Sugartongue

I must disclose I hate ending a title with a question-mark and I recommend that other authors not do it. In this case, I very nearly tagged the following "Elamite in Late Antiquity?". Because the Elamite language vanished after the Achaemenids fell to Alexander. Or maybe it didn't? (There I go again . . .)

Kevin van Bladel, the man who discovered the roots of (some of) sura 18 (yours truly figuring out the rests'), has published an article... somewhere. Its doi is 10.1017/S1356186321000092. I ain't read it; I cannot read it. But I can dump what I know about the general topic.

This looks into the Khuzestan language; "Khuz" being the Semitic word for "sugar", because under the Sasanians that's what the province was for. But the Khuz language, as the Arabs reported it, was not notably Semitic. Their linguists were good enough to tell if something looked like Arabic, Aramaic, or Hebrew; tho' not quite good enough to discern Mahra from Cushite "Berber". Van Bladel sees the Sugar Tongue as the last gasp of Hatamti-to-Elymais.

Much earlier Cyrus the Persian treated Elamite cuneiform as a language of imperial accounting, and the Achaemenid régime which usurped his line continued that cuneiform as a monumental language. But thereafter the Persian rules found as the Assyrians had found, that the Near East was most important and that the Near East did it in Aramaic. Under the Macedonians, Greek was added to the diwan. Something had to give. What gave, it seems, were Akkadian and the monumental Persian. Elamite gave, too.

The Persians survived and ensured that their Persian language did not give, not in Persia. "Middle Persian" came back under the house of Sasan. The Sasanians were likely some sort of borderland Medean group, many say Kurds. These neo-Medes decided to make the Empire Iranian again; not just Parthian. It turned out nobody but a Kurd wanted to speak Kurdish, even then. So: Persian made a comeback. The Sasanians did keep Parthian "Pahlevi" around. Using the Pahlevi script. Which got used for Persian too.

Meanwhile the 'Iraq remained thoroughly Aramaic, to which the Mandaeans provide a snapshot; and Iraqi Christians went for Syriac as the prestige-tongue. Next door there exists a Khuzestan Chronicle in Syriac. The Chronicler didn't seem even to know about old Elam.

There is talk in the Iraqi Talmud that the Jews in Susa owned a scroll of Esther in Susa's language. Esther is not precisely Biblical for the rest of us, but the Susians did appreciate a local book discussing a local story. Like the classical Arabs, most of us assume the Jews were smart enough to tell if something was "Semitic", "Aryan", or "other". Here is where we might trace Elamite's twilight.

This very-cursory research is telling me that, as Sogdians and Bactrians kept up a local literacy and maybe even a literature, so did the Susians. I mean - why wouldn't they? Who was going to stop them?

Our problem is that we haven't found this nonSyriac Khuz library, yet. So we cannot know - for a start - the alphabet: if they used Pahlevi like the Parthians or Greek like the Bactrians, or Estrangele like the east-Syrian Christians. I do assume the Susian Jews would have stuck with Imperial Aramaic script like the Judaeo-Arabs and the Yiddische.

I READ IT 2/22/2022: And I don't need to retract, anything. What a relief! Van Bladel didn't mention the Jewish take, which at the time I couldn't track, either; but I think we might check the Talmudic gemara to Megilla, which discusses the language in which to read Esther. This called out "Elamite" as one language local Jews used, whether or not they should. I get the impression the word the Talmud actually used was "Khuzi" and/or "Susi". Van Bladel notes that old Susa (Shush), exactly, got Muqaddisi's attention as a city where "Khuzites" held out, as against good (Basrian) "Iraqis".

Van Bladel does track even in Achaemenid times how Elamite was steadily attracting Persian loans. By the Talmud's time and certainly by the time Isho'yahb II sent Marammeh down there, this genos prakticos was probably speaking a creole with true Elamite not even a memory.

The QAnon antipapacy

OnePeterFive serves up some crow this Friday in the Easter season. There was, in 2016, a thought that Cardinal Viganò and those four "dubia" dissenters were going to blow the lid off Vatican heresy and corruption. I realised Viganò, at least, was off in the weeds by December. Now 1P5 has caught up.

It is all so wearyingly familiar to the Trump generation. Trusting The Plan. For The Storm.

Honestly, this should be a warning to the Fátima crew and maybe even to the Immaculate Heart set, generally. Apocalyptic movements can change the world. But they usually don't and, in the rare event they do, they never end up how you like. Islam, anyone?

The hydrogen-ion speed limit

Courtesy HBDChick, Ethan Siegel posts at Forbes a fine and informative article about the speedlimits for matter in intergalactic space.

Light in a pure vacuum has a speed: C, which is the limit for everything. Between galaxies, matter is so sparse that a particle traveling through it might not encounter another particle. Such might evade the particles in our own galaxy long enough to hit us down here - such is a Cosmic Ray. We've been talking about dodging those Cosmic Rays in the fortnight-long night of our Moon, where metals breed Bremsstrahlung. Since their speed is boring, some ridiculous fraction of lightspeed C, and since we've been assuming a rest mass, which is that of a proton, these 'rays are measured in energy, by the electron-volt.

Siegel explains that a cosmic proton should own a speedlimit meaning an energylimit. When such go through intergalactic space, not hitting more protons, they swim against a tide, a tide of photons-with-an-h. Between galaxies you can see other galaxies, by their photons. And the Cosmic Microwave Background bathes us all. A proton-with-a-r will hit photons, even low-frequency photons, and, if the proton is going fast enough, this interaction bleeds energy. At 5 × 10¹⁹ electron-volts, the proton hitting light should be spawning off some pions which are a major drain for it. Pions then decay into other energetic particles and of course much more light, but the proton doesn't care; it cares it's not exceeding the limit.

As the universe expands we can expect the photon count to lower and those photons left over to lower their frequencies, so this speed limit will increase. By extension, as it were, the speed limit is higher near us than it is - was - out by the most distant and visible-youngest galaxies.

Anyway we've been seeing some 'rays already in the 10²⁰ eV range, down here. Since they are coming from all over, like comets, that rules out protons from, say, the Sagittarius black-hole or the nearest galaxies which haven't had the time to lose energy to pions.

Siegel says the strongest 'rays must not be protons, by themselves; but whole atomic nuclei of protons and neutrons. Iron would do it. UPDATE 7/8: more on acceleration of nuclei.

The Phrygian nobility

Long piece on Helladic DNA.

Found here - I'd say, verified here - is that modern Greeks are, by ancient standards, northerners. Elati-Logkas is the site in question, Middle Bronze Age. I mean, we all pretty much knew that; the Dorian language (not-quite-extinct today) was spoken in Macedon and the Spartans sure weren't going up there. And north-to-south has been the historic pattern in Greece, as witness the Aromanians and Slavs brought in by (probably) the mediaeval "Macedonian" Dynasty at Constantinople (whom I suspect as full Yugoslavs).

What's new here is the marker for the Mycenaean nobility LHIII. They look like Armenians - partly.

When I think of Greek-like, Armenian-like crossovers I think of Iron Age Phrygia before the Cimmerians and Lydians dismantled it. Could it be that the Trojan War really was a war between cousins? If so the LHIII nobility was a high caste of Luwian-Thracian overlords, speaking [a form of] Greek, but not in much contact with the dâmos.

The bad news in this theory is that it takes away some of the evidence on what the dâmos was speaking. There have been some musings that the Dorians were already here, like the "ME-ZA-NA" in Linear B who may have been protoMessenians. The Arcadians kept Linear B's Greek but they were very much the minority by the Archaic Era.

At a guess, the local populace may have been Ionic. That language is kinda sorta close to Linear B. Last I looked it wasn't deemed a descendent like Arcadian is a descendent. But I could understand a High Speech / Low Speech situation over LHIII, with Doric (and Aeolic) ruled as Barbarian Speech.

UPDATE 5/14: Davidski calls shenanigans. They didn't even mention the later Slavic invasions, it seems. That makes the study useless in present form.

Fake news, real news

A well-deserved LOL to all the Right outfits that hawked this crap. Kudos to Richard Hanania for calling shenanigans.

A much more fitting target for book-related grift would be Amy Coney Barrett, but Team Red didn't wanna hear it.

I suppose internet traffic and donations kept flowing, so the fake news did its job. But - sooner rather than later, I think - the fundraisers and the fakery will be tuned out. And that's a shame, because our real rulers have real plans, affecting us directly.

In that spirit the Mail's "Hamburglar" meme is legit pace Associated Press. It's no secret that the soyfolk have had a crusade / jihad against human carnivores for some time, and that the past year or two has seen a move by the oligarchs to foist these "impossible" fakesteaks upon your Starbucks and your Burger King. Better, smarter.

The Biden Administration's poo-pooing of this, alongside oligarch media, is of a piece with the Obama Administration's disavowal of homosexual "marriage" until, you know, it happened. Or the Clinton campaign's promise that they're not gonna TAKE YER GUNNZ until they took your guns. This Administation has little direct effect upon us anyway since the oligarchy is running the score on D.I.E. and on which businesses get what loans. Biden just bends the knee to what he's told (perhaps not as skillfully as Harris).

The AP linking all this to the claim that the 2020 election was rigged only serves to make whose side AP is on, which is the side of those who "fortified" that election, and which side continues to "fortify" it today.

Trumpism discredited

The 1776 Report has now exited the Right, courtesy Brion McClanahan at Chronicles.

McClanahan is involved with the Politically Incorrect Guide series, which I don't endorse, since it went basic-b!tch srrvative on Darwin and, to be brutal, on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The P.I.G. line is however a barometer on American Right opinion. McClanahan knows well the Founding Fathers, as he demonstrates here.

This means that Trump's legacy is, ultimately, failure. Failure of a particularly Boomer strain, the failure of an overweight white retiree sputtering about "the party of the KKK" and "whaddabout muh Dream" on PJMedia.

The 1776 Report taints every thinker involved with it: of which names I recognise Carol Swain and Victor Davis Hanson. This is tragic for both, since I had appreciated their scholarship over the Bush II years as not being so basic as Bush himself (last seen voting for Condoleeza).

PJMedia commenters do buy books, or at least read reviews of books, so maybe they'll take it upon themselves to read better books, by better writers. I'm not hopeful about Trump's generation, but we can always hope for Posobiec's generation.

Cardio

Berenson is back. Now with an anecdote about a vaccin-ee dying a couple weeks later.

I read about this first from Hanania, who unfortunately prefaces his poast with a "LOL", a tell for insecurity.

Hanania does have a good point that vaccines are demonstrably doing their job. That is why India wants some, and why it is being considered a diplomatic failure that Biden's and Harris' Administration has been slow-walking this. A shift to the individual is what Scott Adams (and Joseph Stalin) would call a rhetorical kill shot. Millions saved in Israel is a statistic; one Israeli dead is Twitter.

All this said, vaccines might be a strain on the heart. The virus was a strain on the heart; a vaccine is by definition a nontransmissible virus-imitator; therefore, some cardio problems should be anticipated. It's been noted that we're doing a global Phase III. It's been deemed a hit on Trump (including by me) that his Administration didn't open up these 'cines earlier.

To offer some recent autobiography here, I'll disclose I walked probably ten miles on Saturday, and I felt absolutely miserable Sunday morning. Not just the ankles n' calves; I'm talking about lung function, fatigue, all of that. I wondered if I'd caught the Pooh Flu after all.

It's Monday and I ain't dead yet so I'll say - it was probably cardio. I could be more active than I have been, and I'm not. (I could also be younger, but, well.) I cannot rule out that the vaccine is a hit to the heart. But sitting around opens your heart to those hits, and to others. (Cernovich has been playing up elsewhere that booze is bad and so's weed, although he's also big on psychedelics, which I'd not recommend for heart patients either.)

To sum up I'll say this: the virus is worse, and unlike the vaccine the virus will spread. So, my advice is, get your steps in. If you can walk ten miles, do it. If you have a gym go to it.

Gaylani's pogrom

Achcar devotes some space to the Farhud in Iraq. He is all over the place on this one. Let's sort it out.

What was going on in the early spring 1941 along the Two Rivers, was a feeling among the Arabs - and the Iranians - that Hitler was winning. Word had also got out that Hitler was no longer a Zionist - by which I mean, Hajj Amin had got out, spreading his venom. Meanwhile, Britain still owned a strong military presence in the Gulf Coast, the Royal Navy not being yet subjugated. Sporadic looting had broken out here and there, although the Muslims in charge of Basra had put a stop to that.

Iraqis pondered whether they might appeal to Hitler or - better - to the Soviet Union, the Soviets being closer; for an overthrow of the British occupation. Iraqi Jews were not Zionists; quite a few were Marxists.

In April Gaylani (or Kailani) led a coup in Baghdad. He wasn't a Marxist, so wasn't about to throw in with still-Hitler-allied Stalin; and he burbled something about respecting the former régime's treaty with Britain. But he also wasn't the lawful sovereign, and then there was that footsie with Hajj Amin.

19 April, the Brits invaded and took Basra. Gaylani lost control of Baghdad by the end of May, and that city fell to chaos. Gaylani's futuwwa blamed the Jews for collaborators with the British and for Zionists. Then came Shavuot which brought those Jews out into the streets.

And here is where Achcar ashq-splains to us, how firstly Gaylani was pushed into being proNazi by the Brits and secondly that the Farhud was not all that bad, and thirdly wasn't a jihad. Something something Gaylani didn't set his regime to be proNazi whilst the coup was in progress blah blah, source: Gaylani's mouth.

As I look into it all, I'd firstly not trust a single word Gaylani said after the fact. Secondarily I'd not trust Achcar here either. Both have a motive to transfer agency from the locals and to pin that upon the colonialists. Not that I'm here to hail Churchill as a saint, especially over this period which famously occasioned a Winston-made famine in Bengal.

What I am here for, is to support Achcar where he points out that the Farhud was... not that bad. Something like 180 Iraqi Jews were killed, which is awful and, yes, the rioters intended worse (as we'll see seven years later). But the rest of the 90000 were saved, by the actual Muslims, especially Shi'a. This, because the Shi'ite ayatollah there denied this riot the imprimatur of Jihad. As a result the mob were made up of street trash and thugs. And when it was understood that the mob was more a liability than an asset, the city leaders opened fire. Hundreds of rioters were killed in that, many more than Jews beforehand.

Achcar, I believe, succeeds in exonerating the various Islams in Iraq, and the best and most numerous of her people, from this atrocity. I do not believe that Achcar exonerates Gaylani who, I say, deserves no such mercy from historians. The Farhud was Gaylani's monster, for which he must answer in his afterlife.

Nahhh the Mufti will be fiiine

There was a claim that Gilbert al-Ashqar "sugar coated" the Mufti in his book. It might be worse than that.

Achcar was all about ruling the Mufti irrelevant. His book does this by sidestep: only 60% of Palestinians saluted the Führer!

After the Nazis abandoned Zionism, the Mufti did what he could for those exterminationist Nazis to win. If the Nazis had won, the Mufti would have called in his chips. The defeated Brits would have surrendered the Med, which Med had Palestine on the wrong end. What, then, would have befallen the Jews there?

Maybe "just" exile. I doubt it. Achcar can blather on about how the Moroccans and Omanis totes loved their Abrahamic cousins y'all. Yeah, well. The Jews weren't so beloved in the actual Jewish homeland. They weren't so beloved by Muslims and near-east Christians abroad. Algerian Jews might be welcomed in Syria. Israeli Jews, with that taint of the Mandate on them?

Although the Mufti was influential up to 1948ish, more so than Achcar argues; Ashcar is correct that Palestinians and the wider Ikhwan would rather forget about him, so the Mufti's legacy is hardly an "icon of evil"... except to Zionists and to "the counter jihad". The Palestinians and the Ikhwan venerate even dumber icons, starting with 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam.

Protecting Palaestina

Per my book report, we find the entire union of Muslim and Arab peoples united as one over that old Byzantine province, that Jews should not come there. Most argued against the Europeans, NIMBY-ly enough; but some went so far as to offer even their own lands - just not Palaestina Prima. What's up with that?

Achcar lets his 1920s-era compatriots speak. And verily what the Arabs spake was: eff off, they're full. They saw al-Filistin(a) as pretty-much a desert which could just about support the farmers it was supporting, and not any more. The Arabs saw Jewish settlement there as zero-sum. By contrast they figured Syria and Morocco, and maybe Yemen, certainly Ethiopia as better options. (The Dominican Republic rather famously begged for more Jews whom they saw as a boon to the economy, but - Dominicans, not Arabs.)

I think, though, that what the Arabs said and what they were, deep down, thinking might not be entirely coterminous.

The Arabs knew that a Jewish majority in Palaestina especially if bolstered by European Jewry would make it a Judaea again. Such would constitute a rollback of the Arab/Muslim conquests. Such would slight the Arab honour and such would discredit the Islamic kerygma. And you know what? Reading some poasts Achcar himself has poasted over the years, I'm honestly not seeing that a lot of nonPalestinian Arabs really wanted all that many Jews in their lands, either.

The neoconservatives were saying just about ALL that over at least the last two decades and, well, sometimes even a neocon gets it right.

Arabes et la Shoah

Currently up: Gilbert al-Ashqar / Achcar's The Arabs and the Holocaust, as tr. GM Goshgarian 2010.

I'd seen this around in 2010. I looked up the index and did not find the word "Farhud" in it. I found instead Edward Said (pro), Bernard Lewis (against), and a blurb by Rashid Khalidi. 2010-Me gave this book a big miss. This book I have here, now, seems to have been sold by Picador in Israel 2016 before making it to 2nd and Charles over in Broomfield, 2018. Where everyone ignored it until, apparently, 2021-Me and his six-dollar bill burning that hole in his wallet. Which 2021 persona still doesn't like Said or Khalidi, and still thinks highly of Lewis overall... but, keep reading.

As I look up Achcar's name 'round the interweb I find he is a "socialist" who hates Trump. Still, Arabes was before all that and it doesn't read as a socialist tract. Keep in mind: Bernard Lewis was pretty much a Marxist, himself. If we're keeping score mine own House of War owed much to Lewis including where he was Marxian. As to what Achcar thinks of his fellow leftie, we'll get to that.

So far I am finding it a worthy sequel to Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross. It has something to offend everybody. If Arabs kill Jews in Constantine département (1934) or in Baghdad (1941), Achcar will tell you - which is where he utters "Farhud". If a local youth movement is pro-Nazi, like the Futuwwa, Achcar will tell you. And... if local Arab movements or local Jews excoriate such pogroms, as most did, Achcar will tell you.

The "Arab world" was a wide and diverse land, analogous to talking about the "Hispanic world". Over the 1930s the peoples here worried about European colonialism, especially those in Algeria and Libya whither French and Italians were settling in. They could see a Jewish colonialism on its way. The consensus was that Europeans should quit persecuting their Ashkenazim and also Algerians should not persecute the Sephardim that they'd got. Later they would slam Gaylani in Iraq for what he'd been up to. Palestine was the issue (we'll get to why): this was, under the Mandate, becoming a magnet for Jews everywhere.

Ashcar finds the 1930s Near East lacking in nearly the "anti-Semitism" that common European midwit opinion over the early 2000s has assumed of that earlier era. I mean, sure: it existed, as Constantine proves. But when and where such outbursts burst out, most Arabs (quite a few still Christians who, as Cohen has documented, were more antiJewish than were Muslims) considered the thuggery an embarrassment and an evil. Some thinkers even argued for a panSemitism which would include Jews, as long as those Jews did not immigrate into Palestine. Others offered to open up their own countries to refugees, as the Syrians had done for the Armenians and other Christians fleeing the Young Turks. Again: as long as these refugees did not swamp Palestine.

Achcar has harsh words for Bernard Lewis, whose 1986 book on Arab antiSemitism really was not on par with, say, The Political Language of Islam nor the earlier (magisterial) summaries of the Arabs in history. Achcar hadn't read Cohen but I get the feeling he'd approve, as I approve, despite both of us thinking less of Lewis than Cohen did. Achcar does approve Lewis' The Jews of Islam, which book I haven't read myself.

Achcar also cannot stand Stefan Wild, who in 1985 seems to have botched a study on fascist influence upon Arab nationalisms. As mentioned, sometimes the "Nazi" influence went more to supporting the Semites - including Jews - against the Aryan phantasies of Europe at the time. The late 1930s Ba'th ideology argued more for a local social-democracy than for anything coming out of Berlin or even Rome (it got... worse, as Achcar notes). The "Young Egypt" was just a clownshow, to such a degree Abdel Nasser quit it 1937 in disgust.

Achcar notes the early Zionist-Nazi alliance, the Ha'avara. This alienated the Arabs and did not endear them. The Arabs were pro-German... over the 1920s, just because, unlike France, Italy, and England, the Germans weren't marching their troops around Arab cities. The Nazis changed that happy state of affairs by exiling their Jews over there.

That said, Achcar does not go nearly as far as Tom Suarez and others in the Unz sphere. The Jews did engage in some terrorism and, on some occasions, massacre. These attacks - Achcar must point out - pale before the slaughters enacted in the Algerian départements; which in turn were as nothing to what was going on south of the Sahara or, for that matter, north of the Cilician Gates. Even some Palestinian activists had to admit their difficulties in getting others to care about their plight when others would say back, "well... you're here to tell the tale, that's not the case for a lot of Jews".

UPDATE 8:30 PM MST - Rooting about the 'Tubes, to the extent Google lets me, I am told the latter part of this book is worse. I couldn't find "Achcar" over at (say) JihadWatch, since 2003 (which is before our scope); but Achcar's book poked Daniel Pi(e)pes by name, so the Pipes forum has pointed me to several antiAchcar rebuttals some of which are hitting the earlier parts of the book.

FIN 5/1 2 PM - Overall, a highly spotty work. I've had to deal with some personages and events in their own essays. Let us all point and laugh at his claim that Dubya was America's most right-wing President up to 2008, which just shows how little Achcar knows or cares what "the Right" means.

We might also discuss to what degree "Islamophobia" is "racism", especially from one who doesn't practice a lot of Islam himself - this, itself, conceals his own racial asabiya I dare say. Or to what degree "racism" even has meaning but ... well, socialist.

The trajectory of POxy 840

Erastus Jonker has posted a nice little thesis, on POxy 840. This one suggests, based on language, where POxy 840 sits.

Way back in 1999, when the Internet community was starting up, I had mine own project on this topic, arguing for a parallel with Matthew 23 and Luke 11:39-41. One Art Kilner emailed me on Christmas Eve pointing out that the setting follows Matthew's and not Luke's. I immediately ruled out Q for this. (This was back when I was still taking Q seriously.)

Going "impressionistic" by flooding the zone with parallels from all sides is, I think, exactly the correct starting strategem when approaching a text dug out of the rubbish. It is also proper that a 400 page thesis is the medium to do it. I wasn't writing a thesis so on that last week before Y2k, I called victory. For 2016, I commend Erastus who I hope is now Doctor Jonker for taking the trouble.

All this said, I still think POxy 840 is postMatthean.

Matthew is dealing with the intraChristian debate about circumcision, like Paul and then Mark; which is why Matthew wraps his tale around baptism. Luke, the historian, must recall that debate which is why he starts before the Jordan, with Jesus' own circumcision.

As we go through all the trajectories in early Christendom, which interrelate, we come across the Encratism, shared among several such communities. Encratism in Egypt will impress the Copts to end up in their monasteries. This next phase will debate personal luxuries, if Christians should go any further in this world than what they need to survive and to propagate. On the Jewish menu, as it were, were wine and meat. Christians knew they didn't need this stuff, which was taking up land in Egypt, so they debated if they even should allow it.

Then the Christians asked about water usage. Why share the bathhouse? Stagnant waters aren't clean. It turns out even Jews crack wise about the miqveh, cf. the Morning Report when Maxine is quoted. We might even have the Johannine Gospel arguing this case, where it discusses the Living Water.

For a debate about ritual cleanliness, Christians could site this best either about where Jesus was baptised, that is in the Jordan Valley; or at the Temple. POxy 840 and Matthew went with the latter. If you don't hold with Q: then Luke felt he needed to put off such debates for Acts, as he didn't like to talk about the mission to the gentiles before that; so he cut this discussion from that setting, and stuck it with general calumnies against the Pharisees, earlier. (If you do hold with Q, I have to say, Q looks a lot like Matthew here, which redundancy is one reason I parted from Q.)

The hydrogen battery

This came to my notice earlier: the transport fuel cell. What's being transported is hydrogen-1: protons. The Hiroshimites found that with europium, they can transport these ions at higher temperatures and higher humidities than they used to.

They're competing against "solid state fuel cells", by which - I think - they mean solid oxide fuel cells. The solid oxide is basically a rusted metal which, at high temperatures, acts as a cathode. The negatively charged oxygen ions are then free to go over to the anode and give you electricity. So Wiki tells me.

Wiki is also telling me that those temperatures are annoyingly high, like Venus high. More "intermediate" temperatures can be had by the usual catalysts, often platinum. Which is, you know, pricy.

By proton transfer, rather than oxygen transfer, I'm guessing they're going the other way 'round, moving positively-charged ions over to the cathode. Here they'd had the problem that they needed to run everything at a LOW temperature. So maybe they're trying to meet the IT-SOFC in the middle.

MOXIE

The Martian Ox-InSitu Experiment works at its destination: 5.4 g/hour but scalable to 12. This is about the same rate as trees, except that the MOXIE also emits carbon monoxide. This means visitors now may get oxygen from carbon-dioxide-heavy planets like Mars and Venus. When they scale it all up.

Mars will be getting its base oxygen from perchlorate salts, or - where the water is unfrozen from pure ice - from good ol' plants. MOXI is for rovers and for Bob Zubrin, who loves carbon monoxide. Unsure about CO₂ scrubbed from an inhabited station or spacecraft; nobody loves monoxide out there.

For Venus in lower altitudes, I feel like Venereans will bias toward a higher g/hour solution, fit for the higher pressures and temperatures there, and for the sulfur chemistry. The MOXIE tech does seem good for high-altitude Venus aerostats, where the experiments would call it "VOXIE" I guess.

PLASMA 8/16/22: This can be improved.

Skip stone

Some Chinese researchers took what we all know from skipping stones, and applied it to a spinning aluminium disc.

"Vertical acceleration" turns out to be the factor here; the acceleration which the water provides, by lift. Between 3.05g and 3.8g, the disc bounces; above that, it skims along the surface - they call it "surfing". g = 9.8 ms^-2 here, although we seem all agreed the same rules apply for the Moon's lower g if we get a covered pond over there.

The editors want this for space reëntry to Earth. They're thinking, water landings - but I'd go further. There's already a Boost Glide trajectory for shedding delta-V over a longer period. We on Earth have mostly used that to lower the heat on the hull. Maybe some craft can skip across the outer atmosphere for longer.

I wonder what these results will look like over other liquids, like Titan's lakes. As to Venus: below its atmosphere of nitrogen and carbondioxide is a CO₂ supercritical fluid. Can this be skipped over?

Bayes

I found out about nomograms VERY recently, here applied to delta-V needs on your route to some planetoid. Turns out - there's more! Apparently back in 1975 one TJ Fagan used one to simplify Bayes' Theorem, for doctors. doi 10.1056/NEJM197507312930513.

There's some online froo fah rah ongoing about whether Bayes is (still) obscure. It's not obscure in astronomy; it's used all the time in reducing noise from data so we can tell what periodic forces are affecting starlight. (That and something called "Monte Carlo".) What is obscure - to me - is what they're even talking about. I tend to skip those parts of a paper. Like I used to skip Lambert Problems and how to solve Kepler equations, until I got sick of being a moron found a concrete problem to solve to which end I taught myself, which took me about all March.

So yeah, if you're not actively applying your math, Bayes is going to be something someone else does, so will be obscured to you. I question how many <3Science! reporters know how to do Bayes. I suspect: few. Although the NYT seems decent at it.

Well - Fagan's where to start, if you are so inclined. One might look also at Carvalho - Page - Barney, 10.1214/18-BA1112.

The Book of Job

The Near-East and Egypt came up with various "hymns of the righteous sufferer". I had the notion since, I'd hazard, 1994 that the Book of Job was some post-Babylonian Jewish adaptation - a "take" on it, if you will. Couple years later I heard about how its story got SEPTUAGINTED, which happened in the west of course, so I moved more that its origins be in Babylon itself.

Being the Ashkenaz I am, I consider Job to belong to the Writings - not to be particularly canon. I just found that it enjoys more popularity among the Sepharad, who use it in Tisha' b'Av. They seem to consider it kin to the Psalms (but wouldn't Lamentations be better...?). But anyway.

I'm lately hearing rumblings that it's an antiStoic satire. If so, why wasn't it composed in Greek first and then taken to Hebrew? And there's no need for that, given the parallels in Iraq. And Job is hardly a Stoic, spending much time berating his LORD for letting ol' Stan screw with him so hard.

Seems more that Stoics meddled with the text in Alexandria thus creating that "patient Job" whom Saint James met.

Get a horse

How do I know that gasoline is done? Because Ace of Spades' posters like Buck Throckmorton are trying to save it.

The core of it is Volkwagen, soon to be the Voltwagen I hear. Some testers went cross-country (New York to Sacramento) on the Eisenhower Autobahn, which took them eighteen days. Buck Throckmorton compared that to the Pony Express' ten days.

My neurons have retained The Book Of Knowledge, a British production of 1980 or so, back when they were still wondering if Pluto was a planet. There was a piece in there about a race between the steam engine against a... horse. The steam engine kept breaking down so the horse won. But not by very much.

Obviously the Pony Express was your game in town, in those days, if your towns lay between New York and Sacramento; and I wholly agree, back then, that you needed a pony. You might even have been better off with the pony before you hit the handcart trail. My point here is that the steam engine got better. They got much better than ponies. Even than the best ponies.

If you are spending any time looking at how batteries are performing these days, you know that these eighteen days cross-country are going to shorten - dramatically. You also know that the bottleneck in providing power to these vehicles is more political than not. A forward-thinking Right might consider cutting that red-tape so lowering those power costs (h/t Hanania).

You'd think that supporting a competitor to increasingly-expensive petrol would help even the petrol-users but, you're not thinking like Buck Throckmorton.

Ace is selling his readers the same old buggy whips. AOSHQ is living in the past. 'Tis a boomer site.

WICKED SMAHT 5/12: Harvard's solid state battery promises recharge time 15-20 minutes. That's easily within parameters of parking the Tesla in Dumas, TX to stretch the legs, hit the loo, and buy another Gatorade.

Emperor Zeno's highwire

After Theodosius II and Marcian, I don't hear much of Leo's theology. I am aware more of Leo's foreign policy, which was a disaster - I don't know why they call him "Leo the Great". Emperor Zeno is where I start hearing theology again, with the Henotikon, considered - by us Latins - as a betrayal of Chalcedon. I have to qualify this: Zeno was a pussy.

I found an account where Edessene bishop Cyrus II got the "Nestorians" kicked out of his city [UPDATE 7/24/23: Ibas' remnant]. The school became a shrine to - what else - the victorious Theotokos; they tell me it happened in AD 489. The next year Zeno at Constantinople raised Euphemius as Patriarch. Euphemius will be similarly spineless at first, until the next emperor Anastasius gave that one no choice but to grow a spine. Some call Euphemius a full Nestorian. I call those people less-polite names.

As to the context, I am guessing that Zeno was ailing. Anastasius was coming. At the same time the Latins couldn't be entirely alienated, and there remained Chalcedonians at home. As for Edessa, I'm proposing that Cyrus' "Nestorian" purge caught several orthodox Chalcedonians in the dragnet. If they could slander Euphemius later, they could slander his allies earlier.

I don't think Zeno was a Miaphysite. I think he was just weak.

The night is dark and full of terrors

Why do we stay in the Church, Steve Skojec asks. He links the Saint Joseph community, where Milo is also found. Here Joseph Sciambra floats an analogy to the Weyland-Yutani corporation, as Aliens portrays it - the best of the franchise. And all are asking: why did Ellen Ripley go back?

Weyland-Yutani is analogous to the Vatican inasmuch as both are Sovereign Corporations. Weyland-Yutani might be answerable to a government, although we nowhere hear of what government might stop it (cf. also Gateway). The Vatican is a government - but it's not a temporally powerful one; it wouldn't take the Italians that long to occupy that hill. The Vatican survives because many people, like myself, believe it has to. Propose here the same dynamic underlies Weyland-Yutani in secular form.

We are unaware of any planets even with the potential for habitability within 30 lightyears of this one. All agree it takes a lot of capital to colonise other planets; the earlier movements of the "Alien" franchise assumes we're not on Star Trek capital. Weyland-Yutani is assumed the only entity that owns such capital, monetary and technological; and I accept that assumption. LV-426 is assumed the only world which can even be terraformed in feasible range of here and I'll accept that one, too.

If you believe that human life deserves to survive, which I do, you will support Weyland-Yutani's mission. You might dispute its means but you support its mission. Ellen Ripley bore one child before these movies, which girl she lost (her story's told in the Isolation game); Ellen cannot bear another. What can Ripley do, but support the best hope for life in future.

If Weyland-Yutani fails, maybe there might come another corporation with those assets; but how long will that take. And what might happen in the meantime? The Alien is still out there. Or worse.

Overviewing this whole argument, I must rate it Pascal-Complete. This logic says we support the Church because we don't have another one. Sciambra, I suspect, finds the logic wanting. I also think we Catholics can do better whilst remaining a "we".

Guang Wu

The Liu family failed their Han Dynasty at the turn of the Christian Era, falling to usurper Wang Mang. Guang Wu, from a cadet branch of Liu, reclaimed the Empire 5 August AD 25, as "Eastern Han" - if not immediately over all China, at least over Luoyang. It took the Han another decade actually to defeat all the die-hards and pretenders. In Chinese history this whole timespan is a BIG DEAL. The period is of some passing interest to Western historians also: its parallels to the Augustan Era, with its proclamations to Restore The Republic, are obvious. It has even caught the ear of [Protestant evangelical] "Christian" apologists. Let's discuss them.

In the seventh year of this tumultuous decade, the apologists tell of a portent in the heavens: the sun and the moon were eclipsed. Then we get this - The sins of all the people are now on one man. He proclaims pardon to all under heaven. Around here is some bantz about the man from heaven.

Guang Wu's seventh year should fall around the time of Jesus' Crucifixion, hence the deluge of ink among those apologists. These tend to be Westerners who - like me - own no Classical Chinese literacy themselves. Some such rely upon Chan Kei Thong, Finding God In Ancient China: How the Ancient Chinese Worshiped the God of the Bible. Chan Kei Thong's translation reads like a Josephus extract - far more Christian than its first-half-millennium authors should have been.

This tetragrammatic meal (食) made of the day (日) is credited to a "record of the latter Han" for which, we'd start with one of the 24 chronicles in the Chinese canon. I am looking at Fan Ye's Hòu Hànshū.

Fan Ye was a fifth century historian and the "Annals of Emperor Guangwu" are the start of this record. Not a primary; but we can assume it a fair secondary. Fan Ye is a topic of recent scholarship: S Durrant, "The Place of Hou Hanshu in Early Chinese Historiography", Monumenta Serica (2019), 10.1080/02549948.2019.1603446.

The date-marker before that event is 癸亥-dark. Guihai: Year of the Pig. Smoke if you got 'em.

The less-stupid Anglo transmitters of this guizi text tend to assume "he" doing the pardoning was someone in position to do such pardoning: the vincent Emperor, and that this proclamation was an amnesty - at least a political one, possibly a debt jubilee also. Such is what Wang Mang had proclaimed when he'd taken the crown two decades before.

We are certainly not considering some Jew dead thousands of miles across the Silk Road or, worse, risen again for some Chinese food on his way to Lake Titicaca. And to be fair to our apologists, they've mostly understood that. Chan Kei Thong hasn't been cited in his own right in about a decade. But to be more fair to the apologists - to judge them - they still trust that one's translation and presentation. Such is how they launder old text for new readers. Such is how they disguise their lies.

Those reading the apologists should keep going. As I read Fan Ye, there's an eclipse of the sun. AD 29 might have been seen in the west, partial southeast. 14 November 30 and then 10 May 31's annular will have been seen in the southeast of China, that last in Korea also. Those latter two are what matter, EH 3-4.

Fan Ye was hardly a dunce; his dates are generally considered correct. For AD 30 and 31. As in: not AD 32-3 when Jesus died. Which occasioned miracles = not a regular eclipse: which is no miracle, but just plain Kepler. Again: I don't read Chinese, but I can assuredly read people who do read Chinese, and none of those people think there was some miraculous event here. Well ... none but Protestant Christian apologists.

As for Chan Kei Thong - like a Moonie (or a Mormon), or a Taiping, he dearly would like to link his Oriental tradition to the Occident. I understand that most Chinese treat him as a crank because: he is.

Regressive road tax

Cerno was flooding the zone on his Twitter earlier this week on - why are we pulling people over on the highways for "tags". This is just British-era Stamp Act stuff. Except that where tea was and is a luxury, hooptie cars are - for the working class - essential. McDonalds and Wal*Mart do not give the company-car to cashiers.

"Oh just take the bus". riiiight. Especially in this age of plague.

One side can agree that Wright deserved to be pulled over and put in cuffs, and another side can agree he did not deserve to have it done by an incompetent. Not even the issue here.

All this has rather been in the news even before the present mess, on account of coming electric-powered vehicles, which won't be paying petrol taxes on account they don't use petrol. People not named "Cernovich" ask the question: why shouldn't highways be funded by the people who use them?

Because the people who use the roads most are not the people who want to use them. Who the hell wants to drive into downtown Minneapolis these days.

The tag system is another hassle imposed upon on those least able to afford it. Roads are eminently fundable through business taxes.

The synoptic tradition on James

Julius Africanus, they tell us, had a base in Emmaus. This was a site for Luke's Gospel. Where Julius cites later Christian history, trying to align it more firmly in Roman chronology, he defers to one Hegesippus.

Hegesippus like Julius was steeped in the Canaanite languages; they tell me as a Jew rather than as a Phoenician. As Papias, Hegesippus made a project of collecting ahadith. Let's look at what he said about James the Just.

Julius vouched for Hegesippus' orthodoxy. That Julius felt the need to do this may be because his contemporaries imagined Hegesippus for his own part had denied Paul's orthodoxy (here in a fragment Photius quoted of Stephen Gobaros). No reader of Luke's works could ever do that; it's been noted for awhile that Paul's teaching on circumcision is accepted in Mark, as well. Further if Hegesippus abandons Paul, I must ask Gobaros what 1 Timothy 6:20 is doing here, "falsely-called gnosis". Let's suppose Julius had counterparties more intelligent than Gobaros...

Hegesippus has James mirroring Mark 14:62 / Matthew 24:30 on Jesus "coming on the clouds of Heaven" and more exactly Matthew 21:9, "Hosanna to the Son of David". That would endorse any NT genealogy except Luke's. Although, by "let us throw him down", here is a "L" trope not in Mark or Matthew. And James utters Luke 23:34, forgive them for they know not - which isn't in all Luke MSS, although Bart Ehrman vouches for it there.

INTERJECT 7/23: Luke has James bar Zebedee cut down with the sword (Acts 12:2). This is in an aside, only for preface before the imprisonment of Peter. Luke, I think, had a problem with the James tradition . . .

Hegesippus' James doesn't eat meat nor drink alcohol; which seems a problem both for Seder-observant Jews and for partakers in the Eucharist. His hero doesn't use "the bath" either, which (I hope) means the public one. I detect asceticism in Hegesippus' turn of phrase like a virgin pure and uncorrupted. I smell a Syrian encratite among us, like Tatian.

We may never know if Hegesippus for source used a Tatian-like harmony of the Synoptics; or, independent traditions. I speculate at least the Gospel of Matthew, or - more likely - a followup, like POxy 840 (also no enthusiast for the communal bath). This implies Luke is transferring post-Mark tradition, from James the Martyr, to Jesus as martyr. Either way Hegesippus and Luke are dueling over the same turf.

"Mary of Clopas" is here also, whom Gospel readers encounter only in John 19:25; but I've long discussed how fraught that book's history is, and Hegesippus writes not as a Johannine but as a Markan-Matthean.

Hegesippus, to sum up, pushes the envelope in Christian orthodoxy. I can see how he raised eyebrows in Julius' wider Church. UPDATE 3/19/22: Alignment with the Epistle?

Julius Africanus

When you hear about "Thallus", you are hearing from Julius Africanus. I'll summarise New Advent.

"African" means Algerian / Tunisian to us. (And to South Africans in as much as their climate is the mirror image to Algeria's. Back then that whole continent was called "Libya", as Suidas will report.) Julius for his part was fluent in Hebrew, as well as the usual Greek; and in Latin as well although in his days that was the army language, not the Church's. I assume the Christians recruited first among the Punic coast. These would be fellow Semites who, following the great Jewish Diaspora revolt, weren't happy with Hebrews. It's later on that you find Berbers like Augustine and Gelasius joining up.

The name suggests a mawla of the Julii, apparently still knocking around the Empire. Following 11 July AD 212, you didn't need Roman sponsorship to be counted Roman. But he'd been a soldier, which service we're told spanned over the 180s; so he'd got his passport before then. The patron / client relationship got him further into the super-citizenship, of Patrician status. As a soldier he'd have been familiar with the Mithraic cult.

As a Roman, our man in AD 215 went to Alexandria. Julius was a correspondent with Origen. Under the Severans (they say Alexander) he'd aided the Empire with the founding of Nicopolis on the old site of Emmaus, a sacred site for Luke's gospel community. For that, the empire needed a loyal liaison, not just a citizen because, again, everyone was a citizen. The Severans were fellow Africans with famously strong links to southwest Syrian sites like Emesa / Hims. I assume the Emmaus region was full of Christians, specifically.

I am told that Eusebius modeled his church history on Julius', which - they tell me - went up to Elagabalus. You may read many putative fragments; they mainly comprise a monograph on aligning the dates between scriptures such as Daniel 8 (and not 13!) and the Olympiads. Most fragments come from George Syncellus in Palestine whose work Theophanes Confessor continues. Beyond Pentecost, Eusebius might amount to paraphrase; I don't read Syncellus using Julius proper beyond the time of Christ. I wonder if Eusebius' popularity in Constantinople and west-Syria had crowded Julius out.

I should be most surprised if Julius had no Aramaic. The Syrian tradition brought translations to the east-Syrian librarians such as 'Abd-Isho' and west-Syrians like Bar Salibi, both recorded by Assemani. Although these translations will be in Edessene "Syriac" where Julius went more for the Palestinians. Syncellus, unlike Julius, disdained Hebrew in favour of Greek, but as a Palestinian he must have known Aramaic, as he is credited for preparing a Greek translation of Theophilus (Syriac) for his literary executor Theophanes.

The three body problem

Newton's law of gravitation reduces to Kepler's deterministic equations... for two bodies at a safe mutual distance (e.g. past Mercury). If you add a third body, like, oh, a cycler; calculations get more difficult, especially as these bodies near one another. For these Newton never figured out a deterministic equation. Lagrange figured out regions of stability and metastability, given some assumptions of relative mass; but he left the rest to posterity. The Three Body Problem contributed to Chaos Theory: simple nonlinear differential equations in a Phase Space ending up in a massive unpredictable mess.

Hebrew University is sorting out some of the chaos. The approach is statistical, based on phase-space volume. From it, there's a phase volume flux, which they say they can constrain. Sounds to me like the borders to Libration Point 3.

For that they use a fudge, "emissivity". The idea is that if this emissivity can be averaged out, the rest of the system can be predicted... statistically.

Or so I surmise. I remain unsure on the details.

It does seem to me that, if Lorenzian fluid dynamics (alias butterfly-effect) are an analogy to the three body problem; that more progress on the latter might help toward Navier-Stokes and turbulence. And: what is emissivity, but surgery on a manifold.

The first Antiochenes

Saint Ignatius served as bishop in Antioch, before being shuttled around western Asia "Minor" on his way to Rome on which route he wrote those famous seven letters. Paul Wheatley considers Matthew an Antiochene document, alongside the Didache.

I came out against Ignatius having much to do with the Gospel of Matthew. Ignatius quotes "M" traditions without Matthew's special language. [CORRECTION 5/23/21: Further I had (then) thought that to the Trallians, Ignatius traces Jesus' lineage through Mary. I was mistaken on that; "seed of David" forces a male descent.] Meanwhile when Ignatius cites Jesus' later biography, particularly to the Smrynaeans, we see much more alignment with Luke and John. Although here Saint Jerome remarked we are dealing with another gospel entirely.

Where Ignatius seems closest to Matthew is in a shared understanding of Jesus' own baptism. For Matthew, when John baptised Jesus, John and Jesus together consecrated baptism as the means by which proselytes and children enter the Kingdom. Matthew nowhere discusses circumcision and he has utmost respect for righteous gentiles (as Jews might put it); contrast Luke, that great post-Pauline gospel, who must start his two volumes with Jesus' circumcision so as to lead up to Acts. Ignatius parallels Matthew 3:15 to the Smyrnaeans. Elsewhere to the Ephesians, Ignatius muses that Jesus' own baptism purified the water. [UPDATE 5/23: Although "seed of David" is a Paul quote, bypassing Matthew.]

I concur with Wheatley, then, that Ignatius and Matthew go together as Antiochenes. I continue, though, that Ignatius didn't quote from Matthew proper. An Antiochene might well have had Matthew's source-material; we see Papias rooting around for pre-Gospel ahadith, contemporaneously and independently. It may be that Matthew's Gospel was not yet accepted in Asia, so Ignatius tailored his message accordingly. This further supports the classical dating for his epistles for the reign of Trajan if not earlier.

John of Amida and Ephesus

Hartmut Leppin has an overview of John "of Ephesus". John was actually a Syrian from Amida, not a Greek; and the history bearing his name was in Edessene Syriac.

John was, however, able to speak the Greek and in that capacity he was bishop in Ephesus, site of Theodosius Junior's two Miaphysite Councils.

John's history came out on three parts. The first part was swiftly ignored, possibly for being redundant. The second part survived at Zuqnin, whose Chronicler used it as basis for his own world history; historically when you see "Pseudo-Dionysius" bruited about, you are dealing with this revision of John. The third part survives more-or-less in full for its own sake, in six books. Which is in any case best for hearing John's own voice, which is where Leppin steps in.

Leppin argues that John was a pro-Imperial historian, like Eusebius; but, as a dissident, opposed to certain Imperial decisions. One might compare him to Socrates the Novatian. I could easily see John signing on with the Monotheletism under Heraclius. I can also see how Zuqnin, who seems a tolerant sort himself, figured John's history for the best available, spurning the also-Syriac historiography of the Orient. Although Zuqnin was on better terms with the Jews than John had been.

As for Coptic I don't think the Copts ever supplied a pro-Roman historian. I hear mainly of John of Nikiu and of the Patriarchs' biographers ... and a lot of apocalyptic. Where pro-Romans wrote in Egypt, they are Melkites like Eutychius writing in Greek or even in Arabic.

CORRECTIONS 7/5/21: Pace Leppin, at least one other Syrian had antiquarian interest in both Amida and Ephesus: British Library Add MS 17202. Pseudo-Zacharias #12.7 further approves Justinian who still reigned AD 561-5, the time of authorship. Although: since this time falls under the Zuqnîn paraphrase, not for its own sake, and since MS 17202 is in fragments, and since John was an independent eyewitness to Amidene events; it can be difficult to see if John even read this thing. But I'm pretty sure he'd read of it.

Likewise I don't know if John bothered with the Orient - at all. Although Zuqnîn makes me less certain of that than I was in April.

First round, done wit'

Colorado opened up the vaccines 1-2 April. They sent me a message about that on the evening of 2 April when I'd already found out via hearsay. So, this whole zipcode had basically ran out of supply by the time I found out.

I'd signed up with Dr B last month; I signed up with Walgreens last week and I kept refreshing the locator page for Safeway, also. Didn't bother with Walmart or the local hospital.

The usual pattern with Walgreens was to say "appointments available" and make me fill out the same. Stupid. Questionnaire over and over, before telling me "haha, fooled you". For Safeway, I always got "no" in 5 miles and sometimes a "limited availability" if I was up for driving all the way to da hood in downtown Denver or Aurora (more rarely, Boulder or Thornton). As for Dr B... I did get a text. One text, for Thornton.

Somehow Walgreens got its act together last Friday because it found DOZENS of stores, then. One of them - Pfizer, for Monday PM - in walking distance! (Barely.) I printed out the forms they need, although I'm unsure I need proof of employment in this system. I took that hike to get there by 3 PM (actually a good bit earlier, because I had to fill out a different form than the one on Walgreens' site). They asked me to sit around for ten minutes, tho' they didn't exactly enforce that; now I'm back here at 4.

As for the rest of the week: as we all know, immunity takes some days to kick in, so no fun n' games just yet. Anyway I hear the weather is going to be snow and cold rain until the weekend. I don't want a bacterial pneumonia any more than I want CoVID.

Spacenews cannot read

Sandra Erwin has an article for Spacenews, which somebody stuck with the unfortunate headline "to develop nuclear reactor to power missions to the moon". I've been blogging long enough to know that Erwin is likely palming her OWN forehead at the stupid headline foisted upon her work.

The subject is a Demonstation of a Rocket, between here and our own Moon: "agile cislunar operations". So, DRACO. WAKE THE DRAGON! Because it's a NTR using fiery NTP. I do say, that is pretty awesome. They're looking at a 2025 prototype which is even more awesome because I'd been anticipating 2027.

What this is not, however: is a mission to the moon. It is an experiment with a slate of manoeuvres to validate the NERVA, which experiments they need to conduct between here and the moon, because it's ... drrrr.... physically closer to the Earth-based lab.

HYPE 4/21: Green, Reynolds. Pretty much the same story repoasted, except that now Blue Origin is in it too.

The Temple as national bank

I am not in communion with Laurent Guyénot. Honestly? I worry about him this year. But last year he did pretty well with Hitler (despite himself) and better with Robespierre (before botching the sequel). I owed to myself a look at his Vridar-esque "take" on the Second Temple and Christian origins. I'll start with Kapital.

After Herod's death, the Jews didn't own a state; they lived in Rome's Judaean Province. Yes yes, technically Herodians had Damascus; but that city has since the Late Bronze Age been an Aramaean city, and the goddess of its main Temple - now identified with Greek Leto - was very much active over the whole first century. (This Temple is a mosque today... sort of. The Assads maintain it as a common shrine to Yohanan Baptiser, also for Christians and presumably for Mandaeans. You know who isn't welcome there? Jews, that's who.)

I used to say the core question internal to al-Islâm isn't "Church And State" so much as "Mosque And Army". For first-century Judaism, Guyénot moots whether the issue was Temple And Bank. And no, we are not channelling Marx ... this time. (Much less Weingarten.) This is basic Iron-Age economics (apparently still a novelty in 2014 but not now).

If a Jew wanted a loan in Judaea, to serve a Jewish cause, he (or she) would prefer to borrow from a Jew. Say you wanted to open a synagogue. Say you just wanted an aqueduct for your suburb of Hebron. No Greek or Roman would lend to you. A Jew might. But the Jew in Hebron might not have the full means to fund your project. For some Jewish projects you needed real sheqels. You needed Sadducee sheqels.

Jews out in Hebron might not have wholly understood the justice in the system. They just knew they were paying taxes and not getting a say in where those taxes went; they were paying interest on loans, to people of Jewish culture yes, but ... focus on that "-ish". The Sadducees, as Sigmund Freud famously pointed out, were tribally Levites, not B'nai Jehudah. They were culturally at least as much Egyptian as Canaanite. You couldn't even raise the issue in Roman Judaea; Jerusalem wealth was backed, ultimately, by Roman swords. The same issues were raised under the Seleucids and, one suspects, the Persians.

This, then, marks the context for the apocalyptic preachers. In Hebron, or in the Galilee for that matter, a rural Jew might preach the evangel from Isaiah 58-61, to overthrow the Romans and to nullify the Temple debts. Another, more urban Jew, if he had some Romans' ears, might - more humbly - preach to overthrow the Sadducees only; with the same end goal. Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson propose two phases in the same Jew's career which is what we read from Saint Mark.

The Mesolithic Zodiac

Last April Fool's Day, Old European Culture reported that some of his commenters have dubbed him the zodiac killer. Because he'd explained how we got the zodiac; when you understand how the magician does his trick, he's no longer magic.

Once villagers settled down to farm, even before they'd sussed out clay pottery, they needed to figure when to farm. Also what was good for hunting and when. In the Near East, they soon realised that the seasons tracked with which constellation the sun would be rising in, and setting in. They also observed the stars weren't winking in and out, nor changing their positions, over thousands of years (if they waited hundreds of thousands they'd know better).

That meant they needed to divide the sky into sections. To remember which sections, they traced patterns in the sky. And the patterns should be iconic for the time of year it was.

The number the West Eurasians chose, for dividing the sky, was twelve. Ten fingers, two feet. Also twelve divides by two twos and a three; rather than ten's less-handy (heh) two and five.

The mating-seasons of various wildlife were particularly handy: bulls, lions, rams. Maybe crabs and scorpions. The stars advised of when not to mess around with Mama Elk. In choosing the animals they chose for the Zodiac; these villagers presaged the Révolution with their "Brumaire", "Thermidor", "Prairial" months, by icon.

As for north and south of the ecliptic: first, at 40° N, you don't see much of the south, so those star-clusters were also-rans. I take it that bears were associated with the north so that big dipper became boreal Ursus. Why a bear and not a tiger, I won't ask - maybe it was a tiger in some cultures.

Now, the difference between a sidereal year and a seasonal year: that might come to bite them. Hence, I suspect, why the sidereal-friendly Julian calendar dug in as far as it did. I think by the time the farmers noticed, literacy and mathematics were coming through, allowing the City Temple to replace the village wiseman.

The provisional vaccine passport

Glenn Reynolds asks a reasonable question: I’D LIKE TO SEE A REALLY SOLID COMPARISON OF POST-INFECTION NATURAL IMMUNITY VS. VACCINE PROTECTION. Unlike some of his comments, and unlike most of his commenters, this question deserves a reasonable answer.

The linked study is talking up Moderna 91%. There's the baseline.

The Lancet posts that a run of the disease offers 84% protection. These are English healthcare workers; the surname "Reynolds" seems Norman to my ear, but I assume Glenn has some pleb in him.

If you're in the 16%, that second run will be a doozy. I understand the Moderna ensures its "second" run - meaning, its 9% first run - is barely noticeable, if you are that unlucky. But by this point the risk is on Dr Reynolds; he's already taken that early one for Team Immunity.

With all the above, we can evaluate his idea that we extend Vaccine Passports to CoVID survivors. My answer is: absolutely, we should. In fact, we should have done that, back in Phase 1.Q.Yuz-a-ma-tuz here, when they'd moved off the most-vulnerable people and were vaccinating 50-somethings. There should have been serological - antibody - tests for the whole lot, and those who had antibodies should have been passed over so the vaccine could be given to uninoculated boomers. This would have freed up vax for the rest of us, sooner.

Call the positive serologic result a Provisional Loicence - whatever lame meme they like. They're like Pfizer bros who get their first dose, and are awaiting their second. Both can go out and do their thing in public if they like their odds. Probably still with the masks on, but we might be losing those by end May. My point is: the survivors don't need in front of us in line; they need a spot in that second line.

I don't know the arguments against it but I can guess. False sense of security, would be one. I believe I've laid out some, like, maths to explain how the sense of security should be cautiously real, real-enough for purpose.

Another is: it incentivises bug chasers, CoVID Parties, people who don't want the vax and would rather catch - and spread - the bug. I deem this worry more real. I also think that they are rare. Not rare enough, especially among PJMedia commenters, but rare.

The fix for that last is, the Provisional Passport runs out. Six months after you caught CoVID, you are deemed a risk again and you're back on Lockdown. Avoid this, and avoid your second virus attack. Get the vaccine.

MEANWHILE 6:15 PM: Denis Rancourt is yet another contrarian being bandied about the Right lately. I suppose Rancourt was more cited last June; I missed it at the time, but he's baaaack. He has now got what he asked for, which was a banning from ResearchGate. I'll just say, to the extent I haven't said it already, that in any plague, sentient beings have three choices: vaccines, masks, isolation. (Mass testing is in there too, for smarter use of any of this.) If - when vaccines are not available - you put about that you don't want masks (and you haven't taken the time to use masks properly)... you're pro lockdown, or you're pro death.

Voyager: Elite Force

I beat Alice - more exactly, through my intervention, Alice Liddell beat the forces of madness arrayed against her. Yeeagh! Next up, Voyager: Elite Force, also known as "that Trek game wot isn't total sh!t".

At the time, 2000, gamers had a glut of Star Wars games to choose from: TIE Fighter, Dark Forces and its sequel, and Shadows Of The Empire among them (and the best would be yet to come). Trek fans, on the other hand, had nothing good. There'd been a Voyager game mooted for some years but it was never finished. In 2000 Raven Software figured, hey, why not a shooter. Dark Forces is doing well over there; and the Trek lore has Borg, for your implacable foe with poor AI.

My problem was that "at the time" thing. My computer in 2001-2 was a semi-upgraded Gateway (remember those?) with a Pentium II and Windows 98. VEF crashed on it. And I didn't get around to installing this game on subsequent computers; given my Alice woes, I'd likely not have succeeded.

Anyway: I got it working here in Windows 10 for 64bit. What you do is to follow these instructions - remembering above all that you must not run setup from the mainline, which is a 16bit app unauthorised for modern machines; run that setup from the Setup folder. It is also possible, and legal, and necessary, to find the 1.2 Patch. Rather less legit is the "NoCD" pair of replacement EXE files; but if you own the CD as I do, and you don't want to fumble with it (I don't want to fumble with it), it is unlikely Activision will hassle you. My display works up to 1280x1024 resolution.

It's a Quake III game, like Alice. It is, however, older than she is, so I changed its controls from default, to be more like hers. I put the spacebar to jump, C to crouch, Enter to use.

Not necessary was "Mesa for Windows". On the other hand, the graphics here really are not good, even compared to Alice a mere two years later (F.A.K.K. made the difference, apparently). I am told of a mod to upgrade those graphics. It seems incomplete and the "Expansion Pack" is recommended for it.

Before the Europeans

A few days back we heard a report from the Bacho Kiro cave in the Balkans. At least 43kBC so, just before the Laschamps flip. Related to the famous Oase, down to the recent Neander mix - in Bacho Kiro's case, about six generations.

The genome looks greater Eurasian - it matches East Asians (and Native Americans). This is the Tianyuan signal. Presumably this is that portion of the American genome which isn't from Mal'ta Boy who comes, of course, much later.

Europeans as we know them, both Gravettian and that Aurignacian revival called Magdalenian / Solutrean [UPDATE 5/5/22 west], are unrelated to this lot. Apparently the palaeos'd used some carbon-based glue so they cannot radiocarbon this specimen. But given its context and certainly given its nature, it cannot be Gravettian and it's more likely pre-Aurignacian. Note that Upper Palaeolithic before 45 kBC, in Europe, is near-pure Neander; no modern human is detected here, beyond the ancient Eemian intrusions into that (Vindija) Neander genome. The cave caught this specimen within a few centuries of arrival.

As of then, every Eurasian was still a carnivore. Africans were moving to an omnivorous diet, but not yet we Eurasians: not in the Balkans, not in China.

As for how this tribe got wiped from the genetic record: this aligns with earlier observations about Sundaland Man. Our ancestors did it. I'm going on a limb and saying that we Sundalanders, by parallel or independently, were learning to eat plants - by which I mean, plantains, and yams, and other starch/sugar vegetables.

UPDATE 11/14: On false starts. Maybe Bacho Kiro (and Oase) suffered even worse from the magnetic distortions than the Neanders did, and blended in with the orks.

Before Amarna, Luxor

We have much of our knowledge of Canaani and (terminal-)Mitannian history from the Amarna archive. Amenhotep III, on his 28th year, had moved his capitol to that site; his correspondence, and that of his son Akhenaten the infamous, has/have been preserved there, which the latter renamed "Akhetaten".

As for before all that: Bronze Age correspondence tended to refer back to past events, the more recent the better recalled of course. First because it was easier to remember but more importantly because it was more difficult to lie about events someone else might remember. Here we learnt about Shuttarna II, the greatest Mitannian king. He'd married his daughter to Amenhotep on that one's tenth year.

It would be nice to have Amenhotep's correspondence from the earlier decades of his reign. Unfortunately for everyone, his palace - his whole city Nebmaatre - hadn't been found. It wasn't the Ramesside Memphis. It was somewhere around Thebes (now "Luxor"), but Thebes was a big place. Luxor generally was so legendary that it featured in freakin' Robert Howard novellas. And in Las Vegas casinos.

Looks like Zahi Hawass has just found it.

Might we learn more about the Mitanni? Might we get early references to the Peleset and the Sherden? Might we learn about the Hittites before Suppiluliuma, who'd attacked Mitanni and failed? Might we even hear from the Greeks...?

Yeadon's tragedy

Michael Yeadon. Featured on LifeSiteNews.

I have little to say that Reuters didn't say already, except that Yeadon's other predictions haven't panned out, and that he recommends to Ditch The Mask. Of course if you don't get vaccinated you cannot ditch the mask... maybe ever.

Yeadon doesn't need the money, so I must count myself among those who Don't Get It. One obvious conclusion is that he's telling the truth: Yeadon concentrated on the immune system, after all... including auto-immune pathology, better known as "allergy". Maybe. Except that he's not current in that field anymore. And he hadn't blown any whistles on Pfizer whilst helping run the place, nor when he was running the spinoff Ziarco (which Novartis bought out).

It could also be that Yeadon has suffered a mental breakdown, along the lines of a Jordan Peterson.

Yeadon in his spare time lately poasted some anti-shari'a, which poasts I've looked through. Personally I like to nuance Waziristan tribal honour-culture against mainstream Sunnite fiqh, but hey. Yeadon's motive for his blunderbuss approach seems to be that the man was fostered by a Jewish family in his late teens; to which end he rates shari'a as hostile to the Jews.

Yeadon opined upon an ImPolite topic - he was Based, as they say; and when you become Based, the cost you pay is that Polite Society will no longer have you. This may have been Yeadon's entry-point to the Conservative world - which is his community now. Some of us value community more than others of us do. Some of us are more picky about the communities we choose.

Back to LifeSiteNews: it is no longer a pro-life outlet, if it ever was, and if they are looking for support elsewhere that they get their platforms back... they shouldn't expect any such support from me.

UPDATE 6:25 PM MST: Self-own from Glenn Reynolds. Tell you what, srrvatives: you keep poasting what you want, I'll vote how I want. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are - increasingly - claiming a mandate to screw you over. They may just about now have it.

Energy experiments

First, the Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module Flight Experiment. The PRAM is to turn solar rays to microwaves, in the radio band. Radio waves can be converted to cook your chicken dinner usable power. I don't read if they're using the Aluminium or the old Gallium, but it's SSPIDR again so - I expect the former.

Meanwhile TAE Tech are on hydrogen fusion power. Yes yes, I know; I can hear the groaning from here. Plasma containment has been the El Guapo for fusion reactors elsewhere, like at Princeton, to such a degree that Princeton gave up and decided to blast that sh!t out a rocket nozzle. Not that we are complaining at THIS blog!

It seems, though, that the TAE guys are abandoning the tokamak stuff common at (say) Princeton, and doing "beam-driven field-reversed configuration" instead. They got to "long enough" with their reaction under the Obama Administration. Now they've reacted "hot enough".

On to a topic any ProjectRho reader knows summat about: TAE are using hydrogen-boron like Alex Cheung. That, I expect, because we have hydrogen and boron, and because the AEC doesn't regulate what you do with it. [UPDATE 4/18/23 Can we improve?] TAE say they can work with good ol' deuterium-tritium as well. Good luck with the neutrons.

TAE assume technologies as have matured over the last six years. That list is daunting: plasma behavior, artificial intelligence, machine learning, faster electronics, magnets, improved diagnostics, shorter latency feedback loops, materials science, vacuum technology, power electronics. They expect all these to improve over the 2020s.

It's that time again

Every few years I try to load, and run, my old games American McGee's Alice and Dungeon Siege on post-Windows-XP systems. There's various DRM on them and, also, the compatibility might not be so good anymore. Although this Easter PM on Windows 10 ... it's doing better!

With the former, an EA game on the FAKK update to Quake III, the advice which worked for me is here. I used the fix file, and put the "Madly Enhanced" mod in C:\Program Files (x86)\EA Games\American McGee's Alice\Base\. Also I put these in the config: seta r_customheight "720" and seta r_customwidth "1280". Over the last few days, I got up to that Majestic Maze where I'd left off back in Houston in, what, 2009? Maybe even 2006.

The Microsoft game - which I tried Monday - is a little trickier. I bought it again in the middle 2000s but not for its own sake: for me (as for many others) it was the runtime for that famous Warriors of Destiny remake. That remake demanded the patch which I did, indeed, install. But in the whole Vista-to-10 generation(s), this sucker even patched liked to freeze up on me. The advice I got here was from Steam: run DSVideoConfig.exe, which for me is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Dungeon Siege\, and set it up for my graphics-card without "TnL". Here I'm back to the stone henge before the crypts. Obviously I'm concentrating on Alice before doing much more here.

The unhappy news for Dungeon Siege is that, when I have the "Transmute" spell, after that henge bit I can no longer click on it through inventory. It throws an "exception" box and kicks me out. Might need to downgrade the height and width.

FIXING DS1 4/17: In these happy post-Alice days, I got to thinking - if there's a NoCD for one game, there might be one for another. Here it is (mirror #3 worked for me). It turns out that this fixes the freezeups, too - at last. Again: if you own the CD, it is yours to play, without all that SecureDisk / SecureROM hackerware, especially if the game is by Microsoft which company bans that nonsense in Windows 10.

The tyrant

The definition of Lynch Law is: an attempt by the commons to target an individual for punishment, outside a legal process. To put it in the mob's own terms: to hold that individual to account. If the mob is particularly riled up against the legal process itself, to hold him "accountable".

Hannah Bruns, recently elected student body president at Vanderbilt, doesn't like the word "mob". That's because the mob got her "elected", by hounding her rival out of the running.

The Greeks had a word for this sort of ruler.

Don't believe everything you read on bioarxiv

I love arxiv, and I like bioarxiv. Let's put it that way.

If you see astrophysics on arxiv, it's pretty much either going to end up in a peer reviewed journal or else its ideas are going to end up there. Bioarxiv is another animal, as it were. In that light, uh... here: Tingting Sun, Qing Liu, Meiqi Shang, Kejian Wang. Eve was 400000 BC not 200000, and Adam was THREE MILLION years BC not, like, 70000.

At that level, we have Neanderettes walking among us and, from the XY side, Homo Erectus.

Up to now, most palaeos have been talking about fits and starts of modern humans getting out to the Near East or maybe Spain and then hustling themselves back to Africa. There's some human introjection into Neanders, enough to alter their [womens'] mtDNA; not such as to donate said mtDNA to us lot.

Allow me to call Shenanigans.

Discovering Stark

Some years ago I bought Rodney Stark's Discovery of God. Last year I was hoping to add it to the LOCKDOWN List, but I'd misplaced it. And I got into maths and Kepler last month so, no time to read. I am picking it up again to start over.

Razib Khan deems Stark as an apologist and, from the mid 2000s, not as an honest one. Stark plays footsie with intelligent-design in this book. But then... so does Benjamin Wiker, and that one's Politicizing the Bible was actually valuable.

Stark threads this needle, for his readers: religions come under the rule of survival-of-the-fittest, and moral monotheism is more fit than paganism.

Stark has a Tapscott in him, prone to #cancel his predecessors as - well, he won't say "racist". An earlier generation taught that the African or Australian tribal mind wasn't up for a Classical conception of the Divine. Stark can't have that. We do know what religions have proven most fit in Haïti and in Africa. We who are not in these worlds question the orthodoxy of voudoun. We cannot question that many people believe in it.

Another factor influencing the drift of religion to law-abiding monotheism must be Empire. Stark has an excellent chapter on Near Eastern temple-cults, on how the (putative, naïve) henotheisms of Neolithic villagers "devolved" into Sumerian and Egyptian polytheism. It stops too short, say I. It doesn't differentiate between Isin / Larsa / Babylon, and Nineveh.

Assyria insisted on the cult of "Anshar". Before them, Hammurabi made clear Who was the capital-G God; after them, the Persians became Mazdaist. The Aztecs and Incas both asserted a Sun God. We are pretty sure these days that Empire comes first. Before Darius, Cyrus; before 'Abd al-Malik, 'Umar and 'Uthman. The Empire conquers, and must move to centralisation as centrifugal forces arise. That's when it needs to convince its subjects that the move is just. Technology shortens distances, shifts the battlefields, and changes strategic choke-points. Religion wasn't a cause; it was an effect.

Backflip

Back to the h>3 thing: let's look at the paper which introduced h to the cycler calculus. Let us read Byrne et al. 2002 (pdf).

This is contemporary with McConaghy et al.. In fact it's the same trio doing these papers at about the same time.

They are looking at the two-synod space, with of course one symmetric return such that "symmetric return" is assumed. So, these are 2-h-1-i and they start with 2L3 which will be 2-0-1-4. This, they dislike for its V_∞ and turn-ratio, and for only making it to 1.51 AU which means half the time the "cycler" isn't cycling to Mars. Here is where they bring in h, for 2-1-1-5 and 2-3-1-5.

h is from CW Uphoff 1989: the Back-Flip. The idea is that the cycler left Earth and passed Mars, and then goes around the Sun for a synod (15/7 years), and then part of a second one. After 2 11/14 of its own orbits, which is 3 11/14 Earth years, it comes back to Earth. But a half year early: Earth is 180° (π radians) behind its, what, +103° at two-synod end. The 2-1-1-5, we can already assume, is coming at a slight angle to the ecliptic. The cycler here positions itself that it changes its orbit to shadow ours. It is not dragging itself at a statite above Earth. It's now going at an inclined orbit "above" or "below" (depending on frame-of-reference). It then meets Earth once more, a half year later. Earth can shoot it off to Mars again. Synod III, cycler repeats.

Although the turnratio is right for 2-1-1-5, it's like unlamented 2-0-1-4 in one important respect... it only gets to 1.45 AU. That's even worse. After all that dangerous mucking about in Earth low orbit, changes are less than a coin-flip they'll be back to Mars again.

2-3-1-5 means it gets back to Earth earlier still: 1 11/14 orbits, 2 11/14 years. Then comes Uphoff's backflip. Or, a full-rev loop - basically, any orbit of semimajor 1 AU. Either order will do, as long as the half-years add to 3. Its problem is that it's lost turnratio again - it's not ballistic. Although it's in the right ballpark, as it were. Oberth could slug this cycler out again.

Russell and Ocampo note 3-1-1-17 (3 revs) as the sweet spot, if no-one minds a three-synod span with lots of downtime and an extra cycler-pair.

The Fimbulwinter in Peru

For the context of the coming of Light to Peru: Adolph Bandelier 1904.

Pedro Cieza de León stands alone (well, except for Joseph Smith Jr., s.a.w.) in annunciating a Post Resurrection Appearance to the lake Titicaca. What we do find at Titicaca is a consistent account by the Aymara and the non-Inca Quechua that, here, fiat lux.

Some this weekend are telling us that this happened in AD 32. Of all the world's historians, only the Christians insist on this. On pain of being OFFENDED. As usual the Christians launder their sources through several layers of... er, ahadith.

For Peru, literacy was done through quipú - an arcane art of knotted ropes, wholly lost to the fires of the Conquest. South America was handled... less gently, than was the Mesoamerica, whose Nahua-speakers swiftly learnt the Latin alphabet and took to it at least as well as did their semiliterate Extramaduran masters.

If we are looking to an event recorded in the AD 1500s, we need to count backwards from that later century. Nobody thinks today that the Fimbulwinter in the Danes' Mark referred to Calvary Hill. They think it referred to the horrors of AD 536, well-documented elsewhere. Including among the Maya, many say.

As of the sixth century, coastal north Peru was dominated by the Moche culture. The Huari would arise around AD 600 and eclipse the Moche over the next century. As for Tiahuanaco, they're later; trading-partners to the Huari, not worth the Huaris' time to conquer.

To sum up, anyone claiming a time of darkness over Tiahuanaco based on sixteenth-century hearsay needs to prove it's earlier than AD 536.

Y luego questo pasó

Let us look at Pedro Cieza de León's "El Señorío De Los Incas", The Chronicle of Perú 2.3.5. You may read this here. In what must be a legend of the Tiahuanaco culture, the local Aymara(?) recall a time of darkness and then the return of light. We'll get to that . . .

De León then writes Y luego questo pasó, which he'll do again soon enough. This has nothing to do with the "mid-day". This is archaic Castilian for llegó a pasar - "and it came to pass", familiar to Anglophones in both the Douay-Rheims and the King James traditions. Here will follow a protoMormon account of a white man's coming to preach to the heathen. I assume a Bible calque, available to Extramadurans. You may read the context from Adolph Bandelier 1904.

The Vulgate had read factum est autem for, say, Luke 5:1; nothing that looks like "pasar" / "to pass". The Old Latin source was LXX and Acts egeneto de / kai egeneto; from preëxilic Hebrew it was wa yehi (וַיְהִי) as Genesis 1:15, 29:10 and so on.

It comes to pass that the second (and later) parts of de León's Crónicas didn't come out until the nineteenth century, but I do think we may rule out the Mormons. Also it is difficult to pin this on the "Alba" translation by Moses Arragel which was occulted by that time. The fabled Biblia alfonsina was lost also.

The Spanish conquistadors were about as heathen as were southern Peruvians as of the early sixteenth century, if not more so; later generations of priests had to sort out the former. Still, the Second Council of Lima, which brought Trent's Bible-ban to Perú, was - AD 1567 - yet to pass.

I smell the language of an early-sixteenth-century Extremaduran lectionary. I also detect a local's attempt to appropriate the post-Resurrection tradition for the Titicaca basin.