Friday, May 28, 2021

GAINZ

I didn't poast my workouts in 2019, but I did do some - as evidenced by this complaint about not being allowed into the gym to do 'em. By happy chance I got to start up where I'd left off on 5 May which is when I started my regimen in the first place. 5 May is when the gym accepted that I done bin robbed of two months because of the Late Unpleasantness, so applied those two months as credit to the next year.

As an aside Cinco de Mayo retains its status as my New Year. I bought my first house then, for instance. Kinda ironic given that I'm a Habsburg partisan... as indeed was Mexico City. Hence why only Pueblans (and American drunks) even want the holiday - and, here and there, critics of Sovereign Debt, and Francophobes. But I am veering off topic.

Since I fretted, not to say was affray'd, that the vaxx was going to tear my heart up; I've been more aggressive this year than I was in 2019. I go pretty much every day, this time. As a result I am now where I was in summer 2019. June is the new July! (Or the new September; there were gaps in July for minor [skin] surgery then in August when I ran off to Houston and back.)

It's been a good 3-4 weeks so far. Not for weight loss but I'll accept weight distribution.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Peştera Muierii 1

Peştera Muierii 1 is sequenced. She's a Dacian cave woman from 33kBC give-or-take.

Her tribe had been in the Balkans for five millennia already, so she's already not much more Neander than we are. Earlier tribes famously met n' mingled with Neanders; Peştera Muierii's folk, we suppose, couldn't. As may have been mentioned, that people didn't contribute to modern human DNA and is a dead end.

Although, Stone Age Europe by then had plenty of other human tribes who could meet n' mingle with one other. Our gal was a mutt, with lots of ancestry from several distinct ethnicities. So several and so distinct that the researchers are calling shenanigans on any population-bottleneck from the Out Of Africa movement in the 70s kBC. Probably wasn't just the one movement. And the Toba explosion did nothing.

Modern Eurasians are bottlenecked however. So if not Toba and if not early human refusal of more African migrations, what then?

Uppsala University says: probably the Ice Age aka Late Glacial Maximum. Eurasia must have been depopulated, or near enough, with much of that earlier diversity constrained. As we find in Siberia.

In other Late Glacial news, "safe" from the ice, the Nubians took it in the pants. I don't think Cushitic (like Oromi) was a thing yet and I know the Semites didn't even exist. So: Nilo-Saharan. As ever, cold Earth means dry Sahara. Means African famines and war.

RAISING 5/28: This was a slow week for news I care about, a heavy week at work. I'd backdated this one even when I posted it, Wednesday I think (no way was this a Monday poast). If I'd seen the other links coming I'd have held it in draught and waited. Ah well.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

The Quran is for us, by us

Walid Saleh has a sermon on sura 43.

Before we chuckle at Saleh's assumption about "pagans" and "Meccans", first consider where in the sura-chain is sura 43. It dovetails sura 42 and (as Saleh implies) used sura 23 as well. At this stage - I think - the Prophet's biography was already extant in parts, vide Sean Anthony's overview of 'Urwa's letters. Maybe sura 43 is a pseudepigraph of a Muhammadan sura.

Although if Saleh wants to make that case he needs to demonstrate it, not assume it. Saleh himself endorses Neuwirth's stance that Q. 19:34-40 is an intrusion, one based - exactly - on sura 43. Classical Islam consistently allowed for auto-tahrif, if you will, through His stenographer Muhammad himself as God every now and again would tweak His own revelation. Those of us who are not Muslim have raised eyebrows over this since Caliph al-Mahdi, at least. Even Muslims of a less conservative bent might wonder if 'Uthman (say) had shuffled text around. Papias' comment about Saint Mark comes to mind, that the Umma might have God's Word but not in the best order.

We also have Saleh's naïvété about to what degree the Prophet's opponents are being quoted correctly. The Quran is rhetoric. John Wansbrough demonstrates that the sîra caricatures of "the Jews" were, for their part, not Rabbinic, particularly over their Torah fundamentalism (although, we might have a point about the Karaite sect). If the sîra misrepresents Judaism to provide a mere foil for Islam, why expect better of the Quran against "Meccan pagans"?

Sura 43 had no "Meccan pagans", is what I am trying to say. We have in this sura a work of polemic against... somebody. Probably Christians. And I'd not look too hard for the Christians in question.

Sunday, May 23, 2021

Jesus' shadow

John Damascene's tradition on Golgotha, which he does not relate directly to the Book Of Allâh, in place of shabah has skian auton - that is, the Jews crucified Jesus' shadow. For John, Islam itself is a skia. Phantasma would have been literal.

John might translate tafsir but he does not translate the Book we got - and that the Iraqis had. Moreover and however John's account doesn't resemble any tafsir of which I am aware. The Arabic word for shadow would be zill, nu?

Unless it's less literal. John's take if we were goin' thematic resembles more closely ... sura 38, in which a jasad takes the place of King Solomon. To much worse effect!

What to make of this? Was there a Syrian verse resembling our Q. 4:157, but perhaps not in sura 4, which had jasad? Was there an Umayyad tafsir of sura 4 we're missing?

Ehh. G-d knows better.

UPDATE 7/14: h/t Juan Cole at Academia, we should look at canon Q. 4:157 as the culmination of vv. 153-9 on the kitâbîs. And what kitâb, but the Covenant of v. 154? John's summary of Mamed's text says the kitâbî drive against Jesus, recently noted as a son of Mary, was paranomic. Although this isn't Nicetas' ἄνευ δικαίου, John's paranomía must shadow bighayri haqqin, v. 155 / Q. 3:21. That would bring John's source closer to sura 4, adding to evidence that the ultimate source is indeed the sura.

Tafasir on Q. 4:157-8

Found an excellent resource for classical Tafsir: the righteously-named Great Tafsirs. So: let's run down the list on lâkin shubbiha lahum (or shabbaha, the more-direct Mas'ûdî reading). I mean, before Zamakhsharî and Baydawi and Razi.

First up is the "Mujâhid bin Jabr" tafsir. He died 104 AH so, he'd have done his work in the middle Marwânid era - al-Walîd I, Sulaymân, 'Umar II, and Yazîd II. Mind, we don't actually have a book by him; this site uses Adam 'an Warqâ 'an Ibn Abî Najîh. Ibn Abî Hâtim, for his part, verifies Warqâ. Anyway what the Warqâ chain taught was - they crucified a man other than Jesus and they reckon that he appeared to them as Jesus.

Over in Basra, we have the famous 'Abd al-Razzâq from Ma'mar chain. This claims from Qatâda bin Di'âma. Jesus cast his appearance (shabaha-hu) upon a man of the disciples (hawarîs, per sura 3), and that one was killed. Jesus had earlier presented that [appearance] to them, and he said: upon which of you may be cast my appearance [such that] his is the Garden? One of them said: "upon me ('alî)". Tha'labî had a similar anecdote, also from Qatâda, except the "man from the people" just says "me (ana)"; and, when he is killed, he gets the Garden where he is radiantly reclothed. Note the wordplay in the former, which I much doubt was lost on an 'Abbâsid-era audience . . .

Muqâtil bin Sulaymân - I am very impressed that the Great Tafsirs sitemaster counts him by the way, not all Muslims do - says when the Jews took [the imposter] to kill him, he said to the Jews: I am not Jesus, I am so-and-so, and his name was Judah. But they called him a liar and told him: You are Jesus. So the Jews made the slain person watch over Jesus. Oof. Always look on the bright side of life.

Ibn Abî Hâtim, whose partial tafsir didn't make the cut because it's partial, has (in addition to some parallels noted above) al-A'mash from al-Minhâl bin 'Amr from Sa'îd bin Jubayr. This is a longer version of Qatâda's tale; in it, Jesus asks for a volunteer and someone steps up.

If we're to believe Arthur Jeffery, Ubay added وما قتله الذين أنهموا به wamâ qatalahu alladhîna attuhimû bihi. I make little sense of the singular / plural shift except as a rhetorical question: and who killed him; those who are accused of it?. If the singular verb assumes group-as-singular it falls into place, so, that must be what's going on: the people accused of it didn't kill him.

I am too lazy for a mere blogpost to draw up isnad-bundles for these. I'll probably not even find one for Muqâtil who, as noted, isn't in the best graces of the ahl al-sunna. However if I were to do such, I suspect I'll find Qatâda (at least) to be legit (in basics).

So, Iraq had a consistent doctrine that someone around Jesus got substituted. And this doctrine is tied with sura 4; this is especially clear with Muqâtil.

Shaybani's peace

Lots of locals have free-library boxes outside their homes and someone of them - not tellin' who - had Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism in it. Brave choice for this "anti-fascist" town . . .

This book argues for the nation-state as against international empire. The ideal state would be bound by the laws of G-d as laid out in Torah. Westphalia is the model; and not the Holy Roman Empire, and not the Church to which end Innocent X (meaning: Zelo Domus Dei) gets an ill mention.

It is, thereby, from a different angle of attack that John Locke gets smacked around too. Nations are familial connexions, as per Burke (and maybe Mussolini) against Locke's pure voluntarism. You can get adopted but that's not your right as a human. Yes, Karen; a person can be illegal, if he's trespassed here.

I haven't been a Lockebro since the late 2000s when I discovered Moldbug, so I'm fine with that pile-on against Locke. I'm less fine with the pile-on against the seventeenth century Church. And since I'm now aware that the Peace was once anathema to my tradition, which I didn't know, I have to say something.

Westphalia did, 'tis true, straiten the common ground between men, which straits had to be recarved - on the Bible, first, and then on science. Hazony here prefigures The Knowledge Machine. To all that I restate that this would have happened anyway, and maybe sooner on account a Christianity based on Tradition is inherently more open-minded than one based on an infallible Text. Wasn't Prots who discovered the West Indies, lads.

I'd wonder if this is a particularly Jewish blindspot, failing to see the difference between the martial Christianity of the Late Roman Empire and the insistently dyotheletic Christianity of the Roman and Iraqi bishops; but since a Pope made the same conflation I am forced to spot Hazony this one. Against both: it was Catholicism which allowed a (say) France to exist in the first place; Catholicism got us the Tournament. In the East, the Church being based in the very capital city meant no third-party honest broker who could mediate the dispute according to a common standard. This lack of a common ground got only worse when most of those lands fell under Islamic rule.

All this said, Innocent were better not to have issued his famously-petulant rant. Westphalia proved that a peace between nations is possible outside the Church. Muslims already knew this from Shaybani's Siyâr which Khadduri calls the "Islamic Law of Nations". It might not be a permanent peace; the two nations are still going to maintain their own interests which may well come into conflict again. But almost any peace not based on subjugation is good. Unless you're fighting Crusade. And Crusades are mostly invalid and stupid anyway.

If the Church hierarchy cannot lead an equitable peace then at least it can endorse such, and if not then individual Catholics will have to work around it. Ah well, as in the papacy of Honorius, and in that of Francis for that matter, we're used to that.

Saturday, May 22, 2021

The fall of the Amazon

Mann's 1491 posited a New World with advanced populations until the Columbian Interchange. Usually that Interchange is blamed for the population crash. Not all the New World crashes; as in the Old World, civilisations rose and fell, most famously the Choltal Maya, and we may also point to Huari and to Cahokia.

Mann further had the Amazon to point to but, unlike Perú, there was no aristocracy nor quipu to bear even the semblance of memory. The Neolithic societies there fell... sometime. It was assumed that Francisco de Orellana, and the smallpox and the cocoliztli, got 'em too.

Maybe not though. Reading University (h/t the Times of London) did a study of pollens, to look at reforestation. They are saying that, in Francisco's time, only the Tapajo in Santarem died out (who were already living in the forest) and Lake Rogaguado in Bolivia got reforested. Otherwise the jungle started taking over AD 950. Marajo held out until AD 1200 until they died out too. Guiana collapsed AD 1300. Richard Spencer has a pretty solid alibi for these times and places, I think.

So: pretty much like the Postclassic Maya or the contemporary Huari - or late classical Rome - these societies faced shocks and general decay for which they were not equipped. As to which shocks: tuberculosis came onto the scene AD 1000-1300. The bogeyman of "climate change" is here as well, I guess because otherwise the grants dry up.

By the way: I'm calling it that the Caribs were what did for the Guiana civilisation. It's widely murmured in Caribbean archaeology circles that the Caribs caught, cooked, and ate the Arawaks where they found them. Barbados had a native population that vanished, such that the Europeans didn't find aught but their campsites.

CASARABE 5/26/22: Llanos de Moxos, southeast of Rogaguado, AD 500-1400.

Friday, May 21, 2021

Q. 4:157*

Next up on my list is James R. White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur'an (2013). I probably got this used, somewhere in Longmont.

I am struck by p. 140f. where White claims that Q. 4:157 is nowhere in the Hadith. White observes other points in the Hadith where the Muslims tracked down verses - or "prophetical logia" if you like - that they just arbitrarily stuck in sura 33 or at the end of sura 9. Anyway sura 33 is sura 4 fan fiction as I've documented here and there, and White notes where the Muslims altered the end of sura 4 itself, so - why not v. 157 too.

I cannot rule this out of hand. I do not find where other suwar cite or spin off of Q. 4:157. Sura 4 overall is early so the qurrâ had much opportunity; also, plenty of suwar mention crucifixion either as David's righteous punishment (sura 5) or as Pharaonic sadism (7, 20, 26). Where we can affix a date to something, the Dome of the Rock's inner arcade (which quotes sura 4's conclusion) assumes that Jesus died like Muhammad died. Sura 19 will expand this to John "Yahya".

It is of interest that legal specialists didn't draw in Q. 4:157 as they quibbled endlessly over other legal means for a Muslim judge to execute a sinner. By fire or by stoning or indeed by the cross.

Mustafa Akyol notes Islamic arguments around Jesus' crucifixion but his mufassir is Razi / Arrhazes, who is late. One could also bring in Baydawi, tr. Helmut Gätje pp. 128-9. He's late too.

John of Damascus is not late. John witnesses to the vv. 157-8 doctrine: And he says that the Jews wanted to crucify Him in violation of the law, and that they seized His shadow and crucified this. But the Christ Himself was not crucified, he says, nor did He die, for God out of His love for Him took Him to Himself into heaven. Odd thing here is that John doesn't pin this to a "book" as he will for other Islamic doctrines - just on what the Prophet "said". And it's not quite the wording of Q. 4:157; which (as Akyol notes) doesn't deny the Crucifixion, denying only that the Jews did it [UPDATE 5/23: And what's up with the shadow?]. Although John and our sura agree that Jesus did not die.

Also early is the Leo / Umar correspondence, which Arthur Jeffery translated from Levond (p. 314), that "you say" no one could put Him to death. Jeffery by capitalising "Him" deemed "doubtless" that this refers to our verse-pair. Although, more-central Islamic doctrines could be adduced here, starting with some ancient slogan that "God lives eternally" (cf. "al-Hayy al-Qayyûm/âm"). We might not even need to capitalise "Him" if we're talking Divine 'iṣma for God's Apostles.

I do find a parallel to the doctrine that Jesus did not die on the Cross. It is in Gordon Newby's reconstruction of Ibn Ishaq's mubtada, Yathrib's answer to the Bible; p. 219. A convert from Christianity told Ibn Ishaq that one Sergius, the Thirteenth Disciple, volunteered to take Jesus' place. Someone else told him that Judas Ischariot was that man.

Note: the Qâric verse is not brought here, pace Newby; these traditions are attached to the verse, by the mufassirûn. More, Wahb bin Munabbih had it that Jesus was "resurrected" which I'm guessing is some b-`-th derivative. That assumes Jesus did in fact die.

It may be that the west-Syrian tradition insisted on Jesus' return, as we find in the apocalyptic tradition. This is what has informed John and Ibn Ishaq. [5/23] The Iraqis at least from Hishâm's caliphate onward are probably just using our sura 4.

Deadline 2025

The University of Reading has 150 years of data to figure when solar activity is at is greatest. The next time, they warn, might start five years from now.

Solar cycles are about eleven Earth years in length - I'm unsure if that has to do with Earth's own effect on the Sun. We're in Cycle 25 which started December 2019. They say that as an odd-numbered cycle ends, the sun gets more violent.

This will affect when anyone can send up a stainless-steel rocket. The Apollo programme dodged a bullet by not flying in August 1972, they say. "We'll just launch it at night!!" won't exactly work when the radiation-belts are carrying particles over to the dark side.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

The Nemesis comets

The hunt is on, for infrequent comets. doi 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114469.

According to this, we had identified five "long-period" [i.e. long-time-between-visits] comets whose spoor recurs here in meteor-showers. Now, SETI through Peter Jenniskens is doubling that.

As a side-note, SETI started out as - quite literally - a search for intelligent E.T. life. Obviously a dumb ol' space snowball ain't E.T. As for what I gotta say about 60 Minutes: they lied about George Walker Bush, they lied about Ron DeSantis [say what you will about both targets]; and they're lying now about UFOs. Still. I don't let what is bruited about in the media concerning ET prejudice me against SETI as an institute.

The Hubble variable

This blog suffered some angst over the past year-and-change concerning the Hubble "Constant", in km / sMpc. The background radiation yields 67.4; supernovae run 74-5. I kept having to stick links at the end.

Here's a paper looking into some way out of these discrepancies: maybe it's not a constant at all, but something that varies - increases actually - over time.

This would at least account for the oldest and furthest radiation puking up a number lower than the newer and closer.

O, sister of Aaron!

Four years hence, I look back on some of my statements re: Mustafa Akyol's The Islamic Jesus with rueful acknowledgement... but not all such statements. To that end, this statement needs a revisit:

when Akyol is marshalling his predecessors for Qur'anic doctrine about Jesus, he stumbles into a junkpile of pious apocrypha that no serious Christian scholar would allow anywhere near him. Like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, or Pseudo Matthew, or the Protoevangelion of James. All this stuff is clearly made up after the fact, but Muslims are stuck with it because the Qur'an endorses them [sic]. So Akyol is stuck with it too.

As I read Akyol p. 122, and based on what (else) I was reading since Winter 2019/20, the "junkpile" deserves a better hearing. (And for that matter, a better presentation. Akyol, like Republicans, needs to lay off the Q.) Here is where was mooted that Jesus was not the Royal Anointed but the Priestly Anointed.

The Royal Anointed is what Saints Paul and Mark present to us, Jesus as Bar-Daweid (Mark 10:47). This went through the "seed" (Romans 1:3... and Ignatius almost passim to the Smyrnaeans, Ephesians, et al.). If anyone was going to provide a nirth certifikit for such a christ, a Jew would have to bear him to Bethlehem - or at least one and/or the other of his natural parent/s but preferably the sperm-producing one. The Synoptics spin out the tale accordingly. (And John... well, we love John . . .) For Mark, Jesus is G-d's apostle whom Everyone Knows as a Nazarene, but is secretly Davidide. Jesus owns a πατρίς town which, perhaps, might not be Galilean. (Mark has a famously cagey presentation of his Christ and Lord.)

Thus, the NT core. However there exist(ed) alternatives in early Christendom. The Epistle of James, for a start - literally Akyol's start - didn't care about Yeshu's death and glorious resurrection. This strain will reëmerge in "2 Thessalonians" and the Gospel Of Thomas so-called. Saint Mark was, in part, struggling against this very strain in the Faith which is why he organises his evangel around the Passion, and above all why he's got that pericope about Simon Cephas trying to figure out what Jesus is.

Also extant as option is the Priestly Messiah. This, we get in the "epistle" to the Hebrews, a work associated with Paul's community but widely regarded as not from Paul himself. Mark seems unaware of this argument himself; we might see reflections in canonical John 1-20.

Akyol points out that the Elkasai sect revered Mary as a Levite, and that a Jerushalmi lection "of Jeremiah" lauds Aaron as "Mary's brother". Not "Miriam", as the Torah and LXX: "Mary".

It stands to reason that if a Jew wanted to float a nonroyal saint - perhaps if he denied the right of kingship entire besides G-d's - he'd have the man born anywhere but Bethlehem. And this is what Akyol finds in the Kathisma Church, forerunner of sûratayn 3 and 19: an illustration of the datepalms by which God fed Mary and the infant Jesus. Hence also much of Akyol's apocryphal Oxyrhynchus, particularly Pseudo-Matthew.

Aletheo-Matthew wants Jesus to be the Son Of David so he's got a seed genealogy, through Joseph. He leaves Mary alone and this gap is what allows the Elkasai sect to speculate on her. Luke is the one who draws the David-to-Mary chain. But you know what, I don't trust Luke; and I get a strong impression that a lot of early Christians also didn't, hence the post-resurrection appearances rife in, say, Secret James. UPDATE 9/5/23: And then there's Mary as the Tabernacle in her own self.

After all the above text, I'm still left seeing Akyol's argument as impressionistic. But that might be about as good as we get from the available content. Mary got associated with the Temple so anciently and to such an extent that Matthew had to note it, and Luke had to hide it. And Palaestinian Christianity never quite forgot it.

As for what this means for Islam, I am less certain. I speculate the Qurân's return to this well has to do with the Umayyads' rededication of the Haram al-Sharif and their general motive to pander to west-Syrian Christianity, against Byzantium. At the same time the Umayyads as Arabs could hardly lay claim to Jesus' royal crown. So they cobbled together a Prophetic Jesus who didn't own that crown. That had to be Mary's Jesus.

The caliphate of Allah is within you

Back in 2017 I bought Mustafa Akyol's The Islamic Jesus. It being 2017, I was more defensive about "Islamic apologetic" than I am today. So I threw in a lot of petulant notes in ink in the margin, and at the end; the upshot being that I thought the book was sloppy. I set the book aside in February (my notes run out p. 143), left what I'd read of it in a bag of doo at Ace's doorstep, and didn't pick it up again.

We are not exactly in LOCKDOWN anymore here in the Boulder-to-Denver corridor, but last Saturday I tried two bookstores and judged them unfit for purpose, so I may as well go through that backlog. I have now completed this book.

The Islamic Jesus argues for parallels between the Islamic experience under Western colonialism, and the Jewish experience under the Rhomania. (Insert The Life of Brian quotes here.)

I stand by that Akyol in this book committed a serious foul in its passive-voicing of the Qurayza event (and unnecessarily!). And I can raise several other quibbles, the book's endorsement of the "Q" hypothesis being most egregious. Overall I cannot shake that this book collects IQSA conventional wisdom, valuable as I have found IQSA; Akyol is a Hahn or a Pitre for the Moslems. I open much more space for "Revisionism" than does current-year academe.

In the book's favour, a "Gospel-of-Thomas" approach to Islam is a legitimate effort to humanise the Believers' approach to the Islamic canon. I've toned down some other quibbles. Above all I agree with Akyol that Jesus is a better model for modern Islam within modernity, than Muhammad, which man (or, if you like, idealised sîra character) barely interacted with the "Padishah Empires" directly.

I remain unsure if the Believer can perform such a humanisation, with these texts. A temporal caliphate with power in this world is necessary to several suwar: 21, 38; 22 on the other side, several others. For every Moses and Aaron is a David and Solomon, as I have stated in about as many words in several fora.

I suspect that Jerome's spirit might return to us to warn that a man who struggles to be both Christian and Muslim must end neither Christian nor Muslim. If on the other hand you have a true craving for Christ, you are in luck - he may be had at the Eucharist.

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Power storage on the dark side

Sweden has a cement battery. Load-bearing structures are of interest generally; this one's a bit more constrained as it has to sit in one place.

That helps best, I think, where energy costs run higher when it's darker. Those would be the poles, here. And on the lunar night which is 14 days and frozen-cold. And on Mars.

All these places are probably better off underground not least because of ultraviolet during the daylight hours (or days); still, some structures will be out in the open, like telescopes and rover-garages. They'll want power.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Poor, brutish, and short

More news on pre-Chicxulub mammalia. Cell has the full report: Neil Brocklehurst, Elsa Panciroli, Gemma Louise Benevento, and Roger B.J. Benson "Mammaliaform extinctions as a driver of the morphological radiation of Cenozoic mammals".

Two issues are at play here: the "therian" mammals up to Cretaceous aren't very big, and they aren't very diverse. Therians are us placentals and marsupials; monotremes are out. So're multituberculates and that psychedelic monster they found in Malagasy.

They figure that although the dinosaurs kept us short (and out of the air I guess), they wouldn't have kept us monotonous. Below dino height is also below man height. Scurrying arould our forests are a wide range of badger, lemur, mouse, shrew, and all manner of other little woodland critters. At least, so it is today, under far more dangerous conditions than held under less-intelligent dinos. Where they all at in 70 Mya? This blog has documented some diversification but, we're being told, it's still not enough.

Brocklehurst's crew figures that our ancestors must have been competing with lingering nontherians. Maybe egg-laying Tasmanian Devils.

Monday, May 17, 2021

Subvenerean hydrogen

News from 12 May is that this planet has more hydrogen than we think - below even the mantle. This goes well with a story from a few days later that our core has collected noble gasses from our Sun at our creation. If helium then assuredly hydrogen is coming with.

As we fare through spaaace we might need to get some of that, especially deuterium which we'll use for low-neutron fusion; I expect quite a bit of that tritium byproduct helium-3 also. Since we know Venus has a core I have to ask about its hydrogen too.

Sunday, May 16, 2021

The lion at home

John Bradshaw's 2013 work is being floated around Twitter again. He's the guy who says that housecats think we're cats too. [UPDATE 10/2: If they can see our Blaschko Lines, we can't blame them...]

I don't actually own a cat. I used to like cats more than dogs because dogs were bigger and barkier than I was at age eight. My parents got a dog when I was about twenty years old who won me over, after many months of trying, bless her fluffy soul. But back to cats.

Cats act most like lions: they are driven by dominance and insecurity. These aren't tiger problems.

Looking around at feline psychology, their brains do work much like primates'. Sarah Brown argues for a "socialisation", which looks like it wires cats to see us as kinfolk.

I don't know exactly if, or if so why, dogs' brains be different. Dominance is clearly a thing among wolves. The difference may be the neuroticism: if the dog isn't alpha, the dog accepts that, as long as he's got his meal and his b!tches. The crown might not fit so steadily on the Lion King.

Saturday, May 15, 2021

Dialexis

When I was looking into the Epiphanius / John Damascene intersection I (re)ran across references to a Dialexis. This is called Dialogue between a Saracen and a Christian in English; it is in JP Migne PG 96 and subsequently edited by Kotter in 1981 but not before a translation got loose.

Robert Hoyland discussed this work in a single paragraph, ending his John section, p. 489; also there are footnotes nn. 121, 123 running over to the next page. More dismissed than discussed, truth be told. Blink and you'll miss it. I missed it until now.

Apparently the Dialexis has a summary also in Greek. And Theodore Abû Qurra got in on it; Griffith in "Free Will in Christian Kalâm", doi 10.2143/MUS.100.1.2011439 82-91 in fact assigns its current redaction to him. Glei and Khoury assign it later still, to that one's pupil John the Deacon (one of many such Johns; this isn't the Neapolitano, nor is it the Coptic historian whose text is Severus' main source for the AD eighth-century). Thus Hoyland, anyway.

Since the late 1990s there seems more interest in the Dialexis as being an early delineation - in Greek - of Christian / Muslim comparative theology. Catholic University got a thesis on that. And there's Marios Begzos, "Inter-Religious Dialogue in Byzantine Thought" which I find in Two Traditions, One Space pp. 40f.; but this assumes Kotter so isn't up to date. Daniel Janosik's John of Damascus: First Apologist to the Muslims is up to date... that date being 2016. I haven't looked since then.

The Dialexis is mostly about free-will and theodicy. Here is late Umayyad qadar, which issue became hot late in Hishâm's rule in the 110s AH / 730s AD. Interesting that Jacob of Edessa had got into this very question for the Syriac Miaphysites a generation earlier; see here Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma.

As to the rest, some of it carries over prior Christian / Jewish disputation, like on how Mary could be theotokos (n. 121), although I can easily imagine Nestorians on the hook for this as well. The question on how John Forerunner relates to Jesus, however, seems specifically Damascene and, yes, truly Islamic. I am not seeing, say, the Mandaeans or even the Manichees with this much influence there and then.

Friday, May 14, 2021

The negligent homicide of Epiphanius

Roger Pearse is discussing Epiphanius and John Chrysostom.

Epiphanius is famed for the Panarium - lit. "breadbasket" but perhaps a colloquialism for "medkit" - which he wrote in Greek to collect all the heresies current in his day and before. It's useful as an encyclopaedia of doctrines which orthodox Christianity had rejected. Byzantine-era Photius, a self-conscious encyclopaedist, although equally opinionated, thought that Epiphanius wasn't all that good at his job. John Damascene thought better of Epiphanius and his second book of Fount of Knowledge is pretty much a Panarium copy (until it gets to Islam obviously). As a result we enjoy a better handle on Epiphanius' text than on many of his contemporaries' work. And it has several translations including into English.

John Chrysostom's (many) enemies, who were proto-Monotheletes mostly in Alexandria, dragged an elderly Epiphanius into Constantinople hoping to snare this pope as that final Panarium chapter. According to Pearse, Epiphanius disappointed the Alexandrines and refused to slander John as a heretic - or at least not as one worth the bother. Epiphanius died on his way to Cyprus; John got fired. Feel free to read Pearse for the gossip around that.

I think the Miaphysites, and the community around Cyril of Alexandria generally, should have let Epiphanius enjoy his retirement and not involved him in the Alexandria / Antioch hissy fit.

Thursday, May 13, 2021

The high-thrust engine

Yesterday was the autumnal over our sister planet so, time to rake those leaves. In celebration: rocket post!

It's a commonplace that combustion engines, of which the jet-turbine is one, represent a controlled explosionburn. Here's controlled detonation. DEFINITIONS 3/19/22: Chris Combs explains that burn/conflagration is subsonic; detonation supersonic. The Orion Project going tactical-nuclear would be, er, supersonic.

Let's manage what Daniel Rosato et al. actually say in their paper, "Stabilized detonation for hypersonic propulsion". The University of Central Florida built them a hypersonic "high-enthalpy" reaction chamber. Herein was created an oblique detonation wave, which they formed by using an angled ramp inside the reaction chamber to create a detonation-inducing shock wave for propulsion. UPDATE 8/23 Apparently this differs from rotary detonation.

Reminds me of Princeton's Alfven: taking a powerful one-off force, controlling it, and making it run for longer. UCF say they got three seconds out of their own detonation. That means it can be studied. That does not mean Elon can use it in a Raptor - yet.

If anyone can run this big bang past three seconds this promises (far) beyond Rolls Royce' new Concorde. This looks to compete with freakin' scramjets and/or the fabled X-15 (UPDATE 8/9: which don't last long anyway). Although I bet when it's time for commercial flight, the aerodynamics of it all will favour Rolls. "Mach 17!" is laughable. And - yeah, three seconds is not the thirty minutes hyped for NY/LA.

As an engine technology, it doesn't have to be a turbine. Which means it has applications in (chemical) rocketry as well. In fact, I'd say foremost. Elon has to be looking into this, to replace his Raptors. Although again, Elon needs more than three seconds.

For now, and for our delta-V needs in space itself: we got a high-thrust-but-still-low-impulse engine. We got orbital transfer options and we got Oberth; we don't even need to go nuclear.

Sadly the blame for the hype must fall upon Rosato, as principal author. An engine operating with a Mach 5 flow path corresponds to a vehicle flight Mach number of 6 to 17. That is comparable to a half-hour flight from New York to London and is 5 times faster than the average time it took the legendary Concorde to complete the same journey. You should have stopped at the first sentence, bro. Manage our expectations with the rest.

And to be fair to the hype, the article does mention that latter. I'd have advised that they started with that, but, hypesters gotta hype.

BACKDATE 5/17. Also, radio signals in the ionosphere.

HYPE 5/28/22: Combs is on this day mocking this take, back from the grave.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

The gospels of Eucharist

Scott Hahn and Brant Pitre in several books presented the Catholic understanding of the Eucharistic liturgy as a sort of weekly Holy Week. It is a commonplace that at least the Synoptic Gospels frame a Last Supper as Passover. John alone doesn't, because this author's Jesus is the Passover; but by "bread of life" and "true vine" the Johannine community assuredly assumed a Last Supper long before it composed that Spiritual Gospel.

Thomas Kazen offers some important provisos. The Mishnaic Seder is a Pharisaic rite that brings the Temple into the Jew's home, on the assumption that the Yerushalmi Temple is no more. The Mishnah is thereby a poor witness to Passover rite in AD 32. Although I'd argue that the Pharisees were already alienated from Jerusalem by then, so I'd not rule the Mishnah entirely out.

Kazen has the advantage that he knows the equation Mark + Paul = Luke, Paul here writing to the Corinthians. Although: their Christologies differ. Both Paul and Luke are rhetors. Luke will tend to share Paul's commentary among other New Testament heroes, often at the expense of Paul's evangel. (I have never considered Luke to be an honest man.) Paul has the integrity to admit his aims.

Kazen's disadvantage is that he hasn't brought John's Revelation to the, er, table. 'Tis true, in the timespan he's discussing - the first 150 years - the Revelation isn't canonical. It is, however, a witness to a (very) Jewish understanding. Might also want to consider Ignatius.

I don't think Kazen refutes Hahn nor Pitre. I'm not even sure he's read such books. Kazen does however present a warning not to overstate the case.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

The post-Syriac Gospel of Thomas

Let's discuss that infamous "Fifth Gospel", attributed to the apostle Thomas. Mostly associated with Egypt, in some Greek fragments and (upstream) in a near-full Sahidic Coptic codex. The Coptic was found later and its codex was later.

It was always noted in studies of Egyptian Christianity that Thomas was not their saint. Mark was, if anyone; and as Gnostic studies kicked in, John and Paul were adduced as well. As Matthew got attached to Antioch, James to Palaestina, and Luke to Rome (and maybe Damascus); Thomas was the Syrian saint (thence India).

And indeed the Coptic Nile communicated with the rest of classical antiquity in those two languages, Greek and Aramaic. Latin wasn't involved any more than Persian before it. Both were some steps removed by sea and by land, respectively.

Certainly the canonical Sahidic Bible was largely a Greek translation, from the Septuagint Old-Testament and from that ancient "Western text" for the New. Also found was that the Sahidic Thomas wasn't composed in Coptic, containing some strikingly non-Kemic turns of phrase and a coracle-load of Christian Greek. Case closed: translated, from Greek.

Well maybe not so closed. Also found are parallels with the Diatesseron, Tatian's great harmony into Edessene Syriac. So Tatian used Thomas!, said the scholars. A note of caution is needed here.

Nicholas Perrin offers that note (pdf). Some of Coptic-Thomas' turns-of-phrase like hos ebol hen-oua (#61), lit. "as from one", work better as Syriac idiom in this case min-hda which is just "suddenly". And overall the linked keywords look better in Syriac. I have some notes to file on Perrin, though.

First note: the Edessene form of Aramaic is late in this game. Idumaea-Judaea had her own Aramaic which that consciously-non-Jewish Roman Palaestina certainly had the motive to maintain, if only against Hebrew. Palaestina was/is physically closer to the Delta. Why are we talking Syriac, then? Is it just the Tatian parallelism? Thomas' adventures across the upper Euphrates?

Also: if Perrin is right that Coptic-Thomas is that late, then the Coptic-NT already existed so (near-certainly) tainted the translation from whatever its original language was.

As for #61, it has no parallel to the known Gospel canon. But. Mark's own catchphrase euthys springs to mind. And Salome is in it. Which would lead one down Morton Smith's rabbithole of Secret Gospels.

If I had been tagged to review Perrin, I'd outright tell the man I am on his side, as being no Thomasbro myself. But I'd ask Perrin if he might reorganise his argument. He should hold off on Tatian (whose own text is by no means solid) and concentrate on general classical-era Aramaics-plural. If it turns out that Syriac is a better fit than any other Aramaic - great! - but Perrin needs to make that case. And #61 might not be the ideal test-case given that it isn't canonical so hasn't the best Gospel / antiGospel parallels. I understand that April DeConick already lodged similar complaints; to which Perrin had to respond in 2008, p 50f here.

Either way since 2017 we have J Gregory Given, "“Finding” the Gospel of Thomas in Edessa", Journal of Early Christian Studies 25.4, 501-30; doi:10.1353/earl.2017.0051. Given's calumnies against "Orientalism" aside, we do need to expand our understanding of pre-Nicaea Aramaic Christianities beyond muh 'dessa.

Monday, May 10, 2021

Composing a maghâzî

I am still looking into Ibn Hishâm's arrangement of pericopae. He stuck his Munâfiq Cycle, if that's even a thing, before the stories of disputation. As I read Guillaume, 242-6, these Munâfiq guys mainly circle around Uhud and the Mosque Of Dissension (masjid dirâr cf. Q. 9:107f.). Ibn Hishâm was poor at relating the asânid for such sections, as Motzki noted; I suspect, because it's all done in summary form.

John Wansbrough, 13, pointed out that the suwar involved are 9, 4, 3, 33, then 63 and 59 once each. The Muslims relegate all of these to the Madînat Yathrib part of the Prophet's career - the late part. Not mab'ath, then; maghâzî... in theme. I suspect that the maghâzî is about where Ibn Ishâq assigned these comments. Pretty much where Ibn Hishâm has them, Hijra-era, Guillaume pp. 219f.

A cursory look 'round and I see these tales cited also in Ibn Kathîr, in Nawâwî, and in Balâdhurî's Ansab al-Ashraf. Ibn 'Abd al-Barr 'an Wâqidî cites "'Abd al-Hamîd bin Ja'far told me from his father" for the hypocrite Julâs bin Suwayd. Mind you: Wâqidî is Problematic for Muslims, let alone for us Ibn Warraq readers.

Elsewhere I do not consider Ibn Ishâq to be the most diligent of Muslims; he made use of a large block of Muhammad bin Abî Muhammad elsewhere, retaining them as a block. Someone like MiaM will be found, who composed this Munâfiq core on Ibn Ishâq's behalf.

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Philo of Byblos

Philo of Canaanite Gubla, called "Byblos" by Greeks, composed an ethnography of Phoenicia in Greek for a Hellenist audience.

His fellow Lebanese Porphyry of Tyre, countering Judaeo-Christianity, endorsed that one's "truest account concerning the Jews" in Against the Christians' fourth volume. I assume this De Judaeorum was one part of a larger project from which Porphyry picked out what he needed. Much like how Josephus had plucked out "Acts of the Diadochi" from Agatharch's history of the Eastern Med.

Eusebius of Maritime-Caesarea, yet another Canaanite and the Arian sort of Christian, picked out this Porphyry quote and a lot more, for his Praeparatio Evangelium. This was to support Judaeo-Christianity against Porphyry. Note that both Eusebius and Porphyry were Hypsistarians in their own way. You could say that in their approach to Philo they were bipartisan.

Philo claimed to have compiled his history from... very ancient sources. Intermittently he claimed to be doing nothing more than translate one "Sanchuniatho", which name is at least intelligible as honest Punic (Sakkunyaton, under late-classical Aramaisation *Sakkhunyathon). As it happens the extracts which Eusebius picks out from Philo don't actually discuss Judaism as such; they are purely Canaanite (see below). And for a long time Semitists scorned this Philo as a fraud.

It is difficult to fault these early-modern scholars. The isnad is a long one: Eusebius from Porphyry from Philo from Sakkhunyathon from a priest of Yaw (note Northern-Kingdom spelling: no hâ') writing under one Abi-Baal "king of Beirut". As kingdoms go, Beirut wasn't even noted as independent until the Hellenistic era. The tradition dates Abi-Baal to the Late Bronze Age but there are too many points where a quote might become paraphrase.

And as you have seen lately, I distrust "bipartisanship", which tends to be a conspiracy by interested parties to agree upon an enforceable dogma against the actual, you know, truth. A Lucian-style secularist and a dishonest Eunomian Christian could readily shake hands over the falsehood of Canaani religion. And this is what Philo offered: not an evangel of Canaani religion as Canaan lived it, but an argument that the Greek gods were false - because they were plagiaries of Canaani gods who were mere mortals whom ignorant Canaanites had raised to godhood. Philo despised his own people's religion. The watchword was "Euhemerism".

Philo and all his tradents might have been unfair; but enough of a record survived in Canaan that Philo could be verified, which Porphyry claimed he'd done - meaning, if Philo was a liar, then so was Porphyry. In our own times Ugarit happened and then Kumarbi happened after that. Since the middle 1930s we've been negotiating terms. I expect others have already mused about the analogy with Ptolemy of Mendes and "Man-Aton"; I know they've drawn parallels with Berossus. Albert Baumgarten published a "Commentary" in 1981 under Brill.

As a Byblian himself, living in a classical age, Philo met his "Canaanite" gods as very Egypt-influenced, well beyond what Ugarit had been following more purely in the Late Bronze Age. Among them is Thoth, for instance. And Egypt actually was Euhemerist: their Pharaohs claimed to be descended from Osiris who first farmed the Nile.

Overall I accuse Eusebius of bafflegab. He presents Philo as saying little (directly) to do with Judaism, despite that Porphyry had endorsed Philo on exactly that. But Eusebius doesn't state this outright. What Eusebius lets us read is that Philo mentioned the genealogy of "Elus" - as Kronos. El is, of course, a common name in the Jewish Torah often identified with their YHWH. Porphyry had mixed opinions on Judaism: he appreciated the laws, mostly, but he disagreed morally with meat-consumption and also with the Christian exegeses of Genesis Two - which went down to the text itself. Porphyry's motive was to present Moses as Israel's oracle to the Platonists' god, poorly transmitted. Philo was by contrast a naturalist out to rebut the Greeks... based on a rebuttal of the Canaanites.

What I don't know, and would like to know, is if the Phoenicians themselves were of a mind philosophical enough to argue that point in their own tongue. I am sure Philo himself represents honestly if as "hostile witness" the Egypt-Canaan synthesis longstanding in Gubla. (A parallel Egypt-Jewish synthesis acted upon the Levites, Egyptian exiles and heretics attached to a Canaanite kingdom.) I wonder if other Canaanites denied this. And I wonder how old the argument was, already.

As for the Jews: I think Philo's take on Jewish YHWH wasn't that YHWH was an historical personage like (he claimed) Elus. I think Philo's take was Ptolemy's take: that Moses invented bad oracles in "Yao"'s name, or maybe in Thoth's. Porphyry wasn't going to admit that; neither was Eusebius.

Saturday, May 8, 2021

Saving the Host

Every now and again one runs across a story about some disaster that befalls a church building. The priest runs in to protect the most sacred relic in there... the wafers of Communion. This happened at Peshtigo, with fire; and long ago in Avignon, with water.

If you are not Catholic, or even for many Catholics, you are probably thinking "you fool". All the precious metals that are likely in there, maybe even precious books and you dare the flames for some biscuits that may or may not even be consecrated.

I'll say this, even if the Host is a MacGuffin with no value outside our faith. Jumping in to spare the Host is inspiring to others. Lay Catholics watching their pastor risk his life will be inspired to go in there with him to spare other relics from the disaster. Say: those books I was talking about. Or the sacred vessels (which, G-d willing, nobody plans on absconding with).

Above all, this impresses upon every observer that we are serious about the Real Presence of Our Lord. Risk-our-lives serious.

Composing a mab'ath

I am trying, one more time, to read John Wansbrough - here, the "Historiography" essay which opens The Sectarian Milieu. Wansbrough is analysing, exhaustively, where the Ibn Hishâm sîra meets the Qurân.

Th.S.M. p. 4 starts with IH 204-32, wherein four groups first hear of an Arabian prophet. Next up pp. 7-11 is IH, 354-64; here the Makkis (mostly pagans) debate the Prophet directly. Then pp. 12-14 is IH, 519-27 on the munâfiqs. Fourth pp. 14-22: IH, 530-72, moving from Arab mockery to Jewish rejection. Wansbrough uses the Saqqâ edition. If you speak English, which I'm unsure for Wansbrough, Guillaume has this fourth block pp. 252-70.

What Wansbrough brought to this mâida is that all these pericopae act as cohesive unities. He also mused that they be ancient. If so, someone or someones collected these variations-on-a-theme and presented them to Ibn Ishâq (or whomever), whose collation nobody since then much bothered to break up until Ibn Hishâm. Wansbrough will rather undercut this case where he doubts Ibn Hishâm's claim to have Ibn Ishâq. (Bringing to mind Douglas Hofstadter's joke about whether Shakespeare's plays were composed by someone else of the same name, which I assume he'd borrowed from someone else himself. Note Motzki, 24 cites the wrong Wansbrough skepticism; p. 58 goes against third-party witness and assumes Ibn Ishaq as a real figure. Motzki would be better off citing Juynboll on Zuhri.)

I bring here Harald Motzki's (pbuh) Reconstruction of Muhammad Ibn Abî Muhammad, which intersects the fourth Wansbrough pericope at Narrations #3-5 from Saqqâ 538f. If Motzki was right, which he usually was, MiaM had earlier Ibn Hishâm ed. Saqqâ 270-2 / Guillaume 121-2 and then S 294-314 / G 133-41; next #6 pipes up Saqqâ 2.47 / 1.552; and #7 is last 2.174. Motzki argued that Ibn Hishâm has taken Ibn Ishâq's narrations near-wholesale and that Ibn Ishâq had done likewise for MiaM. Motzki oddly doesn't cite Wansbrough's textual arguments in the footnotes here, although they could well have served his own argument.

By extension, the same should be assumed for the first three pericopae, that they were late-Umayyad-era collections which Ibn Ishâq packaged into a narratio, Gospel style.

At this point I suppose we have to ask, why. Wansbrough thinks the impetus came from outside. Jews and Christians were asking pointed questions about the new faith. Local Muslim sermonisers also needed a context for that most eminently context-resistant Scripture, the Qurân. Luckily, they had a God who could do that for them. God inspired the first Islamophobesskeptics to utter the veriest words of Qurân, which the Prophet - God's mouthpiece - could easily confute, with no real effort on the Prophet's own part.

This sort of collection could be adapted into sermons, sent out against Christians like John in Damascus, read out for amusement and edification... anything the young Muslim could want, really. It would prove that the maba'th was the genre's best home and that is how Ibn Ishâq passed it on.

USS Liberty

I found out about the USS Liberty in college. I think there was some low-budget paperback lying on top of what we'd euphemistically call "Right wing antiwar" literature. This is after Buchanan's 1992 run; that movement was mostly adhering to Ron Paul in those later years. Gottfried was another name on that list. You know the end of this rainbow.

Being a Zionist myself I am attuned to such dogwhistles. This story just won't go away so, here is Sacrificing Liberty, courtesy Brian Wright (and Unz). We'll keep in mind that Wright is one of those antivaxxers and, therefore, not a reliable source himself; but I do trust him just far enough to transcribe a movie.

What we're dealing with here is the afterclap of the 1955-65 decolonisation. It is hard to understand this decade, since it's a different country, but the way they did things was that the US was trying to take over Britannia's rule over the seas, which rule Britannia could no longer afford (for whatever reason), and that meant the US needed to present itself as the Torch Of Liberty. This started with the Suez Crisis in which the US supported Nasser's Egypt, against Israel. Twelve years on, Nasser was still an antisemitic bellicose idiot and, further, drifting to the commies. I assume US-Israel relations, in reaction, were getting a little better over this time.

In 1967, over what we've learnt to name the Six Day War, Israel overran the Sinai in the course of which, Nasser "lost" an army. Meanwhile President Johnson had ordered the USS Liberty, which had just about as much firepower as it needed to scare off a fleet of Somali fishermen, to... we are unsure what, exactly. To "monitor the situation" or something.

Israel's airforce and navy by this point had little more to fear from Nasser and, further, wasn't over-worried about Syria or Lebanon or Turkey or Libya or whatever else. They found the Liberty just floating out there. They strafed it. Almost sank it.

The reason this "accident" won't go away is because of those lousy inconvenient... survivors. They kept popping up over the decades to tell everyone who'd listen that the Israelis sure didn't act like they'd done an oopsie. The Israelis acted like they were there to sink the ship and to kill the lifeboats. Given all that: the question is, why. And why did Johnson and the elder admiral McCain cover it all up?

Pause for a moment and remember that this isn't just a problem for modern American / Israel relations aka "Zionism". It is also a problem for the antiZionists who are wanting the Israelis' motive. "Drrr them jooos are evil" might cut it in Stormfrontland but it won't cut it for the rest of us. The Israelis make an oopsie and tried to kill the witnesses...? The Israelis couldn't quite manage this, if true; the Coffee Coaster gives due respect to Terry Halbardier who ensured that the rest of the American navy knew that the attack was happening. And anyway a friendly-fire incident, more exactly a blue-on-green incident, wouldn't merit the waste of firepower for the coverup. How about "FAAALSE FLAAAG" - oh, just go away now.

Wright and, I think, the documentary propose that the Liberty had done its job too well - it monitored the fate of Nasser's lost army. There was some Africa Addio sh!t goin' down. The Israeli army didn't have the means to hold the sheer number of prisoners, and didn't trust that those prisoners weren't playing-possum to stage their real attack behind Israel's line. So the Israelis... didn't take prisoners. And the Liberty caught it on tape.

After the war, Nasser needed Egypt to stop fighting it, because he seemed to be short on troops all of a sudden. He settled on a narrative of a valiant Egyptian army fighting bravely to the last man. (Rameses II Usermaatre would be proud.) It got him through his last couple years of rule. Israel got away with murder. Johnson got away with his dumb decision to send a ship to the edge of a war zone without adequate support. Everyone was happy...

... except for those annoying survivors bleeding all over the place.

Friday, May 7, 2021

Here's some drama

Early this morning before getting to work I read Peter Hotez' (MD, PhD) twitter, talking about an antivaxx "harassment machine". It started up with an eye-catching graphic of the Nuremberg hangings of Mengele after The War: Today was a rough, more than most. Sharyl Attkisson was named-n'-shamed for pointing her readers to that Natural News site.

I will disclose my position: antivaxxers are anti-life. To the extent "good" and "evil" have meaning, to be anti-life is to be evil. I think hbdchick is about on the same wavelength, on the outs with the Church where I'm on the, er, ins; it's hbdchick's Twitter where I got the information. All this predisposes me to Hotez. Which means I need to be more careful, on this topic.

Luckily for me, I was at work today and, thereby, on the outs with Twitter. I had a feeling this morning that all of this talk of harassment was a bit too conveeeenient. Sicknick's "martyrdom" by fire-extinguisher and then by bear-spray both turned out to be bogus. As I come back to Professor Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, I see he has deleted his comment and thread. Brandy Zadrozny is still up though. And he's got more allegations - if you believe them, which I guess I do.

Hotez hasn't backed down from his position, which is that "anti-science" needs to be treated [passive-voice] at the same level as terrorism and nuclear-proliferation. The C-word is raised. Oh, and he's a Russiabro too of course. His overall argument is that Biden needs to send the Marines after Attkisson and Natural News, with guns; and maybe nuke Moskva too.

I think I know the motive behind deleting that thread: Hotez was denying his readers access to Attkisson and Natural News. Because Hotez is a censor. Hotez speaks out for the Truth; y'all are just harassers.

I don't believe that Hotez is in a moral high-ground to talk about extremism and violence. Hotez is himself an extremist who wants someone else to do his violence for him. If Hotez dislikes harsh rhetoric against him, Hotez should use less of it against others.

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Can we has anuvver classicul langwij plz

When I got to maybe the lower-sixth form (that's Junior year to colonials) I wondered - hey, we're learning Greek and Latin as Classical languages, the Oxbridge nerds know several other Classical-era languages, how come we're not learning these others. Aramaic sprang to mind. Also maybe Hebrew and Coptic. Or Persian or Irish or AngloSaxon or . . .

I think the issue here is to define what "Classical" means as against, "stuff we see on inscriptions here and there". I mean, if you're interested in Gaulish history, you could and should get into Celtic philology. But all you're ever going to read is "Panoramix wuz here and he grieved over Dogmatix". Same goes triple for "Safaitic" Arabic. We get into Classics in the first place to understand the human condition, to read their literature, to learn from their sages. You don't get that from Oscan graffiti at Pompeii.

Post-Safaitic, we do get Arabic sages. And Hebrew sages, and Middle Persian sages, and certainly some AngloSaxon and Irish sages. But these aren't Classical-era anymore. We're into Late Antiquity. Which, it turns out, is not Antiquity. Everyone is Christian now, or (for Zoroastrians, Jews, and Manichees - and, soon enough, Muslims) postChristian. That is best-case scenario; there exist several Coptic libraries but no Coptic humanism.

Further afield we can absolutely talk of a Nahuatl-language humanism and a near-miraculous library in Chinese and the various Indic languages. But to paraphrase Barack Obama, even granting these magnificent achievements they're just not mine. As a west-Eurasian.

Greek and Latin, although they very much had a Late Antique presence, were humanist before Christ and they're, like, right here. Unlike antique Persians (or Elamites &c) they didn't just erect monuments and keep accounts. They sang love songs and recorded histories and asked about the justice of a world under uncaring gods. If any of this exists for - say - Carian, none of it has reached us.

The Semites come so very close with the Hebrew canon and with Aramaic works such as "Ahiqar", and maybe that Aramaic papyrus in demotic script. And if you know Hebrew and Aramaic, you are well over 75% of your way to Ugaritic.

The Bronze Age is much, much better for humanist prose and poetry, between Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Ugaritic aforementioned and of course Egyptian. Even Hurrian looks good as against Urartian and Old Persian.

One day, if Thoth wills, we may get our real Egyptian Demotic library, containing more than just Hermes Trismegistus. Or our Aramaic and/or Punic library.

Agatharch today

There's an ethnographer who wrote in Greek called Agatharch, or maybe Son Of Agatharch, or maybe he was Agatharch Junior.

There's talk that this "Agatharchides" is obscure. He got quoted by Josephus, Pliny, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus none of which are obscure today. And his book on the Erythraean Sea (that's the Red Sea) survived to get copied in Byzantium up to the ninth century where Photius found it, possibly next to Philostorgius, because there was quite the demand for books on west-Arabia by then. (A previous blog did wonder what befell Ouranius' Arabika however.) I'd not call an historian so widely quoted to be obscure in Roman classical antiquity.

As to why his other books got lost: there was a book on Europe, which maybe didn't seem as relevant as Polybius' book nor, for that matter, all that later stuff in Latin. I suspect it concentrated on Greek colonies on the coast.

Agatharch's book on Asia fared better - by getting hate-quoted. (Philostorgius would empathise.) Josephus and other Jewish historians were on the lookout for anything that might mention their race from a remove. Jews appreciated when someone backed up their own books, but mostly these gentilic books tended to levy scurrilous accusations which Jews then had to refute. Ptolemy of Mendes claiming to be "Manetho" was, I think, the worst; Apion the archantisemite had a field day relaying that one's slanders. Josephus cites Agatharch's work as "the Acts of the Diadochi", which I suspect comprises a volume of that Asian text.

Today, these classical historians' ahadith continue to be cited, not so much to refute their bias (that job is long done) but more to collate parallel data. Which is great; but we must always remember that quotes come without context, and the context might even be the more important data we want. This is something readers of Robert Hoyland should understand for Islamic origins.

Monday, May 3, 2021

Cold equations

I first read [a variant of] Thomas Godwin's 1954 "Cold Equations" story in READ magazine in, I think, 1986. This was in English class, not "Science". The story's a classic, and as with all classics there has grown up an industry of Problematisation around it.

According to "legend", but I suspect it's true, editor John Campbell demanded of Godwin what our 1980s-era "Generation X" would call a Kobayashi Maru. Campbell wanted to get across to his Astounding readers that, in space, there can be no Tolkienoid "eucatastophe". If the oxygen runs out, you die. A Han Solo pleading "it's not my fault" to an uncaring universe just doesn't work.

I take it that the Kennedy Left technocrats always hated this story and that is why we got Apollo 13, that failure should never be an option. The modern Left don't like the Gender Politics of the original, so: Stowaway. I am unaware of a Right critique as such but I do find a Rightist in the comic form, RH Junior whose "Quentyn Quinn" made a right mockery of it. Pro-life libertarian anticorporatist, anyway.

Yes, the story as Godwin and Campbell posted it in 1954 is contrived. The author was writing... in 1954. Godwin and Campbell didn't know the details of the many ways space can kill you. The main issue stands: your shuttle's safeguards can fail, and when they do, the equations get very chilly indeed.

As for Stowaway: since 1954, we've had 65-70 years so this generation of authors has had that opportunity to harden the science some. There's a girl and there's the titular character, and they are not the same. The stowaway gets to live... we think. Whether the stowaway gets to live with himself is another question.

The post-nano age

Used to be that chipmakers had "nanometers" as their metric. That changed in the mid2000s and, to be fair, we all knew it. Multicore became the buzzword for awhile; and asynchronous programming got a boost. Back in 2007 I recall async / await becoming a thing in conferences.

To the extent chips have gotten better, it's because they've gotten smarter: processes that can be pushed onto other chips, are pushed onto those other chips, for instance. Which moves some bottlenecks to bandwidth and latency, but those can be handled too.

Another nice little trick is caching, just like in your browser. First time you visit a website with a bunch of graphics, you download all those graphics, and display them. Takes a while. Second time, if those same graphics are there - why do it all again? Store it locally and let the browser toss 'em back up on your screen. Apparently microchips can store certain favoured routes, Intel since 2011; they don't have to run the same process twice in Minecraft, so they don't.

It's turning out that a smarter chip can be fooled (pdf). Welcome to SPECTRE, Mister Bond; do mind the lasers.

SPECTRE can, I take it, trick such a processor into taking the wrong route thus opening up data which it's not supposed to know, like a cached password. The hacker running SPECTRE now knows it too. pwnd!

Round Two

Just got my second round of Pfizer in Minecraft. I am pretty sure I didn't get microchipped because, who's got money for that.

I must report in all fairness that my menstrual cycle is a bit late. It's only been three weeks since the first jab, so I'm not worried yet. I'll keep y'all posted.

Whilst we're waiting, here's Saletan on the freeloading Right; and here's Derek Thompson. I'll butt in to the latter to agree with many who caught this bug already, that they don't need a vaccine as well.

All this said, I'll refer to Cernovich yesterday when he mused that those who took the vaccine are a "personality type". The Right sees us as... well, as Others. We're dupes at best - and whose dupes? Satan's dupes. Hence why Right gyms are banning those who took the jab; and hence, now, why Right schools are blocking the vaccinated from their children. Partly that's tit-for-tat: they virtue-signal, we virtue-signal; Our Bodies Our Choices, blah blah.

But I think it's more, at this point. It was the Mask Of The Beast over at Ace's (before he banned me); now, it's the vaxx. It's not even the stupid microchip thing. We chose to accept The Narrative of The Elites.

Maybe the Elites are a bunch of midwits. They're still smarter than ... morons. And as we circle back to Saletan, and more-mildly to Thompson, we are going to need a conversation as to what we as Americans can tolerate. Because we know how far the Right tolerates.

P46

PTO today. Am breaking off to collect some musings on the New Testament extract "P46".

P46 is, as the initial implies, a papyrus. As I'm reading Michael Holmes and indeed further in Blackwell 2010, believing Holmes for whatever reason, Holmes claims the papyrus tradition is marked by the Þ thorn. Wiki marks it by \mathfrak {P} which is just stylised Gothic P. I mean, P is for Papyrus, drrrp. Holmes apud Blackwell 2010 is the first I have read of a thorn being used - and the last. So P it shall be, on this blog here. But enough of that.

P46 preserves most of Paul's non-Pastoral letters excepting 2 Thessalonians, Minecraft, and Philemon. The texttype is firmly Alexandrine except I am told, Romans; also 1 Thess is so destroyed here it cannot be judged. As a plus our MS got Hebrews, between alt-Romans and 1 Corinthians; so, P46 and maybe all Alexandria assume it Pauline. Further assumed are Colossians and Ephesians, as "Ephesians" - this is no Marcionite book. The MS, having filibustered on Hebrews, breaks off before it gets to 2 Thessalonians, Philemon, and/or the Pastorals. Sir Frederic Kenyon started a debate over whether the codex even had room for these. And the fragment of "Thessalonians" incipit doesn't extend to whether it was "Thessalonians A".

Pace him, the MS does have room for these but this space could fit anything Paul-related. Maybe 2 Peter, or Paul and Thecla, or "3 Corinthians" or "Laodiceans". Maybe even 1 Clement as in "A". An argument can be made that the papyrus' owner accepted the Pastorals but not for P46.

Sunday, May 2, 2021

The piecemeal Byzantine imposition

As I'm looking at the first instances of standard New Testaments, I'm seeing a gradation. It's generally going "Western" (meaning, wild) > Alexandrine > Antiochene-gone-Byzantine. I'm interested here in the pattern where a NT which preserves both Gospels and Epistles is Alexandrine except for the Gospels which are Byzantine.

In this group is "A" itself, a text literally from Alexandria; also, the Vulgate as we have it. I'm flagging the Vulgate as most important because we know who did its Gospels: Jerome. Which means we know when: the reign of Theodosius I and then the minority of Theodosius II (Honorius, in the West).

Theodosius I had the strength to impose a single text upon Egypt and Italy. So did Theodosius II more-or-less. I am not seeing this for Arcadius or Aelia Pulcheria in between. The Gospels, in particular, look like something Christians didn't replace lightly, given the Western diehards ℵ and W.

If Theodosius replaced the Gospels but not the rest of the NT, as we see in "A" and the Vulgate, that means Theodosius did not (yet) own a new text for the rest of the NT. He just had Alexandria. So that's what stayed in "A" and went into those parts of the Vulgate.

The Alexandrine Bible

By happenstance the 2010 Blackwell Companion to the New Testament has got loose. I am reading its fifth chapter, Michael Holmes' summary "Reconstructing the Text". I assume the last decade hasn't seen much revision(ism) against that Status Quaestionis. UPDATE 5/3: There's WaltzMN, too.

We learn here that the "Alexandrine" text, which is best held by the Constantius-era codices Sinaiticus "ℵ" (except the Gospels) and especially Vaticanus "B" and I'd add Washington "W", is indeed a standard edition. The tradition is also ancient: P46 is already (mostly) Alexandrine, and (I'll argue) later codices like "A" even in Alexandria are subject to change. All scholars agree that, before "A", the Alexandrians are responsible for its first edition and for its standardisation, Origen being a noted player. By contrast that "Western Text" which got out into the Old Latin, the Old Syriac, the Bezae, [UPDATE 4/7/23 the Claromontanus], and even into generally-Alexandrine NTs is wild and messy.

The King-James-only set believe that God's Word is had through the "Byzantine" recension, certainly the most prevalent through the Middle Ages, and which Gospels usurped even the Alexandrine in "A". Jerome and the Peshitta understood that the "Western" text in Latin and Syriac, respectively, was a loser and that Christians needed a standard. Jerome for his part went with the Byzantine Gospels. Wiki tells me that the Vulgate bearing his name has revised the rest of the New Testament through the Alexandrine tradition, which they impute to Pelagian circles - which Jerome hated.

I find of interest that "ℵ" and "W" although Alexandrine have (forms of) the Western Gospels. The Gospels seem pulled or pushed: pushed to the Constantinopolitan standard ("A", Vulgate), or pulled to the Western (non-)standard. I'm going with that local churches were used to the pre-standard readings, which we observe as "Western", and tried to keep them. No Origenism for them! So when a standard was imposed, it was the Theodosian Empire's.

Holmes says that the "Byzantine" text was Antiochene first - elsewhere John Chrysostom is cited. Chalcedon will represent an Antiochene victory... later. I do not find "theotokos" in Jerome's argument about Our Lady. I scent Theodosius I in this adoption of Antioch over Alexandria: Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, Mother of Our Lord the Son of God.

P46, as a standard, hints that the very act of bundling these Epistles was part of that standard, even if Antioch would later revise that standard and Constantinople impose this revision.

Saturday, May 1, 2021

How not to land on Venus

I'd actually thought we'd figured out the length of Venus' day already but - apparently not. UCLA say it depends.

Venus' atmosphere, running against the cliffs of the various Regiones and Terrae, pushes the land one way and then the other. It's like ocean tides over here. Solar tides, to be sure, but then Venus is closer to our Sun.

The Venus day is, therefore, an average: 243.0226 of our days. The actual day might run twenty minutes more or less than that. By the way this also means if you want to land at, say, Aphrodite Terra you could find your target off by 30 km. I think Maxwell Montes, near-polar as it is, might be better.

Also narrowed down is inclination, which changes like ours, but at least at a predictable rate. It's 2.6392 degrees now (I think you'd subtract 180 from that but, hey); it precesses at 29 kyear, comparable to our 26.

And there's a core: 3500 km "across" but UCLA must mean radius because they further liken that to Earth's [3485 km radius] core. They don't know if the core is liquid. It might not even matter if the core's movement is stalled; hence the lack of magnetic-field here.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Carrying on with al-Ashqar, Gilbert devotes an interminable chapter on "the Nasser Years".

Nasser every now and again spewed out some vile rhetoric, and whenever he did the Israelis would note it and publish it about. At one point Nasser cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At several points he would claim that what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians was worse than what Hitler did to the Jews. Logically the maths didn't add up for that latter claim, so Nasser (infamously) gave air to Holocaust minimisers of such stripe whom Achcar (rightly) must flag as deniers.

Achcar proposes to apply "nuance" to all this. The Israelis kept using rhetorical trickery themselves, often comparing Nasser to You-Know-Who. In that light, why shouldn't Arab demagogues play tit-for-tat. Achcar says that the Protocols ref was a faux-pas which Nasser didn't employ a second time, and anyway it was all about European Zionists and that most Arabs knew it wasn't to be applied to the Jews among them at home. Achcar also claims that the Holocaust denialism also wasn't employed twice. He thinks Nasser's advisors advised the man that he was being an ignorant idiot in public. All those "ex" Nazis who found their way into Egypt (and Syria)? But but but the West were taking in Nazis too. The seizure of Jewish property in 1956? Temporary! But darn it, too many Jews didn't stick around for their property to be returned by that saint of a man, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

I just wonder about a pattern of "anti-Zionist" hostility that flares out into these bursts of MEMRI-worthy stupidity. And there are other laughable speeches in Nasser's output, like when he claimed that the Arabs had never been aggressors in their whole history. Just... LOL.

No, Nasser was not Hitler-On-The-Nile. But as I've noted elsewhere, if Nasser had defeated the Zionist Entity and upon it imposed al-qada, as he kept promising, the Jews in Egyptian-occupied Palestine had sufficient cause not to trust Nasser's magnanimity.

I might not finish Achcar's book which is starting to read like Fuller's. The first part of it was not wholly free of apologetic, but Nuance didn't take over the narrative, as is starting to happen in its second part. UPDATE 2 PM MST: okay, just finished it.