Natural immunity

Natural Immunity! is this year's Herd Immunity!... or, for other cranks, its False-Flag! and Russian Collusion!. It sounds sciencey, so people who can't do science parrot this in PJMedia comments.

Jonathan Isaac - who's a celebrity, so Americans will actually listen - offers a scintilla of fact here: natural immunity does exist. Plenty of people caught the Pooh Flu last year; after however-long they suffered from its effects, they do have antibodies now. Genetics offer some additional protection, to some; Razib is on that case.

Against that, the former HalfSigma writes: Vaccines are much more effective than natural immunity. As expected, because the vaccines target the spike protein, while natural immunity targets the entire virus most of which is unimportant because it's the spike that attaches to your cells. Linking to this twitterblog by Eric Feigl-Ding.

The Rs10774671 gene is interesting, I must say. If that's the G purine, you're Golden. If it's not-G, namely A... you're in trouble. I assume those who have this whole gene missing by some ancestral transcription-error are in even worse shape.

Per Razib: Native Americans, as with so much else to do with virus-fighting, are disproportionately AA here. Africans go GG. Apparently this was shared with Neander (and we can assume Denisovan) ancestry; Africans kept it, some modern-humans lost it and had to get G back from the Neanders.

The original paper by Wickenhagen et al. offers the details although I won't pretend I understand most of it. I gather it involves Type I Interferons, which may or may not be present in the A549 type of lung cell. You want IFN-1 in your A549 if you enjoy breathing. They call IFN-1 Stimulated Genes, ISG; OAS1 is that ISG which fights the Pooh Flu in particular.

Now, where there is a vax shortage, I would absolutely agree with Natural Immunity when doing triage as to who gets vaxxed first. Thing is: Natural Immunity isn't as effective as vax-driven immunity. Another thing is: we do not have a vax shortage in America. Americans have a shortage in other important bodily cells, namely neurons.

The good news is, their feelings don't matter.

Bronze-Age perversions

Mike C against Myke C. Mike-with-I is fighting for the twitter-d00d "Bronze Age Pervert" who wrote Bronze Age Mindset; Myke-with-Y wrote The Bronze Lie, and earlier anti-Sparta poasts which I've reviewed (unfavourably, to the extent I'm not buying Myke's books).

To disclose here, I have no personal stake in any of these three poo-posters. I just care about history. I also care about facts, to which end the statement "The Bronze Lie mentions B.A.P. / B.A.M." is testable - thus. If you want to call me a "reply-guy" for that, then you are the reply-guy. Fetch that shinebox.

Three "Spartas" are at issue with these three commenters; and the Mike-with-I is stirring up crap between the other two, I suspect, based on a severe conflation of the Spartai.

I vaguely recall an acropolis in the Mycenaean / Achaean era; the land was better than 'twas in classical times, so the Greeks would have been retarded not to settle the place. Then - following the Dorian overthrow of the southern Peloponnese - came the Heroic / Archaic era. This is the era of Homer, admittedly an Ionian himself, but with much sympathy to the old pre-Doric Achaeans. Last was the Spartiate era which anyone decent should agree was a French-Dominique-tier evil, against the Dorians even more than against surviving Achaeans like those in Arcadia.

When B.A.P. touts the Bronze Age, he is touting Homer's Achaean ideal spiced up with better-sourced aristocratic régimes such as Dynasty XVIII in Egypt and the peak Hittites. It is a warrior aristocracy, yes. But it is an aristocracy over civilians, which civilians are not mistreated (beyond the expected squalor of a low-tech near-Neolithic subsistence economy). There is, like, a whole code of law under the Hittites. The Bronze Age was big on law-codes, often ensuring the protection of the yeoman against rapacious élites (yo, Mike Hudson!). Classical Sparta, as we all know, only had the law of brute force, and - forgetting the lessons of the Bronze Age - died of its own greed. And most casual B.A.P. readers, I think, understand the classical, post-Homeric age as Hesiod understood it: Iron Age (although bronze was still in use, as in contemporary China).

I repeat, I don't respect Myke Cole. Myke Cole strikes me as dumb enough not to notice the distinctions I've made above... but also as dumb enough I find unlikely that the man was even aware of B.A.P., much less Cerno. (Although anything is possible.) The best response to Myke Cole is not to read him. Trying to bait him into a battle with B.A.P. is just adding to the stupid.

Changjin

Here's M.A.S.H. from the other side. h/t Hanania.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's State-Department and McEachran's protégés in Churchill's government had, not long before, "Lost China" - which, from their traitorous perspective, meant they'd won China: for Stalin. Stalin and his Chinese catspaw then swarmed into Korea. The United Nations swarmed right back again, running the Stalinists up to the Yalu. The lake Changjin (also called Chosin Reservoir) is in Hamgyŏngnamdo: north of the peninsula on the eastern Pacific shore.

The Chinese movie, which drained US$201 million, deals with a battle at Changjin. There weren't any Koreans here - which the movie acknowledges. (The "Forgotten War", as noted in the article, and for that matter by Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, is forgotten by Americans: because the Americans who fought there don't like to think too hard on what they had done to the Koreans... and to the peoples further north.) This allows the Chinese filmmakers to run a straight fight between newly-Stalinist China and the US.

So, Stalin and his stooges, like Mao-now-Chairman, sent millions of dubiously-Communist Chinese into this dubiously-Chinese and also dubiously-Korean northeastern province, without really equipping them; and - somehow - beat the United Nations. An underdog story, I'll grant.

The filmmakers found whitebois to play the Americans - in China. They couldn't hire from overseas easily due to the virus from that Chinese lab (assisted by Americans, we must allow).

I will also grant it is difficult to see who the good guys were. As noted, even in America they'd rather forget it all happened.

G-d wants you immune

G-d, inasmuch as He loves you, wants you to live and He wants you to transmit a legacy.

There are viri about in this His creation. (Mine own theology allows for a God with limits to His abilities.) These diseases may be countered with non-pharmaceutic interventions and, best-case-scenario, with vaccines.

Governor Kathy Hochul is correct, notwithstanding Robert Spencer (and I must disclose here, I have respected Robert Spencer in his other works). Hochul is correct as a Catholic. More correct than the Denver archdiocese.

Vaccination is morally obligatory; same as abstaining from sexual relations outside a heterosexual permanent marriage, same as refraining from aborting a baby. You are on the side of life or you are... not.

The first Irish

Some mind-blowing findings on R1b-L21 (I am R1b-L21, tho' I don't know subclade) in Ireland. Uriah / @crimkadid is bringing in linguistic support, from Peter Schrijver who I guess is Dutch.

A mass genetic bottleneck and reshuffle happened soon after 100 BC. It wasn't Romans... unless they spread a plague at some port or other. I recall various claims out and about the Romans posted some soldiers and an embassy in Eire, like we know they did in the Yemen; stopping short of calling that a "conquest". Drumanagh is implicated here (pdf). Some R1b-L21 clades won out; the rest did not.

At the end of it, Ireland got the Ogham script - all in Old Irish. It's the same Irish in the north as in the south, and recognisably the ancestor to the Irish (and Scottish) we get in the chronicles. All that stuff you see about the Irish kingdoms reflect the Christian kingdoms, after that (ignore the term "Dark Age" here plz).

Schrijver thought that Old Irish is very close to the Welsh / Cornish protolanguage. I am unsure I buy that, having tried to learn some Welsh in school and having at least peeked at what Irish looks like today. I mean, seriously; compare French with Latin and Portuguese. But maybe I am just looking at them all with the wrong eyes.

Via Toscana

We got a transect of Italian remains. Nothing new to my readers!

From earlier studies, Cosimo Posth's crew notes that "Steppe" (=IndoEuropean) ancestry hits Italy over the 1600s BC; so, the Etruscans' ancestors weren't so different from the other north(ish) Italians'. However, from when they first appear in this study which is 800 BC, to the Roman era - they're a homogenous genetic cluster. Meaning, they didn't accept many incomers (although some incomers are found). Almost as if... there was a cultural barrier, like language.

So again: we are looking at a "Villanova" / "Urnfield" (=Gaulish) invasion from the earliest Iron Age which then assimilated into the cisalpine population, which was Raetic. All was assimilated into an Etruscan language, living under a Gaulish culture, upon an Italian population. A "Sprachbund" effect likely accounts for classical Etruscan's structure as an inflected language - and for several features of Latin (and maybe Faliscan) not shared with, say, Greek.

Evergreen

This blog last engaged with Dr Bret Weinstein last he said something worth engaging with, which concerned Christ. Weinstein is no theologian, we learnt. What he is, is a biologist. That's where his PhD is from, and he authored The Reserve-Capacity Hypothesis warning that the generational differences between humans and mice are now, at least 70 million years later, so large as to make animal-testing dangerous. Nowadays Weinstein is still making a name for himself in biology... sort of.

Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying taught at Evergreen until 2017. With that, he became a confessor, if he excuse the theologic jargon, for the American Right against the Woke. This opened up a revenue-stream from insecure White folk here. Since these Whites are, to put it mildly, not exactly the most literate Whites on this good Earth, and also are increasingly elderly so with money to burn; they are open to any charlatan peddling to Take The Fight To The Enemy. Like the antivax movement.

Keep in mind that Weinstein and Heying ended their academic careers at Evergreen, not at (say) Johns Hopkins. By academic standard, this is the D-list, even before its student mob raised the place to our attention.

Off topic of vaccines, Weinstein and Heying have a new book out, parleying Weinstein's admitted expertise (however dated) in human evolutionary biology with respect to chronic disease. Unfortunately for them, the Guardian found another biologist to review this book, one Stuart Ritchie of King's College London (which was high B-list, last I looked; I recall Imperial College as the A-list in that metroplex). Ritchie rates this book to be arrogant and riddled with errors. I got a kick out of the URL, that the book is "Sciencey"; the Grauniad, it seems, has headline-editors now.

Which is not to say that the old rag has yet found a copy-editor. Ritchie cannot resist the temptation to pull in the antivax stuff as a means to impugn the book by way of impugning its authors. He also whinges that the lab-leak hypothesis is still unproven, which I suppose it is... in the same way as the Standard Model of Particle Physics is still unproven. (Here's lately the Lancet, soliciting a retraction.) May I suggest that Ritchie take the Tube over to the Imperial College mathematics department to discuss with them what "proof" means?

When it is all said and done, we once again have two tribes of ogres hurling insults at one another between the pines. Weinstein and Heying will learn no lessons from this, and neither will their marks. If "scientody" and "scientistry" can be differentiated, let us now differentiate the biologist from the biologer, and let us hope these two find their way back.

Looking two steps ahead

Mike Cernovich doesn't like his "fans". They're the guys who hang around his twitter telling him what he should or shouldn't post, usually with some parasocial commentary as if they knew M.C. personally which they do not, as I do not. So: here comes a fan blog about Richard Hanania. I think it's pronounced Hananía(s) like the Greek; not Hananyah(w) like the Hebrew. He is certainly more Canaanite than I am. But anyway -

Hanania is a Palestinian who lives in America, as I am a European (mostly) who lives in America. Neither of us likes outspoken Americans very much, be those Murrkins Left or Right. Hanania is one of those guys Patricia Crone chuckled at in her book about the wala (I think it was the Zahiriyya): he is on-point about doctrines he dislikes.

Hanania in this capacity waxes sarcastic. It is not always easy to read sarcasm in someone else's Twitter and it's (frankly) annoying. Cerno doesn't do sarcasm (although he'll often retweet it); which would be a point for Cerno if Cerno didn't have such a slate of other literary foibles. When Hanania strikes the correct balance, he renders his twitter an amusing diversion to read ... but you're left hollow after reading too much of it.

But that's all just so much style. I'd rather talk substance. On that, I detect a problem with Hanania's "DUNK 'EM, OWN 'EM" strategery - because he is so deeply unsympathetic to American Conservatives (and, trust me on this one, I am sympathetic to Hanania here) he doesn't look that extra step ahead.

Take this poast: The idea "Covid is about liberals controlling you" is clearly wrong, as it's liberals who are restricting their lives the most, while things are pretty much normal in the conservative part of America. See The View today. Conservatives really don't understand liberalism. Hanania has devoted many, MANY poasts before that discussing how what campus radicals touted in college in 1990 became HR policy in 1998 and is now getting normies #canceled in 2021. Things are "pretty much normal" when you get out of Boulder County, yes. But that "normal" today was Boulder County fifteen years ago. What's going to be "normal" next year (h/t)?

Earlier Hanania was scoffing at Right "paranoia" on the vaccines coming into the food-supply. That's, er... well. (1) This is a real field of research and (2) if you're not hunting and growing your own food, you're at the mercy of those who do. The Right (I am on the Right) were plenty big on the movie Serenity in 2005ish, back when the bloom was really coming off that Dubya rose. We in GenX might also have seen Real Genius from two decades before. There might be some innocuous reason to develop a laser that can incinerate a small target on Earth from space. But more likely when the Federal government is developing such a device, its intent is to incinerate someone the Feds don't like. I am as pro-vaxx as any good fascist, but you don't have to live in a shack in Montana to worry about what else they'll be up to.

Tartessus is fallen

Atlas Obscura (sure it's not oscura?) is on the Extremaduran beat: Tartessus. The real deal; its last gasp in the Iron Age.

I wondered earlier this year if they'd come from the east and migrated west. That -essos is often a tell for western Anatolia. This new article is more saying, they came from the coast and migrated upland. With a lot of sacrificial hocus pocus. I suppose at least they weren't offering their own children like some people we know.

One modern annoyance is that the site is on private land, and they're in a spat with the Extremaduran government. It seems that post-Franco, devolution is a thing in modern Spain. It would be nice if the two sides could sort matters out, because Tartessus isn't just an Extremaduran or even a Spanish concern, but a concern for all Iron Age Europe.

Sabatier (now with ethylene)

Robert Zubrin was big into la réaction de Paul Sabatier: to turn carbon dioxide into methane. Assuming you had some compound with hydrogen in it, like water. Or maybe sulfuric acid if you're in Venus' clouds.

Sabatier research continues. Apparently for catalyst we're not just stuck with nickel at super-high temperatures and pressures; Jingjie Wu can use carbon. Some catalysts can even produce ethylene. Methanol is noted as well.

Paint

I saw this piece a few days ago concerning white paint. In theory, it reflects almost all incoming light. So at night the house emits heat as usual and in the daylight, it doesn't take much more. In summer, the balance is reached! No A/C!!

... if you don't open a window. And if birds and squirrels don't poop on the roof. And if there's no rain bringing dust to your house... ever. I am pretty sure the bright white house will run afoul of the HOA as well.

So I don't think this is practical for anyplace on Earth, and we'll throw in Mars. Even our airless Moon has static-electricity to attract the charcoal-grey regolith. But I do wonder about deep space.

As Elon Musk has pointed out, paint has mass so costs money when sending craft up into orbit, and paint-chips become space junk in LEO. Further up, however... white paint looks pretty good. Heat is a major problem in satellites which is why they have radiators. Thinking of ammonia-propellant tanks, lately.

So: paint the satellite on planetside; blast it up anyway (taking the cost); and once in orbit, touch up whatever flakes flaked off.

Ilopango's quarry

Mindy Weisberger reported earlier this week on a pyramid in San Andrés in El Salvador, now ascertained as built from the rock spewed out by Tierra Blanca Joven at Ilopango. (h/t Saraceni.) Akira Ichikawa (Ichikawa Akira is his manga name, don't call him that), over the ridge in Boulder, has the full report.

We'll start positive: I agree with that much. I've mused last year that Ilopango crippled the Xinca locals. The big winners in the area would be the less-affected peoples to the north, west, and east: of which, the Maya had the population-density, technology, and warcraft to benefit most. Here, Ichikawa notes Copán as in the sweet-spot, able to extrude at least an embassy to the incoming Maya if not a full colony. It is nice to have physical contemporary evidence, supplanting the circumstantial evidence of highland-Maya (and Pipil) showing up later and sidelining the Xinca; where the literate Quiché, Aztecs, and Spaniards would find 'em.

And I can go either way on when the stone was quarried and assembled to make this pyramid. If they say, after the Maya Hiatus; I am fine with that. That this was before Loma Caldera AD 620, seems beyond dispute; San Andrés seems actually to have become a regional powerhouse after that one. As to why Saint Andrew keeps getting pinned with horrible geologic events... ask a better Catholic.

Where we disagree, is on the dating of the volcano itself. Ichikawa (still) thinks the volcano caused the Hiatus, and all the other unpleasantness of Justinian's reign not directly inflicted by that tyrant himself. Last I heard was from Victoria Smith in Oxford, that Ilopango went up in AD 431. And ooh looky, "Smith" isn't cited in Ichikawa's paper.

Chalk another fail for Boulder, along with Brakenridge. People over there don't believe in reading papers that disagree with them apparently. But hey: Boulder. I'm more irritated with the journals publishing them. Who's peer-reviewing this stuff?

Geothermal

I missed this article eleven months ago: geothermal, as alternative to hydroelectric or coal or nuclear. (Or SpaceX Solar.) On topic of test-loops.

As the article notes this has been a thing over the Yellowstone hotspot (e.g. Boise) for over a century. Not all of us on Earth are so fortunate however.

Strikes me as something the Afar would want, to power desalination of the Red Sea's water.

And, of course, Venus. Its supercritical fluid would be carbon dioxide; if they're just working with the temperatures and pressures of the Maxwell range, maybe sulfur or lead.

Nuclear power in microgravity

NTP ideally should be tested here on Earth before going into space. The propellant in that "P" is, then, wasted. For salvaging that at the lab, and reusing it: here is a Penn State simulation.

The Nittany Lions are looking at hydrogen at 1475 K. I don't know why the press-release is going Fahrenheit. I also don't know why not ammonia. Although, yes, 1475 K is low-temperature compared to some, so a HALEU option. Ultra Safe's option no less...

Hydrogen has proven not to bunch itself up in the "test loop" - so the testers did get to reuse their propellant. I get the feeling that nuclear-heated propellants aren't as dangerous as chemically-detonated propellants.

Sodom's howe

That Sodom story is getting more evidence attached to it; UC Santa Barbara has endorsed Tell al-Hammam [h/t WrathOfGnon]. Which means "the hill of the bath", I think; Tell being Arabic for a mound in the middle of nowhere that probably has a ruin under it. Like Aslan's Howe.

I always suspected the "sodomy" meme came about because the Dead Sea is a place for medicinal baths. Women learn pretty quickly that they shouldn't bathe with men about, especially in the Jordan Valley (cf. lately, Alrawabi School For Girls). So whatever towns were around as of the Middle Bronze Age II horizon, they attracted a certain... clientele.

MBA-II is being dated to the mid seventeenth century BC currently, but, you know - mileage, variant, yours, etc. The paper isn't doing great at this, confusing "1650 BCE" with 1650-year-old. Derrp. Anyway: before IntCal20 Thera, but not all that long before. Either a generation after Tel Kabri or else Tel Kabri needs recalibration.

Our man here is James Kennett, blaming a cosmic strike. Kennett is also big on the comet theory for the Dryas. Martin Sweatman isn't cited, which I must register as an omission.

They do get earthquakes in the lower Jordan and Dead Sea area. Relevant to my preferred field, an infamous one hit Jericho under Mu'awiya. At Bathhouse City, Kennett marks two violent trem[bl]ors at 3300 BC and 2100 BC. But whatever fires happened then, didn't rise to the MBA-II temperature.

War happens in the Jordan area as well. War happened to "Tel Sultan IIIc2", Early Bronze IIIB; these guys cite moar woar 1950-1800 BCE, which (since "Sultan IIId" was a village) will map to the Middle Bronze "Sultan IV" which Egypt probably named "Ruha" and is generally agreed to be true Jericho. In fact, after the mid-1600s destruction - which the locals rebuilt - the Eighteenth Dynasty would level Ruha and keep it leveled (pdf). War would certainly happen in the later Iron Age: the new city built upon that old Bathhouse tell got whacked in the late 800s BC. War just wasn't happening around here in the MBA-II, when Bathhouse was the hegemon.

Since this is the lower Jordan, any impact here would boil that part of the Dead Sea and scatter salt all over the place. As a result, no more habitation in the area for hundreds of years. Not only Sodom but also Jericho - says Kennett - could have been affected in this blast (although Jericho was not melted, it did suffer much damage, as Kennett relates from Kenyon), with the ensuing centuries causing confusion in the earliest Biblical compilers.

We'd like to have an archive but millions of mudbricks are missing - not eroded, because eroded mudbricks can be found downstream and/or downwind. Given that MBA literature was clay tablets... sigh.

On topic, here is what bolides look like on their way down. As Kennett notes, we need to keep watch for stuff like this.

COLD WATER 10/2: Colavito spergs out... again. This time he commends skepticism on basis of... sorry man, ad-hominem: Scientific Reports lacks rigour, the Dryas connection is weak because Dryas-impact hypothesis is unproven, and too many authors are Christians. To that I must point out that the paper's results - if true - refute the Book of Joshua, which linked Jericho's fall to that book's hero. If these researchers are fundamentalists they are of a far more fair-minded stripe than those posting at (say) PJMedia.

WELL SO MUCH FOR THAT 2/29/2024: Richard Carrier offers the debunking.

Small planets don't hold water well

Mars and Vesta are in our side of the snowline - but they are closer to the snowline. Why are they not water worlds?

The question has perhaps not been worth the asking; intuitively, their cores aren't as dense and they're smaller. Now, Kun Wang brings the math.

Wang's crew also suggest bringing it to exoplanets, if they are sub-Earth in mass but in "the habitable zone". Chances are: they're desert planets like Mars.

Pseudo-Pseudo-Pseudo-Phocylides

I hadn't heard of Phocylides, either the man or the Sentences ascribed to him, until Roger Pearse brought the latter a few days ago. It happens that this Pseudo- work, after a surge of interest in the Reformation, got back into scholarly attention in 2017.

The consensus up to then was about where the Jewish Encyclopaedia left it: the book used Jewish law and Jewish literature, up to Ben Sira and the "Wisdom of Solomon". In turn, the second Sibylline up to v. 148 parallels vv. 5-79; which means their parallel about abortion must also be that Sibylline's paraphrase, directly, from our Sentences. But that is about it for Judaism (and the second Sibyl is usually deemed Christian anyway), unless you count Josephus. Jonathan Klawans in 2017 proposed "The Pseudo‐Jewishness of Pseudo‐Phocylides":

On definitional grounds, it is problematic to speak of a Jewish work that displays no distinctive Jewish concerns.
On evidentiary grounds, we know that the work was transmitted and used by Christians, and we can establish that its selective approach to biblical ethics aligns with identifiably Christian priorities. A Jewish provenance can be hypothesized, but we need not imagine a Christian context for the work.
Finally, on moral grounds, we must avoid prejudicial assumptions, such that only a Jew could know the Pentateuch well enough to produce The Sentences.
Pseudo-Phocylides's Jewishness is a pseudo-Jewishness. The evidence suggests its Christian use, its Christian allegiance and, therefore, its Christian authorship.

Michael Cover, er, covers this in "Jewish Wisdom in the Contest of Hellenistic Philosophy and Culture" ed. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature (2020), 229-47; doi 10.1002/9781119158288.ch13. He doesn't believe Klawans. There's also John Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text, 58-66 although I haven't read this. I have to say, I'm not believing Klawans either.

I understand that arguing for Jewish morality among the gentiles remains a popular genre to this day, as witness Dennis Prager's commentaries upon Genesis and Exodus. So there goes the first "problematic". That the Sentences enjoyed Christian use is, I am sorry, a terrible argument. Philo and Josephus were abandoned by Jews and transmitted by Christians, but nobody calls those two Christians. Likewise the books of Maccabees and Ben Sira persisted among the Christians, and so did Enoch and Jubilees, and Tobit. As for the evidence of alignment with Christian priorities, see also Prager; and, we're seeing these same priorities in Philo and Josephus. Klawans should not read the twelfth-century ghetto into first-century Jewry.

Japanese origins

Yesterday the big news was Japan. As the abstract says, the canon history of Japan is a split from the mainland after the Late Glacial Maximum, with the Jomon. The modern population is a synthesis between the Jomon and later northeast Asian farmers, the "Yayoi". Now, we have the details.

Japan was inhabited from 36kBC on, but not always as an island, or at least not always invisible to the mainland. The Jomon make sense as an insular race from, indeed, the Ice Age. They kept a population of all of a thousand(!) over the Palaeolithic there. The Yayoi, again indeed, brought rice, presumably to the southern islands: Ryushu, southern Honshu. They are dated to 1000 BC which is, in China, Bronze Age and Zhou Dynasty. (China never really joined the Iron Age.)

Before Jomon isolation, the ancestral population mixed with Ancient North Siberians, which I am pretty sure means "pre-Ainu". Although, I should be clear, the Ainu and the Jomon are not identical. The Jomon base was Honshu against other islands such as Hokkaido.

So I don't learn what's up with Hokkaido over this period. Possible it was abandoned over the Ice Age, if it was ever bothered with; and secondarily populated by Ainu from the Amur during the last two millennia.

A little surprised to see Jomon "pottery" noted 14500 BC, which the authors assure me is ceramic. This is impressive given that pottery in the Near Eastern Mesolithic, many millennia later, is still carved from stone.

The Kofun era begins about AD 300, which is post-Han, barely.

Jomon women were N9b or M7a; their men were D1b1. These still exist in Japan, so the Yayoi-Jomon interbreeding theory stands tall. Ancient "Yayoi" populations actually cluster with Jomon, although less as time goes on, hinting that Yayoi came from the northeast Asian mainland and only trickled into Japan slowly; also, that the Jomon adapted Yayoi farming. The Jomon were never stupid as we can see from their pottery. As for the Yayoi point of ingress, perhaps-unsurprisingly that came from the Korean Peninsula.

Northeast Asia seems an unlikely region to learn to farm rice, which conundrum is made worse by the Yayoi ancestry: West Liao and Baikal, say the authors. I also cannot find when rice was introduced to Korea; it seems a Bronze Age import at earliest, Shang or even Zhou era. One might ask if the Yayoi only farmed rice after they got to Japan. If the Jomon learnt first, their increased prosperity then attracted mainland immigrants.

It seems, though, that the Kofun were more solidly mainland East Asian. More: AD 300 is quite late enough that we may speak of "Chinese", in fact literal Han; which I would not always say of what's now "South China" and which nobody says of the South Koreans.

The Kofun washed over the ancestral Honshu Yayoi-Jomon mix, if not quite overwhelmed it, such that modern Honshu Japanese are less Jomon than they otherwise would be. Since the Kofun and the Yayoi were, at first, consciously different nations and different races, they spoke languages from different language-families.

As to what this means for the Japonic family of languages, since the Kofun came to dominate that's the language I think they spoke. As noted above I don't consider the Ainu to be related to any of the populations noted here, except remotely distantly before even the Jomon came to be. I don't think any Yayoi language survived to get a record although some placenames and other loanwords assuredly entered the Japanese language(s). The authors think the Yayoi are closest to Tunguisic (sic) speakers, so paraManchu I guess.

If there exists a Han-era ethnography of the east, such might tell us.

CERAMIC 12/27/22: 18kBC Siberia. Also we're hearing the Beringians had arrowheads already.

Lost lore

Among the essays I'd missed toward the end of last month was O'Neill's Great Myths #13 on "the Renaissance". A French word, from a Frenchman - writing 1855 - but this translates Italians of the 1500s who saw their revived Classical artwork as rinascita. So O'Neill is overstating his case (as he's been known to do) when he says that contemporaries didn't use the term.

For now, I'm more looking at the O'Neill take upon Greenblatt's The Swerve, which ostensibly reviewed Lucretius' De rerum natura. Here O'Neill rings more true to me.

I knew The Swerve was out there, but I never got around to picking it up. As Lost Lore goes, I was more interested in A Most Dangerous Book - which I'll admit I also didn't read. O'Neill, it seems, is saving me some time.

"Lost Lore" memes, claiming that books like De rerum natura were "Suppressed", have the unhappy side-effect that paranoiacs from the outside question if those books ever existed in the first place. Then they doubt if any other such books existed. We already had cranks like Illig, and "Emmet Scott", asking if we had endured a Dark Age. Last year Unz readers had this fool asking if we even had Antiquity before all that.

SELFOUTED 3/31/23: Guyénot, all along. I should have guessed.

The eugenicist Jew

To follow on Talmud Techani, another way a pro-abortion Jew can ask to join the conversation is to admit that choice isn't his (or her) focus. The Jew can argue that some conceptions are harmful after brought to birth.

I have respect for this stance. A prior blog had respect for Margaret Sanger. I have come to shudder at this stance: it is anti-life, and at the end anti-choice as well. But I still respect it. From the Jewish perspective, the Jews would be arguing if this birth is Good For The Jews.

Although this evil is internally consistent, in its utilitarian basis, it doesn't accord well with Torah. Torah does allow for a death penalty, but it is not a penalty levied against the innocent. I do not find "pre-crime" herein. I should think that if Torah meant to support punching or poisoning an Israelitess for conceiving a child likely to be a burden on Israel, Torah would have said as much.

So if a Jew wishes to join the conversation as a eugenicist, I suggest he not do so as a Jew.

The heartbeat law is Torah

At the end of last month, one Sarah Marian Seltzer poasted: Just a friendly reminder that banning abortion violates Jewish women’s ability to practice our religion. Rabbiah Megan Doherty had explained how, back in February, on behalf of National Council of Jewish Women which apparently does a "Repro Shabbat". Another Rabbi, Danny Horowitz, got in on it, also in February and also for NCJW. I suspect Seltzer is NCJW too; her only mistake was poasting on her own and on Twitter.

Seltzer un-poasted her tweet swiftly, but I haven't asked whether anything had changed her mind. If she is open to having her mind changed, here comes Roger Pearse. TL;DR - the Heartbeat Law currently active in the state of Texas is Torah. It is binding upon Jews perhaps even more than upon Christians (who really only get in on it with the Didache) and upon Muslims (who historically have got their Torah second-hand, through the Israiliyat and the sunna). Opposing this law is to offend G-d.

The key here is Exodus 21:22-25, which (on its face) covers only accidental miscarriage; which as usual doesn't come with its own commentary. What Exodus comes with, is a vague understanding of "harm". The legal question hinges on two sorts of miscarriage: one without harm, one with. A previous blog has covered that in of itself; we're here to discuss the commentary as it arose under the Hellenists.

NCJW would have us, and (unforgiveably) fellow Jews, believe that the harm is to the mother alone. That is not what Jews in antiquity read in this. Here was no real argument on what constituted harm to the woman, that being handled in other halakhot. Therefore, granted was no harm to the woman beyond the temporary discomfort of shedding the Products Of Conception (per Unplanned). These Jews argued instead on at what point does harm mean something to the foetus, and to the community - indeed to all humanity.

This argument, we can assume, came to the Seventy in Alexandria. Their translation didn't even talk harm, but whether the child came forth fully formed. This was picked up by Philo in his Laws. But hey - that's Alexandria, and today's Jews don't own an Alexandrine Talmud. Sure. But they do own a Jerusalem Talmud, from the Pharisees of Roman Judaea; and by happenstance we own the Judaean Pharisaic perspective - in Josephus. Josephus comments upon the Masoretic Text, that "harm" here means having diminished the multitude by the destruction of what was in her womb.

Also of interest is a legal apodictic formula floating in three two parallel pericopae. This is in purest form, I think, in the Sentences ascribed to one Phocylides, vv. 184-5: 184 A woman should not destroy an unborn babe in the womb, 185 nor after bearing it should she cast it out as prey for dogs and vultures. Josephus paraphrases this to Apion: The law moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring: and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten; or to destroy it afterward., adding that this counts as murder and (again) having diminished humankind. In the second Sibylline Oracle, God consigns all who caused / Abortions, and all who their offspring cast / Unlawfully away to hell. [WARNING 9/19: Although that Sibyl is derivative of the Sentences and accepted by Catholics and Protestants as one of ours.]

I don't hear that these three Josephus and the Sentences depended upon one another. I think there was a catechism, as it were, taught to all young Jews in the beth ha-midrash, before Talmud and parallel to Mishnah / Tosefta.

To sum up, all we're arguing over is what counts as being fully formed, such that losing the foetus inflicts harm, both upon the foetus (now a baby!) and upon the rest of us. If you as a "pro-choice" advocate don't think a functioning heart counts, that's where you join the conversation. Horowitz did not join this conversation and, frankly, creeps me out. Doherty sort-of did... in agreement with Texas as far as the first forty days which don't count. Afterward? More bluster and name-calling.

Presently I consider the National Council of Jewish Women a shande (at best) who, by speaking badly for Jews, do not speak for Jews. The rabbis involved approach heresy.

Abu Mijlaz

If you haven't heard of Lahiq bin Humayd, kunya Abu Mijlaz, that's the point - said Andreas Goerke in JSAI last year. Where later exegetes had incentive to foist tafasir upon al-Suddi and Qatada and (G-d help us) Ibn 'Abbas, Goerke believes that Abu Mijlaz sailed under the notice of later forgers.

Therefore, says Goerke, Abu Mijlaz traditions are worthy of being taken seriously. Hey look, it's the same assumption Harald Motzki (pbuh) made for Ibn Abi Muhammad! I'll just repeat (again) that I love this plan and I am happy to be a part of it.

The argument is not bulletproof; we have seen later authorities foist stuff on obscure early authorities when they know nobody will believe them should they dare cite (say) Qatada. I'll also tweak Goerke on dating these traditions to Abu Mijlaz's Basri sojourn, ending 86 AH so with 'Abd al-Malik (al-Hajjaj continued for another decade, ruling up in Wasit). I can well imagine a circle of Abu Mijlaz in Basra, maintaining a consensus after he left - a certainty if the teacher and his students interchanged messengers. But yes, 'tis a good place to start.

I don't know if Goerke stated the following as bluntly as I'm about to, but his argument implies as one point in favour of authenticity that Abu Mijlaz sometimes disputed the "'Uthmanic" text, which was of course al-Hajjaj's text. Arthur Jeffery lists several of Abu Mijlaz's variant readings, which Goerke (usually) cannot find - possibly because they are in Marandi's Escorial MS which is still unedited. In its place, though, Goerke finds plenty other variants. This mattered to Abu Mijlaz because he believed the Quran was a source for Divine Shari'a. That there existed an Umayyad mushaf, and that many well-informed Muslims outside Damascus quibbled it, is exactly what I'd expect of the Iraq of al-Hajjaj mid-80s / 700s.

AD 1181

The Mancs think they've found the AD 1181 supernova. There have been five in our Milky Way since AD 1006; that's the one no-one'd found in the sky yet.

It's at nebula Pa30 around Parker’s Star, Albert Zijlstra and his team tell us. This rubble came out of a merger between two white dwarfs, so it wasn't a typical Type I / Type II.

As having happened in our own galaxy, I suspect most supernovae cluster toward Sagittarius, where the core is. Luckily that's also in our ecliptic so it's visible to northern latitudes, where we'd been keeping track. Southern latitudes, basically first visible to Ferdinand Magellan, are good for spotting novae in the Magellanic Clouds.

Sodium again

Last I heard from the sodium-cell battery, they were working on the anode side of things. Lithium is our present cathode standard - 285 Wh/kg energy density - but it's rare.

Here is another report on the anode side of things. Still carbon, but graphene on copper with benzene over all that.

H/t Reynolds, who accurately notes that this may solve our supply-chain issues.

Where the Constitution failed: Sparta

Reading through Devereaux, part five of seven discusses the ultimate failure of the Spartan constitution.

Sparta rewarded the Spartiates, and not just the male Spartiates. The top Spartiates were linked with the royals, the Agiads and Eurypontids - of which the latter were somewhat B-list, although unlike Shoguns still considered kings. As Spartiate numbers declined, the available land remained the same; Devereaux pins the 464 BC earthquake as the greatest tipping-point, a near-literal windfall for those Spartiates who survived. For those who didn't survive, the government inherited their lands - which meant, the kings did.

The obvious answer to the problems of elite underpopulation is to grant royal land to the poorer Spartiates and mixed-ethnic Spartans, if they've proven themselves loyal. In practice the kings instead handed out the occasional bribe when they needed ephors to vote them more wealth.

Those chexun'balances, clearly, weren't working from the late fifth-century on. And then the Spartans started to lose wars. Some of this was papered over, during the Pelopponesian Wars, on account that their foil the Athenaians also had a dysfunctional polity. As they always say, when you're fleeing a bear, you don't outrun the bear; you outrun the poor sucker next to you. And maybe call in some Persians to pepper that sucker with arrows whilst you're running.

That didn't work against Epaminondas. Sparta ended up a theme-park for visiting sadists.

Over the third century, first Agis IV stumbled upon the solution: to promote more Spartiates. Against him, the gerousia demonstrated that The System Worked, stopping Agis' bid and putting Agis on a course to the gallows. Cleomenes III, two decades later, simply made himself a tyrant, which seemed to work, but, by then, the kingdom of Macedon owned most of Greece, and weren't having that. This looks a lot like what the Gracchi tried to do, except in reverse; in Sparta, the reforming kings tried moderation first and dictatorship second.

Space tug

A major problem in orbital dynamics is to move a satellite from one orbit to another. The "graveyard orbit" is perhaps most salient, as we have a space-junk problem in LEO and we'd prefer to have those things orbiting way out nowhere where they don't hit useful sats. But also, how about moving any of our useful sats to some higher orbit, more free of the junk. Maybe the ISS itself?

Zim da Man has a report on Intuitive Machines' mission next year. They've sold space, as it were, to Sherpa Escape; who are testing their space-tug. The tug, in turn, will attempt to move some sats to geosynchronous orbit, which for our 24-hour-rotation is waaaay high orbit.

The tug is a Russian-doll monster which will also be testing some other company's ability to transfer fuel in space.

Saint Peter's Burg on Mars

Last December we had a piece about making cement from regolith on our own Moon. Here is another concrete / cement: you. Rather, blood-plasma and urea. What urea we're not using for nitrates elsewhere.

They further point out the plasma need not be human plasma. The technology is literally mediaeval; Europeans were doing that soon after they lost the old Roman formula. If there is a population of rabbits, guinea-pigs, goats and/or whatever else Bob Zubrin wants to bring along, we should be able to use any of them. Although to start with they bias toward human since they assume we're not keeping guinea-pigs on the first Starship out there. UPDATE 9/14: Zim da Man makes a case for Miss Squeaky instead.

Incidentally they further found the chemistry behind the mediaeval concrete: “beta sheets”.

I repeat my hope from December that they have a plan for keeping the bricks together from the inside. We are all discussing a high pressure differential between air we can breathe and the outside, which (Venus and Titan excepted) is comparative vacuum.

They are looking at Mars on account, I guess, there's no regolith. But it should help for our Moon too since, dude, it's right here.

Myke Cole does Sparta bad

In 2019, a couple guys on the internet posted their thoughts about the Five Towns. One was Bret Devereaux; the other, Myke Cole. I just found out this week because Cole has a book out now, and some dood on 4chan recommended le blog de Devereaux. As I read them, neither author seems like they'd be particular close friends of mine. Although at least I might not upend a drink over Devereaux' head.

Devereaux hates slavery and doesn't care that you know it! He also bravely Takes A Stand for women, which after much verbiage he has to admit doesn't really work for Spartiate women who had pretty nice lives by Iron-Age standards, so moves on to Intersectionality - the helot women.

All that said (as a follower of Gregory Nyssene, I too hate slavery and misogyny, and don't care who knows it) Devereaux has the edge over Cole. Devereaux, through his righteous bluster, has his facts in order. I don't hear this from Cole.

Cole sneers at the Oath Keepers, whose Oath they Keep is... the Constitution, as right-wing anti-government and anti-immigration American militia group. He sneers that the violent Left is a thing (say, has he been to a Colorado church lately?). Americans who worry that their government might take their guns away are paranoid, having no legitimate fear that the Biden-Pelosi government is made up of people like... Cole.

But who cares, right? Cole's writing to New Republic readers, who ate up all those Stephen Glass articles like so much cotton candy. More worrisome should be the sloppiness on the history itself.

The Spartans of Laconia left us virtually no writing on how they saw themselves or their world (thus the word laconic). No, "laconic" refers to the ability to compose a comment as short and to-the-point as possible - as Strunk and White taught to us writers. As for their leavings, every classicist knows Alcman and Tyrtaeus. And Sparta had sympathisers in other aristocracies - admittedly, that goes to how Spartiates wanted others to perceive their world, but it can't be so far off how the Spartiates posed their world to their own children.

Cole misses some low-hanging fruit, as it were: for instance, on Spartan paederasty. Devereaux for his part does hit this theme, in at least two discussions. The twelve-year-old kids couldn't Consent. Adult female helotas couldn't, either, he argues. I'll, er, butt in that Devereaux, ah, nails the bull's eye here. I wonder what restrained Cole...

Sometimes Cole even scores own-goals: We hear they murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a club foot. That's bad apparently. Er... like... they were pro-lifers, then? (Well, pro-Spartiate-lifers.) I'll butt in again that I am not surprised that Sparta had to loosen some of those Iron Age East-Mediterranean customs, given how the Spartiate population (famously) declined over the centuries. Their heirs-apparent especially enjoyed some dispensation from the worst of the agôgâ. Do go on, though, Dr Cole; share with us your views on infanticide.

As to the kings who led their armies almost never endured this [agôgâ] trial: here we must bring in Devereaux, on that most famous Spartan himself. Leonidas was a Second Son lately raised to the throne so, in all probability, had in youth underwent said trial. Which assuredly helped him lead that fateful stand at the Gates of Fire. This, by the way, suggests that princes "born to the purple" in the Five Towns, although probably not risking the worst of what the agôgâ had to offer, almost certainly had to risk something, or else they'd not earn the loyalty of their own men.

If I must signal mine own virtue, again, I am no fan of the whole Platonic Republic fandom - interestingly, mostly found on the academic Left - so, by extension from that, as well as by Sparta's own merits, I have no interest in Plato's own Sparta fandom. By further extension, Leftists attacking the Sparta / Plato nonsense on the Left, from the Left, would be welcome. But Cole doesn't do that. Devereaux, sadly, isn't doing that either. They are attacking Spartanism on the Right, because it's safe, and they'll be lauded for doing that, to those horrible nasty-poo Trump voting alt-righters.

I say humbug. If you want to attack Sparta fandom on the Right, do it from Right principles. Or you'll be dismissed as the snob you are. As the Platonist you are. ... as the Spartan you are.

Louisville

Last Sunday morning, at 1:30 AM, three vandals in hoodies desecrated the church of Louisville's patron saint here in Colorado.

Unmentioned in the news-reports is the hoodies' calling-card: an A with a circle through it. Yeah, that's the "anarchy" symbol. Also that the choice of spraypaints were red and black, as well as hot-pink. A big part of the slogans, besides the soi-disant feminism, was that the church was "homophobic, transphobic, misogynist and dying" (with a skull painted nearby). That's a lot of fancy words, and long words.

The police-chief says that's not representative of the Louisville community. I call shenanigans on that. Louisville's city government ordered the display of the Rainbow on city property last June. I should add that the city library is open on Sunday but not Saturday. This city opposes Christianity and this op was in full accordance with Our Values.

And it was an op. Three people, who had their slogans committed to paper and/or memory, who had the time to do it. They had rehearsed this. These were trained terrorists, who did this to demonstrate, first that the Struggle is national, second that you're not safe going to an unapproved place of worship.

As an aside, you know how our Bishop made so much noise last year about how very very sorry we all are about racisms from many decades ago, in the midst of last year's national terror campaign against the police? That didn't seem to help.

The neutron

I do believe a Nobel Prize is a-coming for our NIST: where neutrons meet silicon.

NIST took advantage of the neutron's wave-properties at the quantum-level, measuring the pendellösung (vibrations) in the silicon after firing a noot at it. They get an average of those vibrations after measuring a bunch of noots on their way out. I'm not told if they bothered aiming the neutrons but if it was all scattershot, they may not have had to. I just hope nobody was in the room when they ran the tests.

What they got, was a better understanding of the silicon lattice - to start with. This may push back on that nanometer problem.

For the theoreticians amongst us, we now got an actual cross-section of the free neutron. Our textbooks like to offer a chart of three quarks tied together with gluons, but at the quantum-level obviously that is not how they look anymore than a hydrogen atom has electrons in orbit. In place of that, NIST offer a charge-density chart. Turns out, the neutron is net positive in the centre and wrapped with the negative charge on the outside. All summing to zero of course. The grade of charge diffusion is related to a constant, the Charge Radius, now given a decent measure: -0.1101 ±0.0089 square femtometers. I take it the negative number reflects that electric charge.

Next, and perhaps least, NIST didn't find any "fifth force" between the distances measured, 20 picometers to 10 nano (referring to Yukawa here). Physicists couch that in terms of Constraint. UPDATE 9/18: Turtle Island is on this beat.

And the technique itself is rated Awesome so they're going to use it on other crystals. And on crystals at the supercold state, which they call "quantum ground". Wonder if that means Einstein Bose.

Where's Cesar Chavez when we need him

Jekan Thanga from Arizona is back. Now he's talking robot miners on the moon so NASA don't have to hire Mexicans to do it.

I wish I could say I was kidding, but: As a Hispanic-Serving Institution, the university was eligible to receive funding through NASA's Minority University Research and Education Project Space Technology Artemis Research Initiative.

At least they got some actual engineering out of this one. They are hinting that, besides cutting labour costs, they also might not need as much water.

As an aside, Arizonian institutions are really running the table this week.

"My body, my choice"

Mississippi conservative women have figured out how to abort without a trip to the Confessional: don't get vaccinated, and party on. I have to give them credit for their ingenuity although, the MS Free Press has caught them out at it.

I'd not recommend this method myself, but then; I've never been a woman, nor a conservative.

What I am, is a Christian and a pro-lifer. So if you claim a "religious exemption" from an effective vaccine, you have revealed yourself as a heretic.

Never trust a Brit

Where I'm at, which is about the Versailles negotiations, the Brits have been hedging their bets in Arabia. Before the War they were trying to keep the Ottomans afloat against Russia and the German-Austrian axis both. When the Sauds ousted the Rashids from Riyad, this weakened the Ottomans along the Persian Gulf. The Brits were, at first, like... well so what. But they needed to fill that vacuum in case the Russians got there - and the Russians were allied with the French.

The Russians made themselves irrelevant by losing to the Japanese, and then the French got caught with their hands in the Omani slave-trade, like damned fools. So from 1905ish on, the Brits had a clear-ish field in the Gulf, give or take the odd Dane or Dutchman.

Then oil was discovered. Uh oh.

In between fighting each other, the Sauds' man-who-would-be-king found his way to conquering the Hasa. That's familiar to old-Arabian scriptologists for "Hasaitic"; it's the Arabian coast south of Kuwait. The Brits were already negotiating a series of treaties with Gulf emirates like the aforementioned Kuwait and also Muscat (now Oman), and I believe they even had a post in Bahrayn. The Turks' writ didn't extend too far past Baghdad anymore. So, now the Brits had another non-Turkish emirate to handle.

But the Brits didn't want to upset those Turks - who now were starting to get into rail, for instance connecting Damascus with al-Madina.

Events (dear boy) intervened, when the Turks united with the Germans and Austrians along that other rail, the more-famous Orient Express. The Brits got the Sauds on their side, as far as I can tell, mainly to ensure the Arabs didn't interfere with the British takeover of Basra.

Over 1916, when the Sauds had united ... the Sauds, the Brits figured they were in position to make a play for Baghdad. I didn't know about this little adventure but, I learn, they failed hard. As in, Gallipoli-hard. It was a fiasco.

That's about where, I think, the Brits start looking west, at the Hashimis now ruling al-Madina. Seems that the Sharif let slip to a few interested ears that he'd not complain if a few bribes came his way.

Britain, by now desperate, gave the Sharif just about everything he wanted, more-or-less ignoring the Sauds from then on. But then, Britain was promising stuff to the Jews too. Hell, they were even drawing lines on the map with the French.

How any Arab could take any of the British promises seriously is beyond me. The Sharif seems mainly to have been using the British funding to build up his own Near Eastern pan-Arab empire. Good luck with that.

Saudi legacy

I am still working - slowly - through that library of books I inherited from my grandfather. Last year it was Bertita Harding. Having finished Jerusalem I am now onto David Holden's House of Saud. As finished by Richard Johns because, er, some Arab or other had Holden murdered before he could finish it.

Talk about based.

Anyway so far this book is excellent - written as if by a poet, and pulling no punches on its targets, of which there are many. TE Lawrence was a self-promoter whose chief contribution to the so-called "Arab Revolt" was to funnel bribes to the Sharif of Mecca. Islam was Arab tribal culture put to Scripture and venerated by fundamentalists to put Mark Tapscott to shame; Arab tribal culture is dysfunctional. The Sauds can barely put their own family in order let alone face off against the other families, starting with the Rashids and moving on to the Hashimis.

Some myths are exploded. The Ibn-Sauds are not the parvenus Westerners assume; they did have a centuries-old ... existence, in Nejd and Oman. (Compare, the Bin Ladens.) It is just that the Saud(ide)s were not better than the other families, in particular the Hashimis.

REVIEW 10/4: I am still not done but I can give you a report.

Biofilm

ASU got an important status-update on measuring how bacteria do in human-facing environments in zero-gravity, Low Earth Orbit.

The deal here is that bacteria are Stowaways, so make the cold equations even colder. They cannot be trusted not to react with the metals and plastics on board - nor indeed on the people. G-d help pregnant women on board. (PS. Cochran sure nailed that one.)

They need to break up biofilms and to neutralise anything surviving the water-filters. I don't know if they've accounted for, say, using copper instead of stainless-steel where the bugs congregate, but knowing where they congregate is the first battle.

Also where is lunar gravity, the bacteria might not be as much of a problem for us canned monkeys, but they'll remain a problem for equipment. Also someday we want hydroponics, which are a whole other can of organics we'll need to learn to ship better.

Earliest Bronze Age Anatolia

Two reports from what is now the Turkiya, over the earliest Bronze Age: seal impressions, Arslantepe 5000 BC, and life expectancy, Küllüoba 3000 BC.

Arslantepe is not considered "urban", but Küllüoba is. In between I understand the Balkans were getting to urbanity. Küllüoba is in what's now Eskişehir which is pretty northwest, so where they'll be speaking Palaic. Or maybe Hattic.

The Balkans had got whacked by plague and Aryans. Küllüoba, also, suffered from diseases. Infant mortality was high and life-expectancy around the high 30s (although I am unsure how they calculated that).

Both sites across two millennia had those seals, therefore ideograms. I do not know if these were the same seals.

BACKDATE 9/10

Gateway

Sorry I missed this when Doug Plata posted it; hence the lack of content last month's last day. Thanks Zimmerman for finding it for us.

As of July it's related to HALO so, this blog needs to deal with it.

Over the past week the Z has further noted that Firefly and Virgin Galactic are lagging SpaceX, with Dawn Aerospace far behind them all. Rocket Lab are okay for individual microsats. Forget the Senate Laundry System, that ain't happenin'. I do wonder about Gateway, though.

Looking up Gateway's dynamics, the period is such as to go around our Moon every six days. Kepler imposes a semimajor; NASA are thinking elliptic halo. 70000 km at the height, 1500 km at the lowest. Polar: so it's never occulted from Earth. I am sure NASA employs better dynamicists than Plata and I shall ever be, and I concede the NASA trajectory as clever but... Plata has to ask. Why?

Plata proposes that instead of a space-station, SpaceX can have two Starships transferring propellant to one another. Which they don't need to do in any Lunar orbit; they can do that at, to point out the obvious, Terra-Luna Libration 1. Which Point the two craft then abandon because of its metastability.

I do wonder if we can have Gatewaylikes in, say, the TLL4 and L5 pools. The Moon and the Earth can both supply such a station, and - on from that station - China's kilometer-long spaceship. That however might be a problem for when Luna has colonies of her own.

Re-reading Michael Scheuer

Michael Scheuer, who still has a website, was a CIA hand on the Bin Laden desk - over the late 1990s. As has been pointed out, he was unqualified for that position and his office overall was a failure.

Scheuer then latched onto the pro-Islam, anti-Israel side of the Deep State: Graham Fuller, Valerie Plame, other Giraldi-readers. After Bush was gone there wasn't any use for them.

At base, the Deep State wants the same wars and interventions but under a rainbow flag. David Frum, the MOAR WOAR faction's spokesman, found it in himself to denounce Scheuer early in the Trump Presidency. It seems Scheuer found his true party in the Ron Paul Forum, and then - where else - QAnon. Nowadays he's antivax.

Andrew Harrod is now reviewing Scheuer's early material. Harrod seems ... pleasantly surprised. The key work here is a study of Bin Laden's actual words, not always read by Frum's set. Contrary to popular opinion, and somewhat contrary to Arab popular opinion, Bin Laden didn't claim the mantle of Caliph and didn't even claim to be a trained scholar. (Contrast, Ibrahim Baghdadi.) He claimed to be a Muslim who could read Scripture and history, which he presented with rational arguments, not ever claiming himself as authority. (Again: contrast a self-identified caliph.)

I should interject here that Bin Laden's qaeda did on occasion defer to living authorities on Islam, starting with... the Taliban. I dimly recall the qaeda had hailed Mullah Omar as the amir al-mu'minîn. Mainly, though, Bin Laden hoped to appeal to Shi'ism as well, which Bin Laden could do as a layman. It was a neverending source of frustration to him that his fanclub, like Zarqawi's "Al Qaeda In Iraq", kept bombing Imami shrines and gatherings.

It is, I hazard, the very opposite of irony that Harrod is doing the same favour to Scheuer - judging the output, not the man - as Scheuer had done to Bin Laden.

Harrod reviewing Scheuer is mostly looking at early 2002, and here Scheuer seems solid. Looking back, we might also revisit Scheuer's Imperial Hubris in 2004, when he was calling the Afghanistan occupation an error. As for Iraq, well... that book Fiasco wasn't Scheuer's.

Which is not to say the books lack nits to pick. Frum is correct to flag this one in the second one: the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history. Late in 2001, Bin Laden did enjoy some popularity in the Islamic world; but even by year-end 2002, I got the whiff of Edgelord Troll among his loudest supporters. Like those in Finsbury Park - their poster A TOWERING DAY IN HISTORY was designed to inflame. As Bin Laden receded further into hiding (Abbottabad, we later learnt) it was questionable if this man had even survived Tora Bora. As Sunni-Shi'a relations cratered in Iraq and Syria, other spinoffs claimed more importance, like Zarqawi, and especially Baghdadi. My records show 14 March 2004 as where I'd laid my marker (from Lee Harris) that "Ladenism" was an attitude, not an organisation; and that Bin Laden himself was a symbol at most. Nowadays I doubt most Muslims respected Shaykh Stronghorse even as a symbol by the end of 2002 let alone 2004.

Scheuer's inability to see that just goes to illustrate, further, just how unqualified he was as a CIA agent. Shame, really. He arguably made the right enemies.

Rosh ha-Shana as the fascist Judaean holiday

Jeff Dunetz proposes the theocratic view of the High Holy Days. Which start tomorrow night.

In Flavius Josephus' Judaism, as he proposed Contra Apionem: "theocracy" is the direct rule of G-d. G-d already wrote the Law for all of us, and instituted an "oral-torah" of, basically, rabbis. The lower-courts are settled. (Islam is quite similar excepting that it allows for a more-direct role of the State; but that is what Josephus and Jeff will not abide.) If we live by G-d's Law, we live under G-d, where the righteous State cannot touch us.

Jeff goes on that this entails a personalised approach to Yom Kippur and the ten days leading up to it. He claims it as an anti-socialist argument. On that much I think some archaeologists would be unsure.

The Torah was, if not composed, at least edited in the context of a State, and then of the Second Temple under the Achaemenids' state. Given that, Yom Kippur was likely a set date for Jubilee. This is the annulment of debts owed to... look, we're talking Antiquity, okay? "The Bank Of Yahud" was the Jerusalem Temple.

I don't know what the Holy Days are like under the Samaritans, who (mostly) share the Torah. That'd be useful to triangulate the following conjecture.

In the later days of the Second Temple, I suspect those days were when the jubilands (if that's a word) presented themselves to the Temple - that is, to their creditors. They had ten days' grace to show up and to pay their dues, certainly practical in the not-very-large precincts of the Achaemenid province (Samaritans had Gerizim). If the debtors didn't pay up - well, either they were deadbeats or they were legitimately destitute.

Some of those debtors would be "forgiven" - meaning, cleansed of their debts. Some prophets taught that the debtors were entitled to be forgiven those debts.

Pace Dunetz, chet might not be the spirit of Torah as Torah intended. The "sins" weren't mistakes, missing the mark in archery. They were debts that were owed: chôb, in Ezekiel's Aramaicised Hebrew.

All this implies that a state with the authority to be socialist, even (or maybe especially) if it usually chooses not to be socialist, is the intent behind the Ten Days.

How oecumenism can happen across Orthodoxy

I finished Montefiore's colossal book Jerusalem (9/5: including epilogue). Never a dull moment although plenty of "WTF" moments where I had to set the tome aside for a bit. Moments like the incessant brawls at Our Lord's feet at the Sepulchre. We should all be able to agree that these brawls are an international laughingstock and need to end.

I was reading Runciman in the meantime about how they started up in the first place: the Schism. Not all the brawls are doctrinally-related; the Copts and Aethiopes are both Tawahedo, they're just... well, sorry, racists. So I am under no illusions that this base tribalism won't still be a thing if all our Churches are in mutual communion. But at least we can quit giving the tribes excuses in holiness and Belief.

Catholics are a little better off in that when Irish and Italians (say) run grubby little political games against one another, they do come together at Mass. Why not also the Russians and Greeks? As they say, it's a long story, and there's blame to share around. One place to start, from the Catholic side, might be to show some humility.

The Latin Church is ancient. We call ourselves the See of Saint Peter, himself. Runciman points out that the Antiochene Church also calls itself the See of Peter, or Mar Kepha if you're a Syrian. This proved a famous problem during the Crusade when a Norman prince - Bohemund, I think - took Antioch and wouldn't give it back to the Greeks or at least Syrians.

Adding to this mess is that Egypt claims itself from Mark, Peter's disciple and probable author of the first-surviving Gospel. But this may be our route out of the mess. To whit: as the Melkites in Alexandria do not call themselves The See of Peter, perhaps Roma should focus more on her descent from Clement. Antioch would then get Ignatius of course.

I am unaware that Clement, Mark, and Ignatius had any mutual problem with one another (as Evan Powell argued for Peter and John) so raising this triad as a Petrine unity would take away one source of argument.

Also, although Latin is a fine language with a long tradition in the West, and influence in the East; it shouldn't be the language of the Councils. That place goes to the Greeks. The Liturgy is fairly vernacular in most places anyway, and I have no real preference as to which language it's conducted in, beyond the preference of the congregations; although, in neutral ground - I am thinking mainly of Jerusalem - my vote would be for Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

I doubt I am the only layman or even priest to consider these options. I suspect one reason the Latin Church hasn't considered them is because arrogating the Petrine primacy got "us" a bargaining-chip. I hope that is not true because it is tawdry and reflects badly on the sincerity of the Latin Saints. Mind, I've had some harsh comments about certain Alexandrine Saints as well, so why should "my side" feel left out.

Whilst we're carryin' on carryin' on, I'd even suggest a separately-published New Testament in Latin and Greek, for the West, which included "1 Clement" immediately before the Revelation. Antiochenes get, in this space, the authentic letters of Ignatius. Of course both sons of Peter are fully allowed to read each other's notes: perhaps reciting Ignatius quotes in the Latin Eucharist and at Easter, and the Greeks get 1 Clement at ordinations and marriages. (Alexandria already has the Gospel of Mark.) I'd excise so-called "2 Peter" from the NT entirely, like the Nestorians do, but that's just me.

BACKDATE 9/5, finished the epilogue, wrote this.

The first, temporary oxygenations

Hannah Hickey reports on Joel Blum and Jana Meixnerová, concerning Earth's oxygenation 2.5 Bya. Apparently that's a round number.

The big carbon-crash and oxygen-dump, which threw us into a deep freeze, came 2.4 Bya. A hundred million years prior - Ariel Anbar et al. told us back in 2007 - came a false-dawn. Actually several. Blum and Meixnerová, and Roger Buick, and others, are here to explain these. It turns out there was... mercury, in those traces. Obviously not a signature for life.

A signature, rather, of volcanism. Blum's team says that animals without chlorophyll munched on the nitrates and phosphates that washed down from these new mountains, giving off oxygen as waste. Not a lot of it, and not sustainably - it takes energy to release oxygen from a molecule. But enough profusion of microbes, perhaps, came together that one microbe stumbled upon our inner solar system's greatest source of energy. Or several did.

I'm thinking the new green algae started along freshwater shallows, and that it took longer to colonise the briny deeps. I'm told that the first cyanobacteria tended to drown in their own oxygen, hardly a problem in the ocean, but certainly possible in a shallow puddle.

Heartbeat

The Supreme Court has acceded to Texas' bill limiting abortion to six weeks or less. This amounts to a Federal repeal of Roe v Wade, as it should be.

Now: the other side.

This bill selects for procrastinatrices giving birth - as Richard Spencer notes on his Twitter. Another good point, from another Dick On The Internet, is that we'll be seeing a lot more Downs babies in Texas and other red-states. Elsewhere and elsewhen, once would-be parents find out that their future babies are coming up with that extra chomosome, those babies are gone. The usual statistic is 80%.

This, because Downs testing typically gets done at ten weeks not six. Pace Cerno (as too often), the European-Catholic standard considered normative is to allow up to 90 days or 84 days (12 weeks). I much doubt that is by accident, so I expect a push to improve Downs testing so it can be done earlier.

By the way I'm outing Andorra, Monaco, and Liechtenstein as virtue-signalling hypocrites for their "bans". Their borders are walking-distance of France, a twelve-weeker and - from what I'm seeing - loose in practice even after that. San Marino, I'll allow, lies in the middle of Italy; Malta is an island. Back to Texas, famously that state is the size of France so a ban actually means something there.

I would expect Texans to get more serious about contraception than it has been, but more likely - because Texans ain't that bright - is a rise in "shotgun" marriages. And women doing this procedure out of state.

EUGENICS 9/3: The shoe fits, contra common misconceptions; although male Downs are sterile, females aren't. At least: not always. There are other congenital defects which do better, like dwarfism, which also get screened out in utero. Or like... being female.

Egg

In other equation news: meet the egg. Ernie the Genie caught it at last!

Valeriy G. Narushin and Michael N. Romanov were "visiting"; Darren K. Griffin works at the University of Kent - as a geneticist. Hence, I think, why Griffin directed the research but took third billing as mathematician. The trio published at - where else - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. So much for the Royal Society.

I had thought we'd had this equation already - what's that "ovoid", then? - but no, the actual ovum is something else.

Just looking at it, I'd say what you need to do is photograph it from the side, draw the x axis through Bigendia and Littleendia, and figure out the y = f(x) function. Rotating f(x) around the x axis is the last step which any moron can look up on DuckDuckGo. But again, they didn't do that; they just added another function to the ovoid equation. (Not to the pyriform.)

They say that different birds have slightly different f(x) so, I take it, they needed to get, er, cracking on whatever constants were feeding that function.

The Cantiacs note, obviously, that taking away processing-time means smarter storage and handling of eggs. But it also opens up, say, 3D-printing for whatever else you might need to schlep around in an egg form. Eggs are large enough to incubate a [payload], small enough to exit [a small aperture] in the most efficient way, not roll away once laid, structurally sound enough to bear weight. They think thin walled vessels as eggs should be stronger than spheres of the same shape. I am unsure about that in no-gravity, but I do wonder about an egg at the front of a rocket heading on up.

Which means this shape needs to be taught to geometry students, starting (I'd say) at A-Level / AP.