic and wield a sword: "Mage Blade". Nature-magic is the "Greenbond". There's an "Akashic" whose job is to divulge backstory - I'd call this a NPC class, but I do not dispute its right to exist. The mage who goes to academy is the "Magister". You'd think that would cover it all but, "Totem Warrior" for shamanism. That might be okay because shamans live in the wilderness. Oh look: "Runethane". GAAAHHH

I applaud these alternatives, in AU. I assume Monte and friends balanced them all, adequately-enough, in AU. I am less sold on their presence in DT. It's Too Many Cooks. Before considering or deleting a theme from a setting, some justification should be offered - for or against.

So: runes.

The Runethane exists alongside Rune Lords and Runechildren (including a Rune Messiah), and a Rune Sea, and runic weapons, and various runic monsters, and whatever Mike Mearls was doing with Mystic Secrets and Transcendence. Taken together we cannot exile it all to a small island with the bullywugs. The rune theme keeps getting raised, to such an extent and with such consistency, that it just isn't easy to extricate it.

At base magic is science-and-the-humanities. It's lore. Old lore is shamanic and akashic. The past is passed through sentient intermediaries. Runes might come next: the Shang were our very own Rune Lords, casting their oracle-bones. Those "magisters" come in the final stage, with true literacy. (Mesoamerica like Egypt never went to the rune stage.)

I suspect dragons and I know dramojh were not teachers of true literacy. (Weird-science / alchemy seem more a Verrik thing. I got no problem with Verrik.) By the Shang analogy I do catch a draconic whiff from that preliteracy which is runes.

I rule that all this rune stuff belongs to the ultramontaine fringe, outside the Diamond Throne lands. More: so far, that all of it is for NPCs only. There practice no native runethanes among Terrakal's major races. As for Runechildren, they're legends of the past to keep in the past (or to the far west). So there's that other Malhavoc short-story collection to treat as fan fiction . . .

Unlike "the Dragons Return!", I'd not rule the runes wholly off-map. Foreigners doing a strange and archaic form of magic is exactly the sensawonda we came to the table to game out. So: make it exotic. I see their place in the west, where Monte put Pallembor.

The sandbox of good and evil

Interactive fiction has always held a tension between puzzle and story. Some of that is solved by doing Aristotle right: where your plot does Catharsis on the last third of your staged tragedy, this plot resulted from that worldbuilding you (ideally) did in its first third. So let's look at D&D campaign settings... again.

With Tolkien, whose heirs are Dragonlance and Midnight, you know what you are getting: a clear goal. The ancient evil has reärisen and everything you do is to fight that. More D&D follows the Conan model, which was the Heracl[ew]es model before that and B/Gilgamesh before that. You solve mini-goals, in a quest to become a hero. Figurative and literal Immortality, if playing the Master Set.

In the latter case, the evil isn't Sauron; the evil is the whole world, set up against you. Ishtar (Aramaic Ashtarthé) sent her minions against Enkidu and Gilgamesh. The wicked and weak Tirynsian king Eurystheus set Heracles onto his labours. It is unclear to what degree Grendel and the dragon interrelated, but Beowulf fought both.

Somehow a lot of D&D just works, in its aim to challenge players' avatars. Diamond Throne keeps nagging me as a setting which I never figured out if it did or did not work. It may have bugged Monte Cook also which is how come it kept getting expanded, retconned, and "evolved".

I think when you start any setting from the ground up, you have the choice of Elder Evil or to assume there isn't one. Another, less bothersome Monte setting was Ptolus: it had the Spire. If you were playing in Ptolus you literally had the Elder Evil over your head all this time. Yes there was some guff about Galchutt and Chaos, technically more primordial, but honestly if you fixed the Spire you were done there.

There's probably always something in the past that was Evil. Diamond Throne had the dramojh. They're dead though. So you're playing Mario after you rescued the princess for... what, exactly?

Sure, a DM could cook up banes (evil artifacts) and scatter them around old dramojh ruins. Mike Mearls did that Thrice Cursed Crown; Monte himself did those electrodes Between Life And Death. I do not think either adventure particularly worked. Looked, er, artificial.

If there is no Elder Evil then evil (or good) lies in our own actions. Life, then, is its own reward and has its own purpose. That leaves open, what about life that ends up parasitic and/or predatory on other life - starting on your life. That's probably why Monte brought bullywugs. I'd argue the philosophy was trite and its implementation didn't work either. Note how even bullywugs got sequestered onto an otherwise-irrelevant island.

If life is good and we expand that to The Balance - called the Green here - one clear enemy (for gaming) is undead. Indeed undead got brought into this setting so early it distorted everything. Another enemy is outsiders, up to the level of selfish gods, who don't care about the setting for its own sake. Put 'em together and you get Orcus.

One outside threat, that tied many of these threads together, was the Tenebrean Seeds. They're a Legacy of the Dragon retcon, I admit. That can be resolved by pushing them west of the map, or on some plane accessible through Thartholan. Most LoD is best treated as a collection of Tier Two monsters that you only meet in the mountains or deep underground, not in the Ghostwash core which the Diamond Throne actually rules.

So far our tally is: undead, disinterested invaders, and the seduction of the Seeds. Basically: that whole cluster / barrier of Verdune, Thartholan, and (second-hand) the Bitter Peaks. That should suffice for at least three mostly-unrelated Adventure Paths. Even before we get started on the nagpaharrids. To sum up, Diamond Throne might have some problems in its implementation, but as of LoD it wasn't a failure. To the extent Greyhawk has always worked, Terrakal works.

To restate with more precision: as of 2004, Terrakal's ethical matrix used to work.

If you are liberal online, thank Rush

G-d has called in his loan to Rush Limbaugh, giant of free speech in America. If you are liberal, and you are still able to speak; thank Rush.

Rush was a Rightist. Not as far Right as is being caricatured, and not always as right as some of his fans might claim; but he shored up the Right side of the dialogue in America and, by extension, in the West. As long as he was out there, all the "intellectual dark webbers" were free to denounce him whilst they continued to ply their trade to the immediate left of him.

The Limbaugh family isn't Catholic and I don't think Rush died in communion with the Saints. However I also do not recall that the man ever badmouthed the institution of the Church. (I am sure Rush occasionally commented about the foibles of certain of the flawed men running the place, as was his right and - in certain points - his duty.) Again: as long as Rush was free to speak, public Catholics were free to stake out their positions in public, even denouncing him in places.

We are all the lesser for not having Rush anymore. May G-d bless and keep Rush Limbaugh. May He shine his face upon him and grant him peace.

The Martian atmosphere changed

Right now, iron will rust on Mars' surface like on Earth. Yes, even though its atmospheric carbon is already oxidised; carbon-dioxide can oxidise metals. On Earth at least it used to be that rust left on the surface was "reduced", back to iron. Our Oxidation Event, when the atmosphere changed, is marked 2.5 Gya. Joe Michalski's team reports a similar turnaround for Mars.

On Hadean Earth the reducing gases would I think start with methane, pure CH₄. Probably the same on Mars. The release implies that the Martian 3.5 Gya water-age, called the Noachian there, was still reducing despite the H₂O and perchlorates. The oxidation of the atmosphere came after that.

As for "after that" I don't know that there was ever free oxygen on Mars but, to be fair to Michalski, he doesn't say there was. Carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide have oxygen already; but do they take more oxygen, from iron rust? Carbon-monoxide is reactive to iron compounds (like haemoglobin), more even than oxygen. All these gasses will be pumped out by those volcanoes. Maybe a tipping-point was reached where the volcanoes sputtered out and CO₂ swamped the others.

A comet?

Posted here last year was that Chicxulub killed the dinos and that it came in at a 60 degree angle. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr., and Amir Siraj from Harvard are looking into what this meteor was and whence it came. These are related questions.

I've been saying "meteor" (maybe "bolide") and not "asteroid" because I've been trying to be neutral, although I do have a bias (see below). A meteor is an invader into our atmosphere, when it becomes visible. Asteroid implies we know its origin - from the asteroid belt, as opposed to the Oort Cloud where live comets. (I understand that the Kuiper Belt does not produce Earth-crossing rocks or snowballs, so is deemed moot.)

The latest study claims that Chicxulub was carbonaceous. The type isn't common in the nearer asteroids, which mainly come from Vesta inbound, and are stony or even iron (also uncommon). They are more common from Ceres on out but - these generally stay 3 AU away and out. [UPDATE MAY 2022: As witness Ceres herself.] You know what does come into Earth-crossing orbits? Comets do, that's what.

For that we need a theory on how many comets have been coming this way over the hundred-million-year timescale. Loeb's team thinks they've found such a theory: that Jupiter has pulled in a lot of Oort, sunward. These then break up close to the sun and, presumably, a lot of those fragments just burn or boil. But even these fragments are massive, and the Sun doesn't get them all; such that when one doesn't burn up but hits Earth instead, it goes boom.

All this said, I do have a complaint. Less to Loeb, perhaps, than to his interlocutors. We have the full study. "Iridium" isn't mentioned in it.

The whole Alvarez impactor theory came about in the 1980s because the K/T layer had iridium. That is a metal, "siderophile" so-called; bound to iron. I was until today unaware that carbonaceous rocks are enriched in this, much less snowballs from beyond Yuggoth. (And there exists no natural iridium deposit in the shallow coasts of the Gulf.) Some studies (Loeb tells us) have accounted for that. Loeb et al. point to Trinquier, A., Birck, J. .-L. & Jean Allègre, C. "The nature of the KT impactor. A 54 Cr reappraisal. Earth Planet", Sci. Lett. 241 (2006), 780-8. As I read Anne Trinquier, doi 10.1016/j.epsl.2005.11.006: yeah, the iridium (and chromium-54) is accounted.

Best I can tell Loeb is letting Trinquier speak for him; Loeb is, there, talking to his peers and not to us midwits. So the reporter - who is talking to us midwits - hasn't let Loeb down; the reporter has let us down, for not asking "durr what about the iridium".

One thread Trinquier left open which Loeb didn't close - what's the chemical composition of an Oort comet, against a trans-Ceres clayball. We may have to await another comet mission like the missions recently sent to Bennu.

UPDATE 2/25: Globally distributed iridium layer preserved within the Chicxulub impact structure. Also talking carbonaceous chondrite. The word "comet" is absent... as is "Trinquier". Coïncidentally Jupiter does snag visiting comets here a lot.

The god of the wheel

The Greek pantheon includes a god "Hēlios". Canonically he is an ex god, associated with Hyperion a Titan alongside Kronos. Homer witnesses that cults to Ἠέλιος survived here and there into the Archaic Age. He isn't named in Linear B but Pylos did follow his calendar: doi 10.1007/978-1-4020-8784-4_27.

Leaving Greece, here's the Zealand sun-chariot.

That -ios in "Hēlios" marks an adjectival genitive, like "Dionysius" for a servant of the wine-god. "Hēlios" is a pious euphemism for his True Name like "Bear" for "Arktos" or "Ursine"... or, for that matter, "Hyperion" Who Dwelleth Above. (Looks Semitic to me. Luwian would be "Hēlissos".) To truly get his name across, further, that opening ēta needs to be lengthened to fit its Homeric metre: "Heël-".

When Homer skips a beat like this it's long-known that it's because his teachers had slipped a waw in there. Good [Attic] Greek doesn't have 'em like good [Castilian] Spanish doesn't have 'em; but both peoples were well aware they used to have 'em, and found ways around having to print 'em. Some Greek dialects did print 'em, with the digamma, which became Etruscan - and Latin! - "F".

Wiki finds the word in common to Ionic and Aeolic. Cretan Doric had "abelios", leaning into that V. Pamphylian doubles that. The Spartans look like an outlier with "bela" but, given Crete, we must assume a contraction from Doric. So: everyone triangulates common Archaic Greek *hāwelios. I cannot find the Arcado-Cypriote word for "sun"; it is quite possible they didn't get this memo.

Indo-Euro scholars see "solar" elsewhere, and are aware of pre-Greek moves from initial S to initial H. So they posit *seh₂u-el. In this case all the Greeks except the most incorrigible bumpkins and outliers agreed, first, to hail "the god of Sol" and then, in unison, forgot to differentiate Aten from Amun. Well maybe.

I seriously doubt I am the first to offer a minority-report, but we might be dealing with pious Balkan Greeks who followed not The Solar One, but The Wheeling One. This is Bronze Age Indo-European pantheon, (re?)introduced to the Aegaean Sea after LH IIIC. And why not. Certainly more sexy than Aten's dung-beetle.

The Dark Age in West Africa

HBDChick links to population collapse in Congo rainforest. The article looks to 1149 radiocarbon dates linked to 115 pottery styles recovered from 726 sites, matching that with linguistics and genetics. None of these dating methods are perfect; genetics in particular works by generation, not timeline unless there is literacy.

Dirk Seidensticker - whose name sounds like a Mel Brooks character - and his team find an expansion of West African culture in this region... up to AD 400. Then, it seems, came "Late Antiquity". The population crashed until AD 600, and didn't really recover until AD 1000. So, file the Congo watershed and basin for yet another Dark Age, if Scott Alexander will pardon the expression; alongside the Mediterranean and Iran.

As noted these dates are not solid, absent a good West African IntCal20 with tree-rings and the like. They are solid enough to tell us that most Bantu languages in Congo today are young. Future linguistic study in Congo will need to distinguish between AD 1000 founders and survivals from before the bottleneck. Some communities did survive but seem to have switched languages, like the Pygmies did (but again... when?).

The proposed date for the population collapse, at least, overlap the coming of plague to the Axsum kingdom up that other great African river. Either Congo got the yersinia from Ethiopia or the other way 'round; David Keys would say the latter. Yersinia's base is clearly Eurasian but there was plenty of Iran / Somalia commerce during the Sasanian heyday, maybe even Parthian before then.

We've noted here, also, fifth century Ilopango. This wasn't the AD 536 event in Constantinople. But maybe Ilopango had reach for weather further south and west. Certainly seems to have cut the Xinca culture off at the knees, so it never rivaled the Maya.

Suicidal tendency

The CoVID-averse side of the 'web, which I am on, perhaps to a fault, sometimes links to Studies that "suicide rates went down last year". I link to a few Studies here but haven't linked to those.

I have reasons for that. The CoVID-averse community, as - unfortunately - now a community, is subject to confirmation-bias as assuredly as the dumbest Ace moron. I went looking, by several engines including Google, for such studies. One prominent one came from Japan that self-murder went down in spring and up in the second lockdown autumn-winter. And now comes the city of St. Francis.

It appears, overall, that due to Trump's Three Good Years the suicide rates and general depressive ideation - awful over Obama's second term - were dropping... in 2019. Then came the Pooh Flu. As people (at first) figured that We Will Get Through This Together, at the start of 2020 things were also going pretty well in the mental field. This is what Japan shows. Later in 2020 is when people started getting the sads. Actual action on that follows later.

This is, then, a warning. Those commenting "echshually the rates are DOWN" are wrong; they were operating from earlier studies, and they weren't seeing the trendlines - just like their opponents late last spring when they said "hey deaths are down!!" as the infections were ticking up.

And to soi-disant Health Nerd's comment: The fact that COVID-19 denialists get really mad when you point out that the data mostly doesn't support a massive rise in suicides at the population level during 2020 is really quite telling. He carefully parses his data and shifts this dishonesty - and callousness - around to namecalling and sadism. h/t HBDChick, who really should have made more clear on what stance she took.

In addition we really do need to be looking into some way to reopen schools safely.

I said "safely". The demon CAN spread in the schools. To stop it means tests, masks, and vaccines; if you're not for all the above, you are not in the conversation and you will continue to lose and to be locked down. San Francisco (and colonies like Austin and Boulder) are situated fairly well to control this spread.

A FEAST OF CHAPEAUX 4/1: Suicides went down... overall. Although: my post here focused at schools and at families dealing with school-aged children. Given the demographics of CoVID SARS-2 deaths, I expect some overlap between obese late-middle-aged men: those who died of the disease, against whether they might have taken the exit early by themselves.

HALP 4/11: Gideon M-K doesn't like it when researchers get all personal against him. How about we all let him and Ioannides have this food fight amongst one another.

When a woman wears the Ring

How a woman would use the Mask - that's the question of Adûnaphel the Nazgûlah. Even Tolkien did not dare that question directly; he had Galadriel tell Frodo, not show him.

Either way: that's a different movie. I admit: I'd watch that movie. Maybe I did watch that movie, with Mrs Jessica Rabbit. (I sure as hell didn't watch Cool World.)

Although: it isn't 1994 anymore. In Current Year I shouldn't trust any American director to film this. America is Melkor's land whose artists celebrate the Ring's power. Thou shalt - wilt - celebrate Brie Larson in Captain Marvel - or die alone, incel.

Luc Besson?

UPDATE 2/21: Now I think about it, WandaVision . . .

The Mask

The Mask (formerly Mayhem) and The Crow came out about the same time: early/mid 1990s. Each came out of "indie" lone-ranger superhero comics, to rival the DC / Marvel juggernauts. I am concentrating on The Mask for now; John Arcudi's 1989-95 implementation of the Dark Horse idea is a large reason Dark Horse survives to this day.

(Vox Day is promising something even Genx-ier and edgy-er in his Project Asteroid but... he has been promising a lot of stuff, these days.)

The 1993 sequel The Mask Returns reveals the Mask, later on, as some sort of voudoun talisman. The 1994 movie, which might not have known that lore, has it as the phylactery of Loki. In all these stories, the mask brings out the inner core of whoso wears it.

Ipkiss in both is a Beta Male who, when he dons the mask, acts out against all those who have crossed him in life. The 1989-91 run's Ipkiss has a girl, but he becomes abusive to her. He gets killed in the end of that run. In the movie he gets pushed by events at first but he does, in the end, figure out that he needs to save his "community" or at least his girl from evil.

The movie isn't perfect. It introduces characters later into the narrative than Aristotle should like ("DOYLE?!"). Here it reminds of Orgazmo, also comic-inspired.

The comic, best I can tell, has some overall message that a Tex Avery cartoon brought to life will end the same: Chaotic Evil. The movie likewise starts Stanley Ipkiss on this path of personal vengeance. But although no perfect angel, the movie wants Stanley to be likeable. So the movie cannot use Tolkien's message entirely for its own. The movie instead explores beta male insecurity. Dorian is Stanley's dark mirror. Dorian is a maskwraith. Dorian ends up one of the more believeable villains in Hollywood.

The movie leaves open to the audience whether Loki's Mask is, indeed, the Ring. We don't know if it kills the diver who finds it, although so we suspect. (And if so: Aristotle would say that the Mask killed him in the wrong way.) In both the movie and the comic, some people can resist its temptations.

Arcudi seems to have gotten the movie's message which is why, in his final turn at the comic The Mask Strikes Back, the violence is more to scenery than to characters. (Or so wiki tells me; that run is still gratuitously violent.) One character, a former stoner with a tendency to hallucination, rejects the Mask. Dark Horse went looking for other authors after that. And there was a cartoon. THERE WAS NO MOVIE SEQUEL.

One thing the movie manages NOT to do, which the comic does, is to give the mask to a woman. Arcudi didn't understand women so when his women wore the mask, they acted like... men. The movie knows Aristotle well enough to restrict the mask to its protagonist, to its villain, and to one comic-relief character (the dog Milo). Perhaps the movie also knows what it doesn't know about women. We must respect that.

The 'Iraqi libraries: moved, not lost

'Tis common in midwit historical thought that duh Cris-chins burnd duh liberary. A somewhat higher class of midwit used to say it was DAH MOODSLIMS, usually citing 'Umar. Muslim apologists got their own midwits, with various What Went Wrong theories, and many of these look to the Mongols' conduct in Baghdad. The dimwits rarely know which Khan it was, but I here address those who immediately know to say "Hulegu!", maybe even with the umlauts; our 101 IQ neural nets trap facts to arrange around the central lie, and we tell ourselves we are wise.

By the late AD 1200s the Mongols were already quite literate, and although their "Yuan" regime hadn't gone this far into China they already controlled that whole "Silk Road" between Persia and Gansu. They'd somewhat famously sponsored the Nestorian brand of Christianity (against Islam), to such an extent that the Catholics in the Crusader society figured them for a stable ally. By now we've left behind the dimwits; the midwits - we midwits - already came to this blog with an inkling of all the above. In our mind we should expect a effluorescence of Syriac Christian literature. We midwits would assume that Hulegu burnd duh Moodslim liberary.

So last year Michal Biran ran an audit on the liberaries of the 'Iraq after the Mongol "sack" - "Libraries, Books, and Transmission of Knowledge in Ilkhanid Baghdad". This reminds that Nasiruddin al-Tusi did, indeed, keep at work under the Ilkhans, up in Maragha in Azerbaijan. Most of the article looks at Ibn al-Fuwaṭī who, like Ebedjesu of Nisibis, and like Ibn al-Nadim, composed a bibliography, a book of the books he'd known.

There were, still, a lot of books. Many books by Jews and Christians, sure. But also many books in Arabic. Clearly the Muslims were not just copying books in exile in Cairo or Delhi. The Mongols let the scholars in Arabic, keep writing in Arabic.

Biran points out that the caliphate in the thirteenth AD century was, although relatively strong, still not the caliphate of the ninth. By then it had once more fallen behind the Saladins of the world. That Bayt al-Hikma was no longer the one authoritative Islamic library; plenty of madrassas were keeping their own libraria. We must keep in mind that The Hadith in this mediaeval world was already a matter of literature, well beyond the (already overstated) orality of that ninth century.

Biran finds that it was not until the middle 1300s that Muslims started talking of the Lost Library. If there was an appreciable loss of literature Ibn al-Fuwaṭī and Al-Tusi should have mentioned this with horror. Even Barhebraeus should have noticed, given his full immersion in Arabic literacy. (Timur would come still later, followed by other Sacks Of Baghdad perhaps more damaging.)

What the Mongols did do was to move books. The Yuan would bring books to their capital Peking / Beijing. The Ilkhans, likewise, shifted texts up north, to Tabriz I guess. Also to Maragha... where al-Tusi was at work. But even that is overstated since the Ilkhans maintained Baghdad as an intellectual hub, an oriental sort of Roman Athens, which is how Ibn al-Fuwaṭī found it.

If we are Mutazils we might bemoan that a caliphal library was scattered, to be preserved more whimsically by idiosyncrats; and that the hardcore Sunnism of Ibn Taymiya was thereby strengthened. Maybe. But now we are shifting goalposts.

Wanted: scramjets

I need to move freight from Venus' atmo to orbit. Over a year ago I'd run low-orbit calculations just for the delta-V. Earlier this month I was talking about a ferry from a reasonably-high Venus orbit into 100 km altitude which is 6150 km pericytheree. From a solar-system perspective the latter is more useful. How fast is that ferry going in Venus' atmo?

Luckily I do find the gravitational parameter μ of Venus... in meters. 3.24859E+14 if my other inputs are in meters.

At 100 km any satellite does aerobraking but, Venus Express told us, not much. The VEx was ranging 250-66000 km altitude at eccentricity 0.84. Math.Sqrt(3.24859E+14 * (2.0/6300000 - 2.0/(72000000 + 6300000))) should have been 9740 m/s at peri'. I won't lose by running mine a bit lower and more circularly; 20000 km semimajor would be 9455 m/s, nu?

By reference Mach One is 343 m/s. So Venus Express, at its low point, was running over Mach Twentyeight. Ramjets, ranging Mach 3-6 here, should range from 1-2 km/s. They go faster at lower air-pressures but we haven't much tested these altitudes over Earth; if they fly too fast for too long they fly too FAR, over other countries' airspace. We can fly a Pluto ramjet for some time over Venus. This jet wasn't fast enough for my 2020 low-orbit; it's even worse for my 2021 ellipse.

I want thrice times Mach Nine. UPDATE 5/17: Earth is looking to Mach Seventeen.

Venus might need to develop that combustion ramjet, the "scramjet" so called. These are barely out of the planning stages here on Earth in part because for any duration, as mentioned, they need a good distance to move through (and too many people listen to concern-trolls). UPDATE 2/24: Molten-core Pluto?

The boring billion

Quick: tell me what happened 1800-800 Mya! The quick answer to that is eukaryotes 1700 Mya. Recently mooted are chloroplasts 1342 Mya. Otherwise nothing. After 800 Mya we start seeing the Cryogenian phosphour chain and then the Ediacaran/Vendian, when the dynamo re-booted. Not as WOW DUDE as the Cambrian and points on, but of interest. Not so much before then.

This Boring Billion is, to palaeontologists (happy birthday Charles Darwin, by the way), the Annoying Billion because there was eukaryotic life on Earth throughout. But it did little except, literally, fester. Why weren't here a 1500 Mya chloroplast and a 1300 Mya trilobite?

Ming Tang, Xu Chu, Jihua Hao, and Bing Shen have a piece out on that: "Orogenic quiescence in Earth’s middle age" doi 10.1126/science.abf1876. Tang's quartet say that we were Heinlein's Sanctuary planet. They find that the crust thinned out starting 2500 Mya.

The continents ground into the Nuna-Rodinia pangaea, and stopped. (I take it that the crust was thinner elsewhere than here.) Its sinking mountains became hills. Flat, rounded, boring hills do not send phosphorous silt down slow, boring rivers. No change on land meant no evolution in the unchanging shoals.

Our crust thickened again 800 Mya on. And once life started getting bilateral-symmetric the dynamo rebooted.

ANNIVERSARY 2/12/22: Daily Mail, citing Ziyi Zhu. It finetunes the above: eukaryotes 1650 Mya, which then live a Zothique existence of quiet hopeless cannibalism.

Failure

The I&I site collects hrrdrrsrrvative editorials much like Townhall and PJMedia do, all of whom do a brisk trade in linking one anothers' nonsense. Including on masks (which Ace just cain't quit).

If you needed proof that I&I is rubbish, check out JJ Sefton's link parade and scroll down. You have to scroll down Ace's comments to read Loki calling them out.

Obviously Elon Musk's SpaceX Accidents Keep Happening Over and Over Again is more of this "unproven", "muh safety" disingenuous argumentation you see among the Masks Don't Work, Vaccines Are Dangerous crowd. (We might also re-read Atlas Shrugged.) Musk's "accidents" are tests. Tests are supposed to have a failure-rate until that rate goes down to Falcon 9's.

And see, once more, masks and vaccines. A failure-rate must only be better than the alternative, catching SARS-2 in these examples. Musk, then, needs to fail less often than the Space Shuttle or maybe the Apollo programme, before he gets to rivalling NASA.

Plucking fruit from Venus

I had some ideas about collecting hydrogen along Venus' orbit, very high up. Then I wondered about moving ionic oxygen, from low orbit, to higher orbits. Let's adjust the atmo-skimming model so not to interface with the Lightcraft. This is like the Molniya-to-Mars (pdf) except I'm feeding upward not downward.

If Venus thick-ish atmo starts altitude ~100 km (pericytheree 6150 km). That is normally the "aerobraking" altitude. However - this craft isn't here to brake so much as to scoop. The act of scooping will brake the craft, of course, lowering its semimajor therefore apocytheree. It now has a canister of somewhat pressurised hot gas to show for it, maybe at 100 Mpa like Earth. At its new more-circular and lower orbit, it ionises the gas and blows that up the well with the other ions.

This setup keeps all human activity above Venus in case we haven't floated aerostats yet. Which lack, Casey last April assumed.

This increases the oxygen available in (low-)orbit, and adds nitrogen and maybe even some carbon (monoxide). Supposedly. It seems rickety to me given that the Sun is already blowing gas into low-orbit. I conclude: silly, so superfluous ... for shifting propellant. Directly. The full orbital ring is better... when we get there.

REWRITE 12/15

Stephen Baxter wasn't totally wrong

I've hit Mr Baxter once or twice here and there, but one thing Stone Spring does sketch out: that not all Epipalaeolithic cultures were communal utopiai. The book is based on the interactions between hierarchs and would-be hierarchs, set as it is in the 7000s BC, given that Jericho already exists. In his book, also: the Pretani exist.

So let's talk Aeon's latest - on those pre-agricultural hierarchies. Its examples, which Spaniards recorded, are from south Florida and the Pacific North West. Our midwit takes on the stone-age noble savage come from huntergatherers we've met in the nineteenth century (if not twentieth!). By that time we'd only seen them in this planet's most marginal environments, like the Kalahari. Or in the Australian desert, or Patagonia - we could add. Quite a lot of them had been kicked out of nicer places, beforehand, at that. Back in the sixteenth century some huntergatherers yet survived in more-fertile homelands.

These stone-age men (and women!) might not have done much farming, beyond digging up roots. But they did practice aquaculture. They "farmed" fish. Aeon notes the old Chilean desert coast; I recall quite a few books discussing the preceramic Atacama peoples' emphasis on rope and net.

The article points to about 30kBC as when Eurasians started being VERY lavish when burying some of their dead. This, to Aeon, implies hierarchy: such riches had to be procured. It also precedes the move into Beringia (but postdates Australia...).

All that said, I remain skeptical that we shall find very much evidence of hierarchical protocivilisation before all that, in Eurasia or in Africa. If we do find such, we shall also need to explain how come it didn't "take", south of the Sahara.

Europe's 1% sold out Europe

Michael Hudson does a tafsir on Rammstein. One obvious question is, if Europe's victorious powers in 1919 did not have to maintain their debts, ultimately held by the US of A, why did they.

I'm not concerned about the US being "Selfish" or even "Greedy", much less "Bullies". All countries look to their own interests. The Soviet Union was plenty selfish and greedy, and violent. It's the job of other countries to call the big boys' bluff. In 1945-8, as Hudson illustrates, they couldn't. But in 1919 . . .

France and England - and, from 1924-29, Stresemann's Germany - had a window to tell the Yanks where to get off, like the Soviet Union had done ("go bill the Tsar: in Hell!"). That, of course, would have kicked off the Wall Street crash (and bank run) earlier, under Coolidge. On the other hand I believe Coolidge might have righted the ship better than Hoover and Roosevelt would.

The midwit answer is the same answer as to why the Allies did not accept the various peace proposals coming out of Berlin 1916-17. On Armistice Day the Allies had a choice between clearing the slate, and allowing red armband Germany to totter along; or, getting on the hook with Uncle Sam, but passing the sharp end of the hook to the Hun. Sheer spite certainly explains how it was all sold to the public. But spite might not be the reason.

I also wonder if the debt was a convenient excuse to shrug off the demands of Labour-with-a-'u'. There we're getting warmer.

If I read Hudson right, he proposes that the rich in Europe parked their assets in American banks, those banks being deemed more stable and less likely to confiscate it all like the armbands were promising. If they'd done this before 1924, to a sufficient extent, then their motive would be more aligned with American interests than with the fisc at home. To whit: "England" owed the US money. The smart Englishmen moved their money into US banks. By this sleight of hand, "England" owed that money to American banks... who owed it to the richest Englishmen.

As Betelgeuse, so goes Saiph

We got axion [lack of] news from red giant Betelgeuse late last month. It tugged at some of my neurons that this star has been better constrained last year but I couldn't remember exactly. Luckily we now have Meridith Joyce's more-formal paper on that. Which is paywalled but more-luckily points to the arXiv.

Because Betelgeuse is bigger and redder than the Devil's arse in South Park it's long been foisted on schoolkids that this horror has a 5 AU radius, and is/was 600 light years away. Over the past few years from our perspective the star has been getting dimmer. This has caused many astronomers to wonder what is happening over there/then.

It turns out that we are not dealing with a normal red giant. It isn't burning hydrogen; it is burning helium, and not for all that long either. This reaction can keep going for another 100000 years. The helium burn implies more central gravity; so the star isn't as big as we thought it was. The mass is 16.5 to 19 solars; radius, 750 solars which is 3.5 AU. (Might still be about as hot as they'd thought, though.) Since it isn't as intrinsically bright it isn't as far away, neither. It's 530 light years out, not 600 and certainly not the 650 assumed by the axion study.

They do find pulsations: two periods of 185 (±13.5) days and approximately 400 days. That year-2020 dimming wasn't among them. So the dimming was probably a shadow - a dust cloud. And if Betelgeuse is not prenova then, well, we shouldn't expect its axions (if any) to be emitting in the X band as predicted.

I don't know if Betelgeuse was ever on the main-sequence; Beta Centauri is supposedly over 10 solar masses but still smaller than this guy. This guy is (rather, was) more like Saiph and Rigel on the other side of Orion. Saiph is still marked 200 parsecs = 650 light years away from us; it too is a post-hydrogen supergiant but hasn't gone red... yet.

Tenebrea

Critical Drinker talks The Hobbit. He notes the story's overabundance of silly dwarf characters, and its uninspired protagonist. The Drinker thinks he is talking about the movie. He is deep down talking about the book.

John Reuel Tolkien wrote several stories on downtime during his Oxford career and his labour-of-love in sketching Beleriand's tragic history. The Hobbit was in part just the Tollers story which moved units ... but it also had The Ring, which caught at this author's Wagner-reading subconscious. Keep in mind - at the time The Hobbit first went to the printer, there was nothing much in it that Farmer Giles of Ham or 'Leaf', by Niggle didn't have. It was just, like, a STORY, man; and a fairly episodic and undistinguished one, at that.

Peter Jackson brought out, in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, the core of what LotR could have been. That story was a near-perfect epic, and Jackson created a true work of art from that. My unpopular opinion: Jackson would do much as Tolkien himself had done, when Tolkien spun LotR from The Hobbit. Tolkien took elements from his own The Hobbit, which again wasn't that good in itself, from which elements he made something great.

Well... Jackson also brought out something from The Hobbit, directly. About all anyone could, who wasn't writing an episodic kids' story.

Elsewhere I've noted Monte Cook and Michael Mearls, in their introduction of the Tenebrean Seeds into their Arcana Unearthed universe. Maybe you'll find transcendence. Maybe... you'll become an abomination.

Jackson held onto the Seeds for too long.

The dry Nile of Sirte

A couple years back I started Dartnell's Origins, only finishing it on LOCKDOWN. I was annoyed it didn't break out the Sahara into one such chunk.

Luckily Ineffable Island points to Cécile L. Blanchet: river activity between Tunis and Cyrene, over 160000 years. Through most of this span the shoreline was further north and that's whence they've got their sediment-core. It also encompasses my favourite era, that Almost-Holocene called Eemian. That should be 126-120 kBC here. The notion is, as with dust in the Canaries, that river effluvia at Sirte tells what was going on in the interior.

The article is Blanchet et al., "Drivers of river reactivation in North Africa during the last glacial cycle" doi 10.1038/s41561-020-00671-3:

We show that river runoff occurred during warm interglacial phases of Marine Isotope Stages 1 and 5 due to precession-forced enhancements in the summer and autumn rainfall over the entire watershed, which fed presently dry river systems and intermittent coastal streams. In contrast, shorter-lasting and less-intense humid events during glacial Marine Isotope Stages 3 and 4 were related to autumn and winter precipitation over the Libyan coastal regions driven by Mediterranean storms.

Usually when they talk MIS they're hitting upon Stage 1 at the top. As with their own "BP" system (and "BC") magnitude grows with age. So MIS 1 is us: post- Younger Dryas. Stage 5e begins peak Eemian 121 kBC, although 5a lingers to 69 kBC. If Blanchet started 158 kBC her team should have got quite a bit of MIS 6 in there as well; they seem to be taking 6a+5e for their "5".

The glacial periods illustrate the Greek Underworld, where "Winter" in Crete and points south is the nice time of year. Summer is hell. Over 69-27 kBC, Libya had some seasonal runoff, from storms, but was generally arid. The abstract doesn't tell of MIS 2 but I'll call it: utter desert.

It seems when it was globally warmest, in stages 1 and 5, it rained in the Sahara in the summer. That would have led to Nile-like floods downstream. That incorporates peak Lake Chad over the Mesolithic and the Eemian.

I do wonder, given global-warming attention, why the northern Sahara is not greening today. Are humans irrigating the moisture faster than it can build up?

Whip it good

A few years ago Charles Stross, a man I must disclose I don't respect, posted some ideas for the Musk Starship.

Stross hasn't posted what he thinks about Musk these days but I suspect he's waiting out the politics; if/when it doesn't go Musk's way, I am not hopeful for anything gracious. I also cannot rule out Stross will "fortify" his previous pro-Musk posts should that happen. So I'll excerpt this bit in full:

One serious proposal for a long-term Lunar presence requires the construction of a Lunar space elevator. This would not run from surface to geosynchronous orbit—the moon, being tidally locked, has no GEO—but instead to the L1 (near-side) or L2 (far-side) Earth-Moon libration points, 56,000 and 67,000 kilometers from the surface (points where the effect of the Moon's gravity and the effect of the centrifugal force resulting from the elevator system's synchronous, rigid body rotation cancel each other out and an elevator could be stable). Unlike a terrestrial space elevator sufficiently high tensile strength materials for such a tether already exist. There is, however, the slight problem of fabricating and shipping a 120,000 kilometer long cable out to near-Lunar orbit (and capturing a near-Earth asteroid to act as a counterweight). This is just a wild-ass Charlie guess, but I suspect shipping up 500 tonne cable drums will work out cheaper in the end than trying to build a carbon fiber factory in space (at least, until space industries are sufficiently developed to go the whole eat-your-own-dogfood distance).

Back in 2016 there was some "LiftPort Group", noted there, not really doing much since. The Lunar space-lifts looked more practical. So: if we have the capacity to send a 120 mega-meter cable to the Moon; why not a 60 mega-meter cable to SVL2.

What would SVL2 do with 250 tonnes and 60 Mm of rope? Well... as noted here, the SVL2 Lissajous region is in penumbra, which is Mars cool, but not superconductor cool. 60 Mm down from that will get you below 950 Mm altitude which is full umbra. More rope, more umbra to move about in. This works best when the SVL2 innermost counterweight is well above the 419.7 tonnes of the ISS; which we've already conceded isn't hurting for energy, tho' we'll want to work on the fuel.

We're not in Venus' gravity-well for another 470 Mm. Also our ions will be predominantly solar (so protonic), not Venerean. I don't expect a lot of strain on this rope. We can tether all sorts of goodies along it. Fiber-optics come to mind. Electricity relays. Robots to find and fix strains in the rope itself. Or just to pull in freight from a lower orbit.

Another fine idea is to spin the cable. Someone from lower orbit - who wants to Earth or to Mars - jumps to 950 Mm, grabs the tether, gets flung into Hohmann. That something doesn't expend the propellant or energy. These costs pass to the SVL2 station which, as noted, should be megatonnes.

Reddit tells us it's something like 360 m/s to get from E>V Hohmann to Venus high-orbit capture, tho' I recall Hop David claiming 400 m/s. From orbit to V>E Hohmann we need first to reach the tether's end so, first the shuttle burns its own supply, then pulls on the tether.

This will work best for small, low-propellant craft: like shuttles, or (Earthbound) whatever passes propellant-tanks from orbit to Hohmann. Also for Opposition Class trajectories the outer planets shift amongst themselves.

The neutron drive

A big problem with nucular energy - and nucular torchships - is the neutron problem. Neutrons're uncharged so you don't control them. In the D+T fusion reaction, they're 79% of the energy... wasted; 5% with classic He-3. And then they butt into other isotopes, making them unstable depending on what isotopes. Unstable means: radioactive. Last The Feb. 4th/5th night, having woken up at 3 AM, I stumbled on a discussion from Google Plus, if you remember that, on directing the neutrons.

I haven't seen much on that since the posting time, 2018.

The upshot is, neutrons can be directed at emission ... if the atoms which burst them out were directed. That is done in MRI machines. The complaint here is that you need a VERY BIG machine if you're going to be aligning sufficient neutrons to overcome, say, 10 km/s of deltaV (i.e. low orbit).

Now, the reaction won't last so, neither might the magnets. Maybe feed the magnets at the launch-pad, externally. Maybe divert some of the outgoing energy to keep the magnets runnin'.

If we can use Hydrogen-Three instead of Helium-Three, first off, the cost is slightly lower (unless orbiting Uranus) since the latter comes out of the former's decay. Although at 0.087c tritium exhaust is a bit slower than helium's 0.089c. Let's call that a draw.

More to the point for tritium the "Lawson factor" is a sixteenth lower, so is ignited that much easier. Might not need to blow up a nuke to start it! Assuming we're in space, we orbit the launchpad and feed it with solar. For deceleration in space, if we can't aerobrake: there's that antiproton reaction. Note that with a 12.32 year half-life, tritium doesn't store too great so is for inner-planet work only.

Either way such a neutron / fusion boost looks a fine way to generate some hardcore initial thrust, maybe also for deceleration at the destination. I'm thinking an Orion with less fissionable material. Its "fallout" would mostly be neutrons aimed where you want 'em. D+T is assuredly on the table tho' mainly for space, still. And the D+He-3, with slightly better exhaust velocity, should scale up which under undirected fusion it wouldn't. That might be a plan for Earth. Which I'd never say for any implementation of Thermal.

If from Earth you launch from something you want to harvest that fallout from, and at a safe distance. Say: an uninhabited ice-field. Dig a deep hole in that ice first if you're paranoid. The "side effect" would mainly be a lot of tritium and deuterium ice, which you then get to scavenge and re-sell; and oxygen-18, which you pass to the flourine-18 market.

SUPERMIRROR 2/5 10:15 PM: via NicoNicoNekomancer, Neutron optics. Polish up some Titanium and/or nickel or silicon in space, neutrons will bounce off it. I like this idea for stage-two, when the neutrons are fewer. Or maybe you align the neutrons to head toward the payload and bounce them all out to the same direction. Anything is better than having them ping-pong about the chamber causing trouble.

BUMP 2/6: I'm rereading the articles more closely, and rethinking this.

SPIN 8/12: Bruhaug n' Kish.

Our revels now ended

General Chang has gone to Suto'vo'qor. Qapla!

I saw Star Trek VI in London with my dad when it came out. I got a yuuge series of VCR tapes soon after that of which I saw 2, 4, 5, and 6 multiple times. I just rewatched the 2009 DVD of ST6 tonight, which I hadn't watched in some time and... hey, different from as I remember. (It was also VCR-level grainy, not up to better DVD.)

I recall a scene with a bunch of Star Fleet warmongers presenting a scheme to rescue Kirk; not on this DVD. "She did not shed a bloody tear!" / "Klingons do not have tear ducts" - not here. Also recall a scene where the assassin's face is ripped off and - hey, human! Very scooby-doo. Also not on the DVD.

I looked it all up and it looks like this 2009 DVD was the theatrical release. I have to agree, the scooby-doo crap was superfluous. And I never liked the VCR's "canon" that Klingons don't shed tears especially given several such scenes in TNG and more so DS9. Klingons are not unemotional!

I did miss the scene with the rescue-plan though. It showcases the War Party in Starfleet, in such a way that the Enterprise crew is still the focus.

Overall the theatrical release was superior. Do keep the deleted scenes in the Special Features. The DVD fell down in not keeping those, there. I'd bought a used edition and, well... I got what I paid for. At least there were some extras on Tom Morga the stunt man. And some Maori(?) reciting the ST6 plot for Starfleet cadets, which, well, should have been left to Youtube.

I noticed that no Plummer scene was deleted from ST6. Nor were any such scenes replaced with Kevin Spacey.

As for the obituary: it fails to note ST6, criminally, since by all accounts he enjoyed that role more than his role in Sound of Music which I didn't watch. Knives Out is another one enjoyed by the generations after me. In the meantime we shall always have The Man Who Would Be King and Inside Man, and shall always wonder if he would have made for a better Gandalf. I think not, for that.

On topic of the DVD extras, we also got some Klingon Shakespeare in Minnesota. I hope Christopher Plummer is in Heaven to portray Richard III.

The bullywug campaign

I may have given the impression a couple evenings back that Arcana Evolved broke a perfect system. It did not. The Diamond Throne was already flawed! Today I'm looking into the island Noll. But really this template can be applied to any other campaign stuck on a world with bullywugs in them.

Because that is what Noll smells like: someone's homebrew bullywug campaign tacked into someone else's world. As Fiend Folio outlined them bullywugs are semisentient amphibians who breed... a lot. They impose a moral dilemma upon parties who must decide if genocide is on the table. If not, the froggies comin' right back atcha in a few years.

None of this is particularly new, and Malhavoc's decision to rename them "inchon" or "inshon" or whatever K-pop manhooa name it was fooled nobody. The Lands Of The Diamond Throne arose in part on the axiom that alignment doesn't exist. This axiom was subverted before the product came out by The Dark, which makes undead; but never mind that. Noll and the inshon smell, to me, like they were crafted early in the process, perhaps earlier than undead, to highlight the Moral Ambiguity. Someone forgot to delete them.

Because inshon absolutely can be deleted from the setting. Nobody will mind if they are retconned outta there. Even having them lurk out there in the past as a dead race is unoriginal, given that this is the land of the dramojh.

If we must have not-bullywugs then I suggest to expand the plagiary to pull other sources. Specifically: let's rip off the Mass Effect series. Someone spiked the kurgans' kimchi and made inshons NOT breed so much. Let's say Noll did this after its first run-in with the critters.

My suggestion for an inshon campaign, again if we must have them, is to escort the survivors to Thartholan, where they can hop over to a water plane in conjunction. Or maybe the giants did this before the campaign starts.

"It wasn't a steal, it was a safeguard"

We had Moldbug; now, we have Ms Ball at TIME. Save it while it's hot; it's on Archive (thanks VD), but it might not survive even there.

They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.

"They" here are a handshake between business and labor. Meaning, between deep-state-aligned corporations and unions. The smaller businesses and the line workers didn't get a say.

Unmentioned in the "business" side: the vaccine manufacturers "stopping the count", slow-walking their process and (especially) not releasing their good news until after the election.

As for motive, Ball protests The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding. The "disinformation" meme would put the lie to that. For the Left, "disinformation" is information that hurts the Left. It can be false (like QAnon); but in 2020 it included the account of Hunter Biden's dealings - which were not false, just unhelpful. So what we're reading is a Pravda story explaining what happened between its lines.

I have mine own ideas on motive: that coronavirus radicalised the public-health voter. Breitbart agrees adding also white male demoralisation. That much came not from "disinformation" but from accurate information, that Trump had abandoned them to govern like yet another hrr drr srrvative GOP drone (but with tweets!). Overall I think that mattered less, though.

I especially like this: Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program. Recruiting Duraks, in a deep deep Democrat op. As we see from the North American M/B Lincoln Association, outed as such after its founders were known as what they were since 1988... there's no use for them anymore!

As for Ball herself, well... she's one of (((us))). What I cannot tell from her story is why she posted it. Is it a victory lap for the true tribe of urban media liberals? Or is she signalling hard to a Haredi extended family - Trump voters - that they've been jobbed? With us lot, we can go both sides, which is why we're not trusted, by either side.

It's not over of course. We're learning in real-time some of the methods by Bank Of America, monitoring purchases and volunteering those data to the Feds. Sure does seem like The Plan wasn't what Q said it was, and isn't what Anonymous Conservative says it is. Sure does seem like the Democrat Party won and is now the only Party.