Sunday, October 31, 2021

The pagans in the Schutzstaffel

Razib Khan yesterday got into the "no you're the real Nazi" debate; here focused on the actual R1a Aryans across the Indus.

Schiklgruber was himself E2 I recall, probably via the Balkans. Also despite cribbing That Flag off the Aryans he didn't get into that pagan nonsense himself. He started Catholic, in the Charlemagne tradition; ended up Deist. As Tim O'Neill taught us.

And paganism was nowhere part of the NSDAP platform outside Toothbrush-'stache. Overall implicating Addie for the state of late 1930s German spirituality reeks of blaming Robespierre for the Cult Of Reason.

What Razib finds instead, which is interesting, is that paganism was the default state of the SS. That was Himmler's puppy.

On the one hand - as Razib points out - this means "no you're Hitler" can yield to "no you're Himmler" which is, er, even worse.

On the other hand a lot of blame is available to be shared for those events. Catholics and Protestants, by ideology, failed their duty equally. Where they protected Jews they did so less because their religion told them to, and more because they were themselves fellow minorities in those regions (so - selfinterest versus smug).

The king of the Vendée was a Swede

Simon Schama's Citizens has an update: the sans-culottes were, in part, right about Marie Antoinette. She was a cheater. That means the Révolution was also right not to crown her coucou "Louis XVII". His daddy was probably Hans Axel von Fersen, a count in Sweden and hero of America's Revolution.

The "Louis XVIII" France would later get was Louis Stanislas Xavier: younger brother of Louis Charles husband of Marie, who ruled as Louis XVI.

As for why the Bourbons recognised Ludvig von Fersen as Louis Capet XVII, I gather the Vendée reaction had got there first - and suffered for that lie. By taking the throne as #18 L.S.X. honoured their sacrifice. History is littered with irony, tragedy, and farce - especially perhaps in le pays de Saint-Denys.

I don't recall, as a side-note, if Schama diagnosed Louis Charles as an autist but I did get the vibe that the king was much more interested in SCIENCE! than in ... ruling a nation. More so Schama brought evidence that Louis Charles had a birth defect on his "li'l lewie" (phimosis) that had to be corrected by surgery.

L.Ch. could have resigned, found some spergy job tinkering with the Navy, and not married Marie. Alas, L.S.X. after him would be even worse at being king. The disasters of 1789-93 would have happened anyway.

Saturday, October 30, 2021

The Manna Hunt

Sheffield's McAndrew series prefers it out in Oort. I just finished "The Manna Hunt", which parallels the Gateway sequel (1980) in proposing Malthusian Earth's hunt for food as our spur to get out there.

I for one question Malthus (many of us question Malthus) but hey - 1980, Late Great Planet Earth, Population Bomb and the rest of it. Although Sheffield, himself, should have known better. An alternative pull to other planet(oid)s for food would be phosphorous. Or maybe something horrible happened to Earth like Dan Simmons' Big Mistake. And no, I am still not taking Climate Change seriously; but we have many other ways to system-collapse.

The outer comets got CHON; fine. And rock. Probably salt too. The story assumes a core of radionuclides and I am overall unsure what levels of phosphorous they got, but whatever.

What I don't get is how come they need to take McAndrew's scientifically-dubious "balanced drive" half a light year from home when they can, like, go on a fusion-propelled trip to Ceres.

The story is fine, as far as it goes, but it's not nearly the Hard Science Fiction it could be.

The first evangelist of Jesus

Vridar back in 13 October (I missed a lot of stuff mid October) mooted an interesting phrase: the first evangelist. Not "Matthew", nor "Mark" nor even "Paul".

We own four manuscripts titled "Evangel" in full, plus or minus the odd textual deviation. They purport to evangelise Jesus as Christ. Vridar, I am pretty sure, believes that the Gospels we call "Matthew" and "Luke" edit and rewrite (respectively) some ancient version of Mark's Gospel; so, for him, neither of them will be first. That leaves Mark and "John". But, Saint Paul had already done that evangelism. It was kind of Paul's thing.

For Paul, the text was epistolary but the subtext is his Gospel, which he preached as truest to his baptism. For the Evangelists' manuscripts titled "Gospel", the text is the Gospel. As to subtext . . .

As Evan Powell looked at Mark and "John", he saw a conflict over the figure of Saint Peter. Mark by tradition was a child who barely remembered Jesus' ministry, if at all; but he did know Peter quite well, and his Gospel - Papias tells us - is Peter's side of the story. Either way, Powell demonstrated how his gospel reads out a defence of Peter. (This, by the way, is why I don't put Mark in "quotes".) As for "John", in chapters 1-20 we have a gospel that casts Peter as the new Judas.

This means that the two gospels we own which are mutually independent are not gospels of Jesus. They are sectarian documents more concerned with presenting Peter and anti-Peter as the correct heir to Jesus.

I dimly recall how John Dominic Crossan argued that the Passion narrative was compiled from Old Testament tropes mainly from the second Isaiah and Psalm 22. Vridar is saying the same for Jesus' vita leading to that - whoever first composed it, had cobbled it from Josephus' depressing litany of failed Jewish revolutionaries. The *evangelist would have to be cribbing Josephus' text, or an extremely recent competitor; on account his forerunners include Jesus ben Ananias whose tale ends at Jerusalem's siege.

Now, here is why I doubt that Vridar's putative *evangelist could have plagiarised Josephus directly: this first evangelist would exempt John at the Jordan, whose tale the Gospels tell independently of Christ.

The simplest solution is that John's movement was too infamous. The Mandaeans today could well preserve a spinoff, retroactively. John and the Mandaeans represent popular Roman-era Judaism with a miqveh independent of Jerusalem. (And not Samaritanism. They owned their own Temple.)

But what's the point for Jews without Temple - why even care about John? Answer to that: this *evangelist did his work when John's memory still mattered, when is whilst the Temple still stood. Which precedes Josephus' memoirs.

We would still have to explain Josephus' coincidences around Jesus ben Ananias (Hananyahu...?). But if we're at the point of doubting Josephus' honesty (which Vridar, like lots of my Jewish cousins, does), we could explain this now-fictional character by Josephus taking an actual Jesus who was Yahuhanan's figurative "son", warping a few names and bringing much of his story forward in time. When you doubt a narrator, you've declared the name of the game to be "Calvinball". Anyone can play.

To sum up: if there existed a First Evangelist who drew in from previous sources to compile a true Gospel Of Jesus, as opposed to Jesus' Gospel For Or Against Saint Peter, the core of this source was most likely one Jesus a disciple of John who came to Jerusalem to preach against the Temple, and got punished by the Romans for his trouble.

TOWARDS A BETTER ARGUMENT 11/1: The Slavonic text. Here is a Jewish War with both Jesus bar Anan[yahw] (four years before the war) and the wonder-worker of the Gospel(s). Someone like John is in here, too. On the one hand, the Slavonic version hints that Bar Anan was known to Josephus before the Revolt; on the other hand, it also points to someone who looks a lot like our Jesus (alongside someone like our / the Mandaeans' John) - albeit unnamed.

What's left for Rocket Lab?

Assuming Starship works, as several of us are assuming, what's left for the other launch companies? In particular Rocket Lab - they can get stuff into orbit, but not much stuff at once.

Seems to be that Rocket Lab will own the space where they ship such low-mass materiel as you don't want to share with other cargo. Sooper sekrit satellites. One-and-done shuttles of V.I.P.'s, if the V.I.P. is heavily sedated.

I think, mostly, it's good for boosting radioactive fuel. I mean, yeah; the L in HALEU is for "Low", but it's still not something you want next to your food and water. UPDATE 11/10: ... until Project Babylon takes the HALEU space. So: fragiles only. UPDATE 11/28 ... like retrieving SpinLaunch hardware itself - from a 30 km balloon, after it's fired its load. Plenty room in space!

UPDATE 11/30: I increasingly think da Lab has the wrong business-model... or, anyway, has promoted such. In future I expect all rockets to be reusable or one-way (i.e. their stages never return to Earth). Rocket Lab, then, concentrates on midair salvage for such small rockets as fail midair, or DIY prototyping efforts. Even Starship, if it can disassemble parts of itself in midair.

McAndrew's weird science

I've gone through the first two parts of Stephen Baxter's Bronze Summer and am fed up with it; so I'm off to try Charles Sheffield's McAndrew stories again.

McAndrew is Scotty. Seriously: here's the "Mac" and there's North Britain's patron saint. Sheffield uses McAndrew and his assistant and pilot Jeanie Roker to explore kewl syfy idears.

Sheffield in 2000 collected these tales into The Compleat McAndrew, which has an appendix defending the sciencyness. The science is from the middle 1970s and mostly held up as of the writing of the appendix. The speculations derived from those earlier years are faring... less well, today.

The first story (and appendix) propose "kernels" roaming about the Oort Cloud. The "kernel" will be the Kerr-Newman [black] hole but we're using the term "Cornhole" for other things these days. Anyway you spin up a black hole, to store energy in its ergosphere - the oblate bit - and get that energy back when you slow it down. Needless to say: there aren't any kernels out there. Cornhole-afficionado Baxter in Proxima instead had it that kernels were being made (somehow) on Mercury, where the energy is greater.

"Moment of Inertia" designs a spaceship with its 50km front plate made from squishing an asteroid down to near-neutronium density. Er. Okay; I suppose lots of kernels could get you the same effect. That story's mission is to Planet X, then posited to be affecting Neptune's orbit. We now know that this Planet X doesn't exist. We are, however, on a new hunt for "Planet Nine" and/or a Mars-sized comet affecting Sedna et al. so, we'll call this a wash.

As notes the appendix, the main problem in the high-density dinner plate is moving this monster in a timely fashion. Sure, the crew won't feel inertia. But the overall ship does; McAndrew even gets annoyed with someone calling it an inertialess ship. Might this be a comment on the EM Drive? It might!

Third story in, "All the Colors of the Vacuum" throws physics by the wayside in proposing how to push his ship without removing all its mass as propellant. That solution is Zero Point Energy, which will later be Stargate Atlantis' magic fuel-source. This isn't just a handwave in the story; its inventor will be a macguffin whom McAndrew and Roker must rescue. From the forbidden asteroid of philosopher-kings.

Also in the appendix are string-theory, axions, dark matter, and supersymmetry all of which we still haven't found and are rapidly constraining off the textbooks.

On the social side, Sheffield is just a better person than is Baxter so nobody is getting raep'd. Sheffield clearly belongs to the Robert Heinlein school of SF: where men and women all get together in a cuddle puddle, engineers are awesome, and "political correctness" is stupid. Sheffield, accordingly, in 2000 chose Baen as his vehicle to get The Compleat McAndrew out to the bookstores. Truman / Kennedy liberalism, then; which became the neocons. Also around here, maybe a little Righter, are Niven and (in earlier, happier times) Pournelle. As for Frank Herbert, that one exudes the incense of NRx. None of this makes for a worse story; Abraham and Franck are FAR on the Left but also (like Herbert) supreme cynics, so The Expanse has been a classic for most of its first three seasons. Sheffield, by contrast, might be too good a person to work in transplanetary SF.

Friday, October 29, 2021

Ad astra!

Last week I checked in on Casey Handmer's spaceblog. This year he has, intermittently, floated ideas on what the Starship can do: save a lot of money, save the Artemis project, save Eli Watney. (You know what doesn't get saved? Gateway.) On the hunt for something to poast about yesterday afternoon I wandered back there. Handmer has summed it all up: the Starship means that everyone working on space project needs to quit thinking every gram counts and start thinking of tonnes.

Yes, you can now bring your golfball... and a full slate of clubs. We assume you're bringing that golfcart, in the rover; now you can bring a caddy to drive it. And the fully-stocked lounge, when you're done your nine holes. We're not quite at the Orion stage where we're bringing the barber; as I recall ol' boom boom is a oneway ticket even when it works.

I do hope Nyrath Chung is reading Handmer... since everyone else is. Whilst I was dithering, Reynolds jumped on the story already.

Even though we're at "every tonne counts" instead of "every gram", there remain some parts as weigh many tonnes which Elon would rather not use. One idea was to dispense with the first stage's landing gear. (That stage hoping to land on Mars will still need gear... for now.) Instead, put the gear on the landing-pad: catch the (again, unmanned) rocket with, er, chopsticks. That's being tested too.

Back to Handmer, another good point is that if Elon doesn't mind losing a Starship (and stranding a crew), if the whole thing lands on some low-atmo planetoid, said crew can flush out its fuel and use the tank as extra living-space. Even better: with no atmo underneath, you can even swap the Starship with that Orion. There's the seed for the extraplanetary base, on the Antarctica model. Until someone finds a lavatube.

Looking around elsewhere ToughSF chimed in, a fortnight ago, explaining why we don't repurpose a Starship with a nuclear engine, Orion or NERVA: It's a chemical design from top to bottom. Starship is for pushing the parts of the (actual) interplanetary NERVA into orbit. Then it goes back to Boca, leaving the mechanics to assemble that other ship.

UPDATE 11/17: Handmer has a followup. The Mars-mirror idea will never be launched from Earth but we may consider his other ideas.

One quibble tho'. Does 100T/$10mil mean NASA's engineering marvels in microengineering are now useless? I am going with... no. One advantage of a Cassini-sized probe being (relatively) light is that it can change course. NASA could design a bunch of small probes for Uranus and Neptune, ship their components all up to some station in STL3 halo, assemble them there and blast them to the beyond with a NERVA (preferably by fusion, but hey). Starship is all about getting cargo into low Earth orbit and then getting the rocket back to Earth. NASA can still do planetology. It's just that they'll be hitching lifts shared with other guys' stuff, to fill the manifest.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Spoliatio

Tree Of Woe explains why your frathouse can't do a Taco Tuesday: spoliatio.

I never thought "cultural appropriation" was good rhetoric. It's been widely noted that appropriating facets from other cultures is... Diversity as advertised, witness the Italians' takeover of [North Asian] pasta especially after they got the [Mesoamerican] xitomatl. That meme fails to convince in exactly the same way the "Latinx" meme fails, coming as it does from the same fat schoolboard types.

Spoliation, on the other hand, is a rhetorical Kill Shot. It sounds like something that has spoiled. And the word is just shorter.

Although... perhaps "Cultural Appropriation" and "Latinx" are in our language exactly because they don't work. In this Soviet system, the landwhales on the schoolboard write the Newspeak Dictionary. You will use their language or you will be shut out.

Tarim

Bombshell on the pre-Hsia Tarim mummies: they were not Tocharian. They weren't even para-. As late as 2100-1700 Based Count they were Ancient North Eurasians. h/t just about everybody today from which I'm picking Saraceni and Gizmodo.

The research contrasts this with the Junggar Basin up norf, which is similarly dry and seasonally even colder, so also has well-preserved remains. Those guys had Yamnaya ancestry, even earlier: 3000-2800 BC. The press-releases don't report if Junggar / Dzhungar were Andronovo or Гора Афанасьева; the base-article says the latter, as we should expect given the dates. Either way doesn't matter for Tarim: Junggar wuz IndoEuropean.

Which Bronze Age Tarim wuz not.

UPDATE 6:15 PM MST: Razib got into this last night which I missed, and am kicking myself for missing. He covered all of what I just redundantly did. He does note that the huwite Westerners whose portraits the later Chinese drew (badly) were probably Sogdians, since Afanasievo (or however you latinise it) were a tan lot and the old Bronze-Age Tarim would have, in life, looked almost like Comanche.

Wrestlemania!

A week or two ago, HBD Twitter (now under target by Stasi) floated a theme that beards developed in fistfighting culture. Men and women prefer not to settle their mutual differences by punches to the face; ditto women and women. Man to man, by contrast, sometimes do go mano a mano. The Greeks notably included boxing in their Jeuses Olympiques, and we had the Marquess of Queensbury in England.

It all looked Too Good To Check so I did my usual brave thing of not paying attention. Until today! h/t HBDchick and screw the Stasi.

This thesis turns out to be testable - amongst survivals of the Pleistocene today (or throwbacks thenceto): hunter-gatherers. It turns out that the Sirono... don't box. Unless some idiot gets drunk. And then the rest of the tribe mocks him for fighting like white men. Nah - for the Sirono, decent men wrestle.

If we're talking actual savages, like Steve Pinker noted in Better Angels: those guys will come at you with sharp objects or clubs. Your beard won't help with either. (Although kinky scalp hair might, until - hopefully - you get old enough not to get into clubfights.)

We might raise this up to Asian culture whose martial arts are defensive (judo, jiu-jitsu, aikido) or use feet a lot. You could get punched in the face... but more likely you're breaking some ribs. Or an arm when your punch gets blocked and twisted.

So maybe the beard developed specifically in boxing cultures. The Greeks, then, will have been Olympian fistfighters from since before the Bronze Age; ditto, the Ainu and maybe the Jomon. I suspect the Semites also. And Julia Lovell's weightlifters of 307 BC western China like Wu king of Qin - who (I suspect) was R1b (likely over the Iron Age - there's some late-breaking news about the Bronze Age). The Siberians before entering Beringia never boxed, and once in the New World whoever did box didn't do it for long enough to change their genome.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Ashqelon's final garrison

I didn't dig at the fun part of Ashqelon. The fun part was the Late Iron Age souk down by the beach. I'm checking in on the current consensus of Ashqelon's final days.

The market has Greek pottery in it. Thus it represents an apparent resurgence of the old Aegean / Canaanite connection that characterises the early "Philistine" era. Alexander Fantalkin argued instead, in "Why Did Nebuchadnezzar II Destroy Ashkelon?", that the pottery findings are overblown - as a trend. Rather, they tell an actual story.

Per Le-ma'an Ziony's "Ekron of the Philistines": when Babylon sicced its Medean allies upon the Assyrian Empire, this left a vacuum from Syria to lower Egypt. This broke up the Assyrian trade-network such that what many cities had come to specialise in, were now useless. Ekron's economy collapsed. Fantalkin - from other indications - found similar in Ashqelon. That market was new, when the Babylonians crashed the party 604 BC.

As to what the Greekware was doing there, Fantalkin argued that its was to serve - primarily - Greeks. The Greeks were doing better than they had done, say, in 704 BC; but still, they were hardly Pericleians (yet). Fantalkin then analogised to Mezad Chashabiah (Hashabyahu) and our good friend Tel Kabri, which also had Greekware, that these were mercs.

The Swiss Guard aside, sensible nations don't hire mercs for longer than they must. Somebody was backstopping a strategic point. That somebody, Fantalkin noted for Mezad Chashabiah, was Egypt. It was probably Egypt here too. One assumes Egypt had d00dz in Gaza as well.

With at least three Egyptian garrisons not including Gaza, the Babylonians - considering themselves Assyria's heirs - would have their pretext to swoop down on the whole coast. The Egyptians would try to get some of that back but LOL.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Gaya

Upcoming is Pere Gelabert et al., "Diverse northern Asian and Jomon-related genetic structure discovered among socially complex Three Kingdoms period Gaya region Koreans".

Those three kingdoms would be Goguryeo (north), and Baekje and Silla (sharing the south). Gaya - so I read - was in the south but not one of the kingdoms. Silla annexed Gaya in the AD 500s maybe in the wake of that horrible half-decade, you know the one. Later, in the 600s, the Tang would pretty much annex Baekje and subdue Silla (and Gaya) - driving out Silla's Japanese allies.

The Gaya capital was Gimhae. They buried their honoured dead in Daeseong-dong... with some of their living. Human sacrifices were interred there. Socially complex, indeed. Place was Squid Game. But, as the saying goes, their loss is geneticists' gain as we get a cross-section of the Gaya genome.

Gaya women were G4 like modern Koreans and the "Yayoi farmers" of old Japan. The men were also typically Korean, marking a contrast with Japanese who retained more of their ancient Siberian "Jomon" Y-chromosomes. Since Gaya was a loser in Tang-period history - twice over - the authors feel safe in asserting that the actual Three Kingdoms bore similar genetics. I mean, unless those Kingdoms (like, er, Japanese) imported Gaya's women . . .

Gaya does have more "Jomon" ancestry than the authors expect, mtDNA and Y aside. Specifically: the Honshu sort of Jomon, ninth century BC. (Japan is a long and mountainous chain of islands, and "Jomon" is unironically pots - not people.) The admixture is set around AD 200 - before Kofun, note. The paper doesn't venture on whether Gaya (whilst it existed) harboured a holdover Jomon-esque population or if this was simply a Honshu bunch who came over and intermarried. I could suspect that of Japan-allied Silla proper, but I would not have suspected that of independent Gaya. Mind you... before Kofun, was a very different Japan.

I am glad this is a preprint, because I really do hope Dr Gelabert's team incorporate this recent data from pre-Kofun / post-Kufun Japan.

Appalachia rises

Everyone hates coal but can't quit it. Even if (like me) you don't consider Carbon Dioxide a pollutant, the ash is assuredly a pollutant. Most of the carbon had got oxidised - that is, burned. What's left over is... well, a lot of it is heavy-metals, which you don't want in your water-table.

We do want many those metals in other industrial contexts. So, treat the ash with acid! - say the chemists. Uh...

Glenn Reynolds brings the good news: we can use citric acid. (Or maybe uric. Sweet lemonade, sweet sweet lemonade.) Much less dangerous, and the twice-used ash is now just dirt. Ship it somewhere where they had an erosion or salination problem.

The reaction worked at 70 C and 70 bar. I bet the purification factory won't need much energy to run. It literally would be running itself - not as a coal powerplant anymore, but as a coal processor.

UPDATE 2/9/22: Heat pulses on fly-ash. That looks good for the residue after the dirt is liberated from the now VERY toxic remnant.

I want to be running our grid on nuclear power anyway, including the coal mines themselves.

Monday, October 25, 2021

Disconnecting from G-d

The Word Of The Lord isn't connecting well with kids straight out of publick skool.

Which is... mission accomplished, for the whole system, which started as Bismarck's Kulturkampf against us Papists and swiftly made its home here in Neuedeutschland - Progressive America.

On average that generation are worse people than GenX but "to Hell with them" isn't the Christian answer. Pace Tapscott if "Intelligent Design" and Biblical-research denial are the Christian answer, Christianity deserves to die. Pace Vox Day, QAnon and vaccine "hesitancy" won't answer this, either.

Equally, though: turning Christianity into the D.I.E. Department At Prayer is hardly going to help, since these kids already get enough of that in their re-education prisons. Why would any teenagers volunteer themselves for more of the same, on their day off? And why should churches (or mosques) volunteer themselves?

I don't see this as the dilemma the Wall Street Journal wants us to see it as, frankly. I think the young folk will come to us when they get #canceled or fear getting #canceled. Or when they realise what Iblîs has done to them, through the schools he runs.

China's one-way rocket

Last Tuesday China test-fired a solid-fueled rocket. That's a high-thrust rocket, that can launch heavier loads for cheaper. Downside: they also can't get that rocket back, so it's not competing with the Starship as a regular shuttle.

... unless, its mission is to deliver the rocket itself into space. If there's a station up there already, some tug can grab it, refuel it, and redirect it. Or, clean out its innards and repurpose it as a zero-G closet or something. Looks a bit small for human occupancy currently.

Or maybe it's not even going to space. Maybe it's going to Denver. Zimmerman doesn't take a side about August's hypersonic test but, I'd assume the worst.

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Svend

On topic of l'Anse aux Meadows, Colavito directs us to Adam of Bremen. This historian traveled to the Danes' Mark and interviewed Svend Estridson, their king until AD 1076. Adam testifies to Svend's excellent memory and, further, visited the Mark's churchmen to consult their archives. Adam also, one imagines, visited the docks.

Having compiled his notes, Adam went home to append the geographical index "Descriptio insularum Aquilonis" to his chronicle Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum. Colavito pins this work around 1035 CE but our man was a mere whelp in AD 1068, when he first entered Bremen; Adam was himself probably a Saxon, from Meissen. The chronicle got its third book (before the Descriptio), an encomium to the late bishop Adalbart, after that one's death AD 1072.

Svend, for his part, had been ruling since AD 1047. This was when Danish and Swedish were still the same "Old East Norse", but already not Icelandic (so I'm not calling him "Sveinn"). Although: all the dialects in this ancient age were mutually comprehensible and, besides - everyone knew Latin. As of AD 1021, Iceland was a Christian island so their sailors had that one fewer problem landing at Norwegian and Danish ports. Also in 2019 came claims the Norse stayed at the Anse (at least seasonally) for a century. I am unwilling to assert that far, but a half century will take us to the 1070s which is all Svend and Adam need.

Dune (take 3)

It is a recurrent 20-year tradition to adapt Dune for screens of variant sizes. It's Denis Villeneuve's turn this time.

'Tis fairest to compare this one with the Y2k miniseries on the SF Channel now called "SyFy". David Lynch's version has its fans but, frankly, only trolls rank it above the later efforts.

The special-effects are, as expected, MUCH better here than in the miniseries. The miniseries could not pull off crowd-scenes, thus making difficult to believe there existed a galaxy at stake. Also better here is its Paul, whom Timothée Chalamet plays as a callow youth with a good heart, because that's who he is. The miniseries' Paul starts as an alpha jock by Caladan standards, and never quite does grow into his rôle as Space Mohammed. (He is a sight better as the conflicted caliph and then kharajite in the next miniseries which carries Dune Messiah into Children of Dune.) The movie's Leto is better too, because he's not mumbling his lines in a hungover stupor. Although the sound-editing lets down the dialogue for him and for other actors.

Since the miniseries had no budget it trended toward filling in our exposition with ballroom and banquet scenes. I actually... liked these scenes. Especially when bringing Paul together with the Princess Irulan; there is genuine chemistry here, and humour. (Although, Paul shouldn't be returning Irulan's fancy, since - we know from his dreams - Paul already loves another.) I liked the music and colours of the pageantry, in the miniseries: House Corrino is cold, with a slightly off-key musical score; House Harkonnen is angry red, industrial, and often shot in Battlefield Earth angles.

Oh, and Harkonnen's fat baron although more menacing in this new version was just so much more fun to watch in the miniseries, which role he hams up (pun intended). You love to watch the earlier baron wheel out Yueh's wife in front of him, explaining exactly how he freed her. (Completely free!)

Here's an outright whiff in the new version - we don't get an early scene where the Duke and his concubine Jessica share intimate moments between themselves. No I am not talking about striking up the soft disco drums and heartbeat basslines. (Which we'll see late in the miniseries.) Just anything to show us why, exactly, it matters that Jessica bore her man a son, before the Bene Gesserit tells us.

Also I thought the hunter-seeker scene was done better in the original, which drew out the tension when it is Paul and the servant girl at risk. Paul acts to save the girl, thus helping convince the common Arrakian that they have an advocate.

Ah well. We'll see how the 2040 version looks.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Hekla 3

So now Baxter has started on the Bronze Age Collapse. He's following Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Cline proposed that the Hekla 3 eruption did what the late AD 530s blowups would do, except to a less-resilient civilisational network. Cline relied on Baillie's date for the Hekla 3 eruption over in Iceland.

I never took Cline seriously. As for Baillie: when he ate a retraction about the 1645 BC volcano (Alaska, not Thera) I figured that Baillie might have been wrong about other stuff when, like all of us once were, he was young and excitable. Still, Stone Spring depends on that thesis; Baxter's world is more resilient than ours was. And the man is a normie. To the extent midwits stuff Internet comment-boards with Kewl Kuttin'-Edge Idears; Baxter will clutter the science-fiction shelves with that rubbish, too.

To some level the shift of water-mass away from Europe might deform the crust enough to change when, and how, Hekla went up. But that's a copout. Hekla 3 is a hoax. A "false-flag". Didn't happen; it is a meme.

So let's look in on this. After the Norse landing AD 870, our mountain blew up AD 1104 in a Plinian kaboom (creating a rhyolite) and then AD 1158 (dacite). Before known human habitation, absent the odd castaway or monk, geologists identify several layers: 3, ‐S, ‐4, ‐Ö, and -5. Because we aren't moles so dig from top to bottom, the higher layers bear the lower cardinality. H-4 was the worst at esplod'ity index (VEI) 5. The worst VEI elsewhere since we were Africans were the Kawakawa/Oruanui at Tia's Cloak (Taupō) and Toba at 8; Tambura and the more recent Taupō were 7. H-4 would rank with Vesuvius and Mt. St. H., at 5.

Sure, Iceland's incessant VEI 3-4 tephra is annoying for Brits and even for Finns. And as Laki proves, Iceland doesn't need a Plinian to mess up the northwestern Old World - a year of steady outgassing will do. But a Plinian is what Baillie was arguing: the H-3. For an Icelandic kaboom to bounce its ash over the Alps to affect the Eastern Mediterranean, I demand for VEI a 6 (Pinatubo) - at least. That was not H-4 and, as for H-3, which is what Baillie wants, that wasn't even a 5. Baxter illustrates, of course, Icelandic Vesuvius.

H-3 presaged "A shift in eruption mode of Hekla volcano", as Guðrún Larsen et al. wrote (doi 10.1002/jqs.3164). The mountain erupted more frequently but didn't gouge itself out, as H-4 had done. These flows made a literal mountain of what had been more like Thera, a flattish crater. One advantage of a more regular, moderate eruption cycle is that its layers are better for constraining when they happened.

Hekla‐D is found just above Katla‐E, which together come to 2940 years ago (14C 2790 ± 45 BP). Below / before K-E is H-O, which is more difficult to constrain... since it came soon enough after the big H-3 that some important metrics were distorted. We don't get tree-rings; Iceland ain't exactly known for its bountiful forests. (We'd thank the Vikings but, we're talking the Hekla and Katla belts.)

TL;DR - H-3 and then H-O should get treated together. Their dating is churned up. Consensus currently states that they happened very late 11th century. Consensus meanwhile pins the Bronze Age Collapse to Rameses III's forts ringing the Gaza / Ashqelon coast; that's usually set early 12th. (It helps we own a vita of this Rameses from his son's reign: the Harris Papyrus.) That presents a gap of, what, 150 years. And anyway H-3 was too weak to matter past the English British Channel, at a time when Britain itself was backward.

Friday, October 22, 2021

The supercritical / dense gas boundary

Gas and liquid are separate phases of matter. You can see, in a glass of water, the difference between the two. Water has a boundary with air. Consider supercritical water, and high-pressure vapour.

Can a chamber be created which has cooler lower-pressure vapour on top, and the supercritical fluid below it?

I am, of course, trying to wrap my head around what Venus' carbon-dioxide looks like at this boundary, if it will appear to observers as an ocean. I suspect it will look more like a desert haze with mirages at dawn.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Horse

Saraceni reports: in the centuries before Avellino, horses broke out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. 2200-2000 BC.

Amalyah Hart is talking North[west] Caucasus but - as Davidski keeps trying to explain to us - that's not the Ukraine steppe. More to the point (exactly because the equids are not Circassian) the researchers link this to the spread of Indo-Iranian languages. Those will be the R1a-associated languages: the truest Sons Of Aryas. Not Greeks and Armenians; not even Baltoslavs - if we're to believe Hart.

These horses, against others like the Botai (which might have been the Tocharians' breed), had stronger vertebrae and didn't mind humans as much. I sense that the Ukrainians were breeding these horsies for many centuries before they had a horse that much superior to others'. That horse was amazing.

Bronze Summer

Technically I wasn't done with Stephen Baxter "The Wall"'s Stone Spring. There's a second part: Bronze Summer. I found that used (along with Stephen Donaldson's Seventh Decimate) and (having finished that) am on to it.

The date is, now, 1200 BC possibly pushed back in time. Troy VI has fallen and Troy VII is a shantytown good for little but cheap whores. Civilisation is doing better overall because literacy is more widespread; Troy's collapse is not The Bronze Age collapse. [UPDATE 10/23: Yet.] The settled farm-towns aren't doing as well as they should be doing, which I'll get to.

Baxter's Hittites have a steel monopoly because our man did not know Albert Jambon's Irons of the Bronze Age, which came out 2017. But I recall that monopoly being overblown all through the 1990s and beyond; the only decent steel in the, derrrp, age of bronze was meteoric. Just like King Tut's dagger. See for instance Robert Drews in 1992 who pointed out that the new military tech of 1200 BC was all still bronze. It's Baxter trying to be clever and cutting-edge again, and failing at it.

Just like when Baxter was retracing the Across Atlantic Ice route, which was that other main departure-point besides the Seawall Of The Jǫtunn. In this world, Iceland exists with a mixed North Hunter Gatherer / Skraeling population. Their ships can reach the Olmec on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, to borrow their stonemasons. However "exotic" the wood was at the Anse, they didn't have rubber.

As for what else is different what I am having trouble believing: the hunter-gatherers have survived but the Neolithic European farmers, somehow, have not. I get the impression that Gimbutas and Mallory didn't make an impression: there was no Kurgan or Bell-Beaker influx, because the farmers were Indo-European. So everyone is Gaulish or Greek. (And Hittite in Anatolia, but I'm fine with that much.) Did the introduction of a stone seawall to everyone's north mean that civic society came past the Balkans before 4000 BC, with the plague hitting before, and Indo-Europeans arriving before, so no-one remembers?

I could go on. Is there a hillfort / oppidum culture like the Romans found? Who's keeping literacy among the bronze baronies - druids? And if the stone towns are older so everyone's learnt why rats and fleas are bad, then why is everything still so filthy - where's Roman-era sanitation?

I'm at the point of suspecting an author's fetish, like Donaldson's incurable frustration and internalised rage. Baxter The Wall is still subjecting his characters to you-know-what, including the teenaged boys. Everything we animals do which humans would rather have done in private are, still, done out in the open.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

The 1021 Project

We have a year for the Anse aux Meadows: 28 years after the AD 993 cosmic flux. That's when three trees were cut down for timber, and sawn by iron axes.

Lucky we knew about that flux.

They say that 1000ish was a warmer time but, even then, the Newfie / Labrador coast was hardly a Vinland. The study says, however, there is "exotic" wood, so these Norse likely had ventured further south. Which they could do because they had a base, at the Anse.

I don't know if the bellicose skrælingjar were at the Anse or in the Vinland; we do know they weren't Inuit. The Inuit have their own sagas, which name the indigenes Tuniit. Northeast nontundra Canada had a culture at Cape Dorset; but that one ends around AD 1000. Afterward, um. Maybe the Beothuk?

I find difficult to blame plague for the "Terminal Dorset", if it is even a thing; or simply lack of archaeology in a vast landscape even Canadians find difficult to visit, and near impossible to winter-over. These Norse came from a bottlenecked population itself, that of Greenland; their transmissible diseases, if any, had run their course. This wasn't mediaeval Lisbon.

Could be I'm thinking of the wrong plague. Maybe it's not airborne, and sticks in a man for longer before it kills him. Hepatitis?

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Shufty

I learnt to speak very late for a child. Part of that was because I'd been immersed in three (3) languages as a toddler: good English, bad French and worse (Algerian) Arabic. Some words stuck - shuf, 'asma! - that is, watch out! listen!!, which is pretty much all a bored male toddler will ever hear. And whenever someone on (usually American) TV is casting a working-class Brit from the south of England you'll be hearing shufty.

Zoosh was another one, for two.

Learning Modern Standard Arabic, and especially focusing on Classical, I never saw shuf; I saw ra'. Couldn't figure out zoosh either: any Semite knows ethnayn or (ordinal) thani. Was zoosh Iranian? What's it doing so far west of Alexander's City, then? Later I heard from a Moroccan that it comes from zawj which is in the Qurân for a pair.

Here is Ahmed al-Jallad's shufty on areal spread of common Arabic. Nobody says shufty (šâf) in Malta except tourists. Likewise back when Arabic was spoken in Cyprus. These Arabics landed in the High Middle Ages; šâf, then, postdates the 7th/13th century.

Monday, October 18, 2021

Nasser's many enemies

Ron Unz himself has stepped up, or into, the USS Liberty affair 1967. Here, the word is that Lyndon Johnson was out for a pretext to bomb a Soviet airbase west of Cairo . . . with nuclear weapons. Aim was to topple Nasser, not just to cripple him as the Israelis had already done; replacing him with a less meddlesome pro-American.

Thus triggering the "For All Time" alt-history; but at the time Johnson thought he wanted to be President, and cared more about that than about life on... anywhere.

To add to Unz' theory on Johnson's devilry, in light of House of Saud, that replacement likely would have been Anwar Sadat, who in fact would replace Nasser not all that long afterward. Sadat was, however, even more anti-Israel. Thus pulling responsibility even more from Israel and toward Johnson than Unz would allow.

I should add that Israel was not Nasser's only enemy. Nor was Israel the only anti-Soviet bastion of the region.

Nasser and Sadat over the 1960s meddled hard in the Yemen, unseating the Imam from Sanaa and installing a somewhat popular but weak "democracy". The Sauds made the place even more chaotic than the Yemeni usual, bleeding Nasser dry. In the end the Egyptians retreated, leaving Saudi with the mess. (Saleh would take Sanaa about a decade later I think, and more-or-less stay there. But irrelevant to 1967.) Another annoyance for Saudi is when King Saud himself fled to Egypt under Nasser's protection.

Over the 1967 war, the next Saudi king Faisal did diddly. He just sent some troops into the Transjordan to shore up the Hashemi king, leaving the West Bank to... what it is. No Saudi landed in Sinai nor did any approach Suez.

I do not recall that Holden and Johns said anything about the Liberty. King Faisal sincerely hated Jews and Israel. Although... that was of a piece with his anti-Communism, suggesting he'd have hated Nasser that bit more. The Sauds should, then, have been Monitoring The Situation same as the Liberty was.

Seems to me that there are a lot of archives in Israel and Saudi which haven't been opened and should be.

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Neutronic lifetime, II

Last year I noted some ongoing questions as to how long a nonrelativistic neutron will last by itself. Besides "curiosity", our standard model depends on some Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix being unitary. That, in turn, might be more true for some neutron lifetimes than for others.

Back then, Durham suggested measuring the outflow from the inner planets. Now, Durham thinks they can get some results faster: with the Lunar Prospector.

Meanwhile we also have these neutrons suspended over frickin' magnets: 877.75 seconds. Possible due to the neutrons' internal magnetism I take it.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Radiant

In small-scale reactor news: Chris Young reports on Radiant. This based on a press-release and an interview from 22 September... 2020.

So basically I missed it and, frankly - so did Young. These 2020 releases came out to counter NuScale which had touted their reactor a few weeks prior. Although I didn't miss much on account Radiant was still in prototype. Young says Battelle Energy Alliance is testing this in its Idaho National Laboratory.

Radiant propose to ship their reactor by any means you like; it's lightweight enough even for air. It is not producing power in-flight, so... this is not powering your Cessna. Something like it may power shipping however.

Naturally I applaud the return of nuclear power. Long overdue.

Friday, October 15, 2021

Homo arabica

Here is a study finetuning Arabia. Per Saraceni: The study suggests that ancestors of Arabian Peninsula groups split from early Africans some 90,000 years ago, from ancestral Europeans about 42,000 years ago, and from ancestral South Asian populations some 32,000 years ago. She points us to Charles Q. Choi.

This was all Pleistocene so I had assumed that Arabia was dry but subject to monsoons. Given the monsoons I expect Oman as the Pleistocene staging point.

Also: "ancestral Europeans" is what it says it is. That 40kBC date doesn't surprise me, because the Neanders were still king from Anatolia northwest.

That South Asian 30kBC by contrast is simplistic to the point of being preposterous. The study must be ignoring the relict populations still lurking around various jungles and islands including, er, the whole of New Guinea and Australia, and maybe even Hy-Brasil. I'll buy 30kBC for the old Dravidians and Elamites but not for the Andamans. I take it that southeast Asian F holds true as the first split with GHIJK being everyone else and the true topic of this new study.

Anyway all of this just shows GHIJK phylogeny, not its locations at the time. The Great Divide's theory of Sundaland Noah is still possible, for 50kBC.

I am also unable to fit D in here, such old Siberians as now found in Japan. I do not think they ever approached southeast Asia from 50kBC to the Viet era. If nothing else the northeasterners own true Denisovan traces where the southeast has a still-undetermined (and much heavier) paraDenisovan lineage.

Trying to fit all that together, the I and K lineages map to ancestral Europe and to ancestral North Eurasia respectively; Aryan R1a, Celtic R1b, and American Q among K's sons. Non-R1a India trends high in H although Wiki tells me J can rise to about a third in Pakistan. I had thought that IJK went together but, apparently, that should be amended to IK; instead, HJ go together, splitting 30kBC.

As for Arabia back home, at the tail of the Glacial Maximum 18-10 kBC; this peninsula was moister. Or, if you like - Oman was larger then. Still too late for those earlier population emissions, but it did contribute to an expansion within Greater Oman herself. This population following the Holocene drought broke apart into tribes including, I dare say, the ancestor to our Semites. And maybe to our Cushites as well.

As for full-on Arabian Semitica, the paper implicates the male line "J1a2b", with 29 subclusters. Quraysh is J1...c3d and J1-a2b is linked to the Yemen so, -a2b will be Qahtan. That J1 / J2 split was before 18 kBC I think.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Great Barrington

I was aware of that portentiously-named Great Barrington Declaration, the Mayflower Compact of the let-'er-rip crowd. I didn't mention it because, unlike Zimmerman et al., I thought it was stupid. The correct response to a virus is to wait for the vaccine; when everyone has immunity who wants it, then let-'er-rip. So the GBD's signatories were fools who made a deadly mistake. Blue Lives Matter, as Hanania points out.

All that said, the GBD presents the correct declaration for a post-vaccine era. The signatories may be ushered back into scientific circles if they admit as much.

Zimmerman now presents the case of Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist for Brigham Womens' Hospital and a medical professor in Harvard Med. Kulldorff last year besmirched his C.V. with the Declaration. Currently he opposes vaccine mandates, contra Civis. On the other hand Kulldorff also advised the CDC on vaccine safety, so directly or indirectly helped write this page, which says like I do: the vaccines beat catching the Pooh Flu itself.

As for whether LinkedIn should be censoring the "Brownstone Institute" and/or Kulldorff's essays, on the one hand LinkedIn is a monopoly which shouldn't exist outside fascism. On the other hand why is LinkedIn even hosting essays? Kulldorff should find somewhere else to run his blog.

I'll be first in line not to read it.

Mars dementia

A couple days ago Gothenburg reported on blood-traces after prolonged weightlessness. It didn't look good. This on top of the usual atrophy that happens to anyone stuck outside normal human contact in the middle of nowhere.

As they note, they didn't look at the brain itself; but at the amyloid proteins - infamous for Oldtimer's Disease - and at the glials, which work to clean up damaged brain tissue. They were working overtime. As for those glials, even if there wasn't damage, those cells think there was so... glioblastoma risk. Just, ugh.

Even assuming the Chinese and/or Elon create their spinning torus on a cycler route to Mars: the crew will still likely need to go OVA for hours on end. And then there's the low gravity on Mars itself. Our own Moon is at least in striking distance of Earth so (hopefully) won't have permanent staff, until Heinlein's Revolt breaks out.

Glioblastoma and amyloid research is required for extended forays. Starting with predictive capability so they can sequester crewmembers who might risk the mission.

CAUSE 12/15: If hydrocephaly, we may have a mitigant.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

We are being held hostage

Zack Kanter pins down the supply-chain crisis: longshoremen at Long Beach. I recall them from early in Dubya's Presidency when they were striking for... whatever. I recall that their union was very, very Left. And I say this as a mildly pro-union guy.

[NOTE 10/17: All keeping in mind that California and the EPA banned three-year-old trucks in 2020... meaning, effectively, nonunion and private trucking.]

And some of our Stuff That Sucks comes from other unions, or at least from employees in mutual collusion - as is happening with the airlines. Here it is the Right applauding the strike. (h/t from that law professor who helped get us the Iraq War, lately seen recommending you get jabbed with antibodies.)

It is, as I've illustrated, easy to "dunk" on one side - or on the other; but since I am not as good at this game as editor Michael Kinsley was, I'm done dunking for the night. Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg is proving himself not up to the job, but he is not the problem. He can hardly act without orders from his boss, nu?

It is clear to me that a lot of Americans are, simply, done with America. They don't want to work toward a common purpose. This is eminently the case on the Right; but it is also the case on the Left. Being a selfish cynic isn't something that is unique to Left or to Right. It's just selfish cynicism.

Ronald Reagan had a cure for Carter-era "malaise" when he faced PATCO. Maybe Donald Trump, never entirely at home on the Right or the Left, could have applied this cure; at least (some of) the Right would have kept shtum on the pilots (and I am absolutely implicating that law-professor here).

This is a problem with the people. In the meantime, my advice to my readers is to shun anyone who supports these frivolous walkouts.

Perelandra never existed

CS Lewis wrote a triad of novels about the planets in this Solar System, based on the knowledge he had. He already knew that Mars was mostly dead; hence why he sequestered its civilisation in the Marinaris. At the time, people wondered more about Venus. Well that got debunked in a decade or two. But maybe we can salvage Perelandra if the events took place after time travel!

Here's the latest: Venus never had water on its surface. It was steamworld until its dynamo died and then it became ... what it is. Unless you count supercritical carbondioxide as a fluid. By extension it never got tectonic plates either.

Next question: how about underground? There is recently posed a mantle-generation hypothesis of oxygen alchemy; although of course that doesn't create hydrogen.

OR NOT? 10/29: On poor constraints.

Tobacco: part of the Haskett package

It is reported that tobacco was cultivated (sorta) at the Wishbone camp in Nevada, 12,300 years ago.

That falls in the Younger Dryas snap. Back then I understand that the Bonneville complex of lakes were mostly still in the Basin, not yet the desert it would become 7500 BC on. Many of those lakes would have been brackish but still good for waterfowl and, yeah, the Wishbone campers dined well on duck soup.

The breed is Nicotiana attenuata: a frost-resistant species. Commercial baccy today is N. rustica and tabacum.

The (probably) “ANC-A” peoples at Wishbone at the time were Haskett: contemporary with Clovis but not yet Clovis. Of course Clovis could learn from others and vice-versa.

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Swine flu, again

All the pigs are all lined up, before their time. As good a time as ever for other states to follow California and improve pigfarm conditions.

Personally I am fine with culling the population. In fact, for the New World: I encourage it. We have a severe feral hog problem and the genus is intrusive here. (Yeah, I know; so am I, along with most others who own a religious objection to such animals.)

Propose that farms for this sort of meat switch to peccary. My relatives still won't be allowed to eat it, but at least it belongs here.

Monday, October 11, 2021

So the unvaxxed want to strike

Many selfish pilots and flight-attendants are Making A Point and the PJMedia set are eager to make heroes of them.

My advice to Southwest Airlines and to others facing this extortion is: come clean with the citizenry on what's going on. Tell them that in these times, they have no choice but to limit flights over the holidays and to raise prices. Also to raise wages / benefits for those crew staying on.

Seriously: it's not the airlines' fault that they have workers who are selfish attention-whores. It's conservatives'.

The 1492 Project

15 October 2019, I posted about Admiral Colón of... Liguria, best I can tell. I'd left it that he was an incompetent overshadowed by Cortés, whom I'd read more about and have some admiration for. Anyway 'tis That Time Of Year, when the Wypipo Tribe be called to "celebrate" indigenous peoples. Preferably not by eating them like the Caribs had done to the Bajans . . .

The main hit I had against this guy was that I thought he was a slaver.

I don't blame Columbus for the diseases. I chuckle at his geography but that's not a hit against his morals or rulership; same goes for the man's apocalyptic Catholicism. Even on the slavery thing I generally have a "compare A to B in the context of A and B" ethos, as you can see from my stance on The Jab: we don't compare The Jab with "everything else being awesome", we compare The Jab with catching CoVID. (I mean, unless you are a PJMedia reader with a brain full of the HSV.) From the captive's perspective: if those fighting over his flesh are a slaver and a cannibal, he should root for the slaver. Especially if that one promises to enslave the cannibal! But maybe we can go without the slavery entirely...?

Enter Armando Simón who, as a Latin, has finally had enough. He hits the same points I just did, adding more.

He's following "Adam Mill" but seems a sight better-informed than that midwit srrvative ever was (if John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith loved each other very much...). For a start Simón goes to the primaries where "Mill" relied on nineteenth-century fanbois. It helps that Simón can actually read Spanish. I don't know about Nahua but, for Columbus, we don't need Nahua.

I'll nudge Simón that he might need [Yucatec] Maya. I recall that Colón's fleet skirted their peninsula, technically Norte'mericano. He could add that the Caribbean population was never high. Where he blames Native Americans for syphilis' entry into Spain I'd more blame the Portuguese fresh outta Kongo. And yeah, we all know that everyone in the AD 1490s knew our Earth ain't flat. What this Admiral actually thought about this planet's equatorial topology was arguably even more retarded.

Also: that Columbus enslaved people isn't about his first voyage with a couple of "Caravel" tugboats. Obviously that canard is ridiculous. If we're judging Columbus we're judging his tenure as the Viceroy of all the West.

Overall, Simón's takedown although ranty is far superior to "Adam Mill". Put him alongside Darío Fernández-Morera.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

The second Suez

I have, after over a month, finished The House of Saud. (Which is more than David Holden and Richard Johns did . . .)

Along the way I read about the diplomatic mess around James Earl Carter's legacy, that Egypt / Israel peace hammered out at Camp David. Holden dislikes Israel's Likud and, frankly, seems not to approve Israel itself. The whole Arab world excoriated President-for-Life Anwar Sadat as a traitor for his Separate Peace. As for Carter, as with so much else Carter, he needn't have bothered. Let's concentrate on Sadat. Why'd he do it?

Sadat's side of the pie was the Sinai Peninsula but not Gaza, plus billions in US taxpayer aid. By that, Egypt no longer needed the aid she'd been getting before, which was mostly Saudi. Mind, now Egypt was an American client. And the Sinai is just more Negev: a massive desert good for little. National pride accounts for some of it. Ehh.

I wonder if at work was a glance at the map. Egypt owns the Gulf of Suez. But there's another gulf on the other side: Aqaba. Jordan owns the town Aqaba; Israel owns Eilat. Besides these strips, Egypt has the western shore and Saudi-controlled Hijaz, the east. Right next to Eilat to the southwest is the Arab town Taba. As an Egyptian-controlled town it is a sleepy little place with hotels and stuff like that. Before Camp David this whole shore was Israel's.

What happens absent Carter with a more Saudi-aligned Administration? Well, the Saudis might want in on a pipeline and highway from Taba up to the Med. Closest Med port-ish to Taba is Diqla, maybe Rafah. But really we are talking Gaza.

Imagine a treaty whereby Egypt is entirely ignored and Gaza, instead, gets Sinai, at least the eastern half of it with the Aqaba shore. Saudi money rushes northeast. North Africans on Hajj who aren't in flight give Port Said a miss and disembark at Diqla. The Med nations aren't (as) strangled by the Suez bottleneck. It would of course exist mostly to serve the Hijaz and Saudis and we'd expect it to be their outpost more than anyone's.

These days I doubt that Israel would mind much if there was a small Arab state between itself and Egypt, and if Gaza were offloaded upon that. Back in the middle 1970s, Israel maybe thought they could control this highway for however-long. Although that might just be Holden talking.

Over all it sounds like a wonderful opportunity for just about everybody except Egypt and (that generation of) Israel. You can see why Sadat and Begin would sign any deal to keep it from happening.

Erῑtha's scam

Linear B tablets are famously ... boring. They were written by accountants, after all. Everyone introducing these tablets to a wider audience is on the lookout for content that might be expanded into something that won't render A-level Greek students physically unconscious.

At least, so I hope: that Linear B even can be presented to our ep'hēboi. Some part of Miller's Ancient Greek Dialects should be taught to students if they are to move from Attic/Ionic to Homer, or beyond to - say - Sappho.

As to what in Linear B would be of any interest, these might deal with legal disputes (because there's a social element) or with the coastal garrison (because F@ YEAH, WAR). Others show up because of their place in the history of the decipherment. Some are here just because they list the Olympians and/or other gods from M-et-Me D'Aulaire. As I was reading Miller I recognised some old friends.

Tablet PY Eo 04, DMG 121.1 ff deals with land-tenure: Ai-ti-jo-qo *Aithioqos ("Burntface") owned some arable tracts [likely divided, from - we'll get to this], and leased one to E-ko-to *Hektor a θεhοῖο-δόhελος, an 'abd al-ilahi if you will. The type of lease is ὄνᾱτον, which means Hektor doesn't just sit there but is allowed to grow crops on it. In Latin this lease is usufruct.

That tablet, for Miller, introduces the more-interesting PY Ep 704, DMG 135.5 f, where the tenure is disputed. E-ri-ta is a hιέρεια priestess. E-ri-ta is like Aithioqos an owner of ἐτώνιον land in her own right, so presumably has lessors to work that as ὄνᾱτον. She claims further her "god" owns more (which of course means she'll get to use that land too). The god assuredly has δόhελ's - I think female servants in Pylos tended to weave linen, so these farmboys will be more Hektors. ("E-ri-ta" is usually transcribed "Erῑtha", on analogy from Homer's erῑthos, which itself means "day-labourer".) Problem for Erῑtha: an authority disputes that second plot, the δᾶμος. They agree that Erῑtha's minions have ὄνᾱτον rights there but only so much as they are shared, with the deme's rights.

I understand that some ink has been spilled over this already. Might Pylos' deme have evolved into a bipartite manor...?

Maybe not if Erῑtha could help it. I suspect the holy lady of running a fast-one on the people: since time immemorial.... Either way, we learn why the court keeps scribes - precisely to make that time, memorial. Back to Aithioqos, I'd advise him not to trust temple-slaves to work his land for long.

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Let the Mandaeans keep John

I last heard from Charles G. Häberl in 2013 with "Mandaeism in Antiquity and the Antiquity of Mandaeism", which is what it says it is: an argument for ranking the Mandaeans with authentic Late Antiquity, or not so late. Häberl is still at it, with "Mandaic and the Palestinian Question" (pdf) which I just stumbled into this morn.

Häberl questions how come Christians and Muslims get to claim John the Forerunner, and Mandaeans don't. (I'd butt in here that Mu'awiya amir in Damascus also claimed John, more so than he'd claimed Muhammad.)

"Mandaean is an Oriental Aramaic!" has been our touchstone since Nöldeke first noted that dialect's parallels with the Jewish Aramaic of the Iranian-run Irâq. Häberl doesn't question that; instead he points out - since we do have dialectic drift here - that this phenomenon in this dialect makes ciseuphratian loanwords easy to spot.

Häberl is aware of very early loanwords likely taken into Hellenistic Aramaic under the Seleucia. Some of them weren't even Greek at base; the Greeks could borrow Persian words same as the Aramaeans could, and as the Parthians for that matter. Yes there's a Mandaean word for "paradise". Just about every language has that word now. Häberl, whose focus for loans is on the occident, identifies such Iranaica to dismiss them. (Take a lesson from this guy, Dr Perrin.)

Given all that, Häberl locates evidence that, although the Mandaeans and the Bavli Jews represent survivals of a pre-Syriac linguistic Asorestan, they weren't the same community. At the least, they didn't share religious concerns.

Take the Cross. (So to speak.) The Jews reject the entire New Testament so don't care about how Jesus died nor if he even existed, and where they're aware of John (like Josephus Flavius was) they figure he's yet another false first-century prophet who ended up getting a lot of Jews killed. The Mandaeans, here, more agree with Sura 4. Mandaeans do care about the New Testament; they're struggling for the same theory of baptism independent of the Jewish Temple and circumcision, and the NT is simply the best source for that first-century Jewish theory. Where Mandaeans part ways, as gnostics, is that they believe salvation comes from true knowledge of the next world, not through G-d's intervention through Jesus' body and blood. So, to parallel good Semitic shared Christian Aramaic salib, they mock the Latin crux - and not the Greek stauros, nor anything Iranian.

That implies, at the very least, the early Mandaeans had some data on what the Principate was like for provincial residents before Caracalla's imperium. I doubt Trajan's sojourn in the Mesopotamía can account for all of it.

Also here are Hebraisms, hardly unexpected, but... not the local Jews' Hebraisms. Häberl reads mitgamla as Hebrew mitgimla, for being weaned. Aramaic Jews in the Irâq sequestered the gml root to Hebrew and didn't carry it to their spoken language which has Hsl. The gml is instead found with the Samaritans, in their Targum to Genesis 21:8; maybe with other Westerners.

More relevant to Mandaean dogma would be iaunaita. This, Häberl relates to the yawen of Psalms 40:3 and 69:3, where it is the "mire" from which the Psalmist calls for Divine aid. No Jew (or Samaritan) would say this of our entire world. But a gnostic might!

Häberl further cites the western loanwords about where J. J. Buckley's The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandæan History arranges the earliest "stratum" of Mandaean text. "The Mystery and the Book of the Great Ennosh" gets a callout for a number of archaisms, which Mark Lidzbarski had called back in 1925. (We don't have to discuss Lidzbarski's conclusion, that the Ginza had updated / translated this from Imperial Aramaic. We just care that the text we got is early.) The should-be-more-famous Book Eighteen, effectively the Late-Antique Mandaean Apocalyptic Chronicle, is also here inasmuch as it incorporates earlier material.

Overall I don't know that the Mandaean language owns a Western basis. I actually suspect Lidzbarski is closer to it: Mandaeans and Iraqi Jews together represent a holdover from Antiochus III who re-united all the Aramaic-speaking peoples (albeit under Greek). As various post-Biblical communities settled in Iraq, their Aramaics drifted together. As for the Mandaean abandonment of Jewish praxis, well... the Samaritans meanwhile had extricated their Torah from Jerusalem. I have no idea if the Elephantine "Jews" used a Torah or if they just kept a parallel Psalter like we see in the Demotic fragment. The Nile may even have had Jewish gnostics (although this is debatable). I'd not be surprised if the Mandaeans thought of using the Tigris as their miqvah a full century before John did so at the Jordan.

What we can say is that the protoMandaeans made common cause with John's memory. A good parallel in Christendom is how the Church of the East adopted Nestorius posthumously. Häberl, I think, is basically right.

Friday, October 8, 2021

You gotta

Late last month I noted as appendix to this post, 1-2% of MA cops resigned (Hanania knows math). United Airlines shed less than 1%. Probably won't see much higher numbers in the medical profession, either. My conclusion? Fascism works.

Expanding on that, WIRED presents the Civis study on convincing people to take The Jab. The short answer is: order them.

[INTERJECT 10/9: Civis is a soyboy club full of soymilk, Impossible Burger, and reddit. Sure. But . . .]

Reasoning anything with such people as run left of the bell-curve doesn't work, as hardly-a-Civis-author Theodore Beale has repeatedly pointed out; only rhetoric works. That means the people choose their rhetors: Tony Fauci or Candace Owen. More darkly, American Gen-X would rather listen to the guy who writes songs about how American boomers will face The Pillow. Beale is hardly shy about his motivation: generational genocide, by suffocation. Gen-X can pretend to agree with Beale's posts, but boomers shouldn't.

If we can't convince people, say Civis, we have to force them. The Cernoviches and all the crew of PJMedia will still whine about it, but - as Cerno points out - there will be no Civil War over it. Cernovich doesn't even advise resisting it; he's taken it himself. (Cernovich btw predicts a Mexican-Cartel model of regional protection rackets, but these will only survive by D.C.'s sufferance.) In short, the antivaxx movement cannot win and it won't win.

Which means there exists no point whingeing about it. Every complaint posted at PJM just serves to drive up clicks and futile arguments. What they do accomplish, is to mark PJM's posters not just as fools but as contemptible. When you say "I am your enemy and I am powerless", you make yourself a target for bullies; and these bullies will sleep very well at night after they torment you. And then you'll lose elections. (And you'll lose people. The Fauci Ouchie kills drr librulls at an order of magnitude less than what it prevents kills y'all unmasked American-flag wavers; drr librulls'll be right here in 2022 to smugly vote you down.)

PJM anyway does not have conservatives at heart. They are simply more dishonest than Beale. Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, and Stephen Green are content to watch you gasp your last, begging for the vaccine; if they direct more clicks to their sites (and, in Ed Driscoll's case, to Treacher's sites). Mark Tapscott hasn't even the integrity to work PJM for PJM's sake; he's only there to redirect its readers into his (Calvinist) cult.

The solution for the conservative movement, such as it is, is to give up this stupid and pointless fight against the best public health measure we have. And to avoid the grifters preying upon your ignorance and (somewhat deserved) paranoia. To the extent the Right objects to fascism (LOL) it should concentrate on something which does real harm, like "Equity" so-called.

Because you're going to take the jab anyway.

The ongoing decay of the Sîra

On the question did Muhammad exist I should sum up this blog's commentary on the official biography. This comes from the Muhammadan mab'ath / maghazî, often packaged together as "Sîra". Ehsan Roohi presents his take at the start of "Between History and Ancestral Lore" just now posted to Academia.edu; although I see the history of this scholarship a bit differently.

Maybe because we each cite different sources. I should confess here that I'm often that sort of "REF?!" weenie that Richard Hanania hates. But I see Hanania's point that in a 48 page essay, why should it bog itself down with every comment ever tangentially relevant to the topic. So please do consider whatever I bring here to be brought here in a friendly spirit. When I get annoyed by scholarship blithely ignoring relevant data I generally tell you; Roohi has not annoyed me so far.

John Wansbrough in the late 1970s presents a towering figure, and any summary of the Sîra's critical project must mention him. The project did not begin with him (more, below), and the man assuredly had overreached. But he bequeathed to the project the same tools as used in Biblical and classical scholarship; he gave the project its Design-Patterns, as we coders call them. One such tool is the topos, or trope: if the event is made up of clichéd material shared among similar events, and the core of it seems designed to explain something itself nebulous (like a Qurân passage), then the whole event dissolves into so much literary vapour.

After the Prophet's death, we have the example of the "Pact of 'Umar", probably a construct of the 'Umarid line including the man raised to the caliphate in the late 90s AH / 710s AD. This guideline for kitâbî law vied with legal compendia for that purpose as compiled by, for an important instance, Ibn Jurayj. 'Abd al-Razzâq's copyists brought this latter together with Ma'mar's maghâzî as appendices to 'Abd al-Razzâq's musannaf of sunna. The Pact won out, not because it was more authentic, but because it was more useful; along with its counter-tradition in the ur-Ashtinameh.

Within the mab'ath, the scholars we have chosen - Goerke, Schoeler, and Motzki foremost - tend to date the Sîra's narratives of Jewish (alternately, "mushrik") doctrinal opposition to Islam to the first century AH. Modern scholarship finds its basal sources in, so far, Muhammad Ibn Abi Muhammad and now Abu Mijlaz; in House of War I proposed the Zubayrids as important as well. These cast rhetorical devices from the Quran into narrative, or narratio as Wansbrough would put it.

Also to be found in this context is that weird event of the Satanic Verses. What we likely have with this one are late first-century storytellers expounding on the Quran to explain verses whose context they no longer owned, nor wanted to own.

Within the maghazî, we see an overlap in the scholars. The accounts of the raids (literally what ghazwa means; it's even become a Latinate loanword: razzia) are also dated to the first century. In these cases, I do not find where these events are tropes at base. These may actually have happened.

Also in maghazî is a subgenre where the Prophet confronts opponents at home. Since those Muslims (in the maghazî chronology) were on a war-footing these events are likewise violent. These stories, inasmuch as the Prophet is the archetype for the Believer, are what inspire state violence against religious minorities. These selfsame stories get mined by those outside Islam in opposition to that religion as a whole: The Truth About Muhammad being one modern example.

Since even before Wansbrough, not all scholars nor even Muslims have always accepted these sordid tales. Following 1973, when the Arab-Israeli conflict was hotter (and the Muslims' consensus was nominally on the Arab side), Israel made hay of the open Judenhass of the Muslim establishment, especially in Saudi. One particularly vicious maghazî-set episode, increasingly cited by extremists, involved the ethnic-cleansing of the Banu Qurayza tribe. Some Muslims had the integrity to feel embarrassment. Some of these have excused Banu Qurayza or waved it away, even if they should know better. But in 1976 one Walid Najib Arafat (best Arafat) set to refute it. Even some Orientalists have applied the brakes for that one.

Roohi last year questioned the Ibn Ashraf episode; this was family lore done to protect Muslims of Jewish descent, by casting those ancestral Jews as the Prophet's sicarii. With "Between History and Ancestral Lore" he expands his net: all those supposed assassinations come to us from family lore.

Roohi's work may well end up republished as a full book. (THAT book can cite Arafat and whoever else.) I look forward to buying it; I hope its publisher sets the price at a level accessible to a wider audience.

Thursday, October 7, 2021

The most potent potable

Monkey Island / Ischia has yielded up some more secrets. The indefatigable Mindy Weisberger writes about Cremation 168: the tomb of Nestor's Cup so-called.

Cremation was the Archaic Age standard (and for Homer) - not like the Mycenaeans, who buried their kings complete with (famous) gold masks, like the Egyptians. Quite a few ashes were interred in this tomb, all from adults. Earlier the thought was that a child was here, but in that case - why this cup?

This Geometric kotyla, stylistically from the late 700s BC, bears a Semitic-order Greek inscription. The alphabet is Euboean, which makes it the ancestor to our alphabet by way of Etruria. Its text makes reference to Homeric metre - and to an already-legendary Nestor with his famous wine-cup (eupoton poterion). The parallel is to The Iliad 11.632-637. Although the cup is pretty, as they said of my boi Alexander Pope - I question if it be Homer.

To put my cards on this table I consider The Iliad a conscious composition and "Homer" to be as good a name for its composer as any. I assume The Odyssey a sequel like Cypria is The Prequel. The Odyssey's Demodokos character is a certain deliberate nod to earlier stock - we'll get to him. The Odyssey has survived on account of not being an outright fanfic. Where that stock is not the Iliad itself; said stock may well be contemporary with our man of Halicarnassus. Or even earlier.

Back to this cup's text I find the Last Word in D Gary Miller's Ancient Greek Dialects and Early Authors, 145-6. Some of the text's flourishes are Homeric, such as ἵ̄μερος αἱρεῖ. However for Καλλιστέφανος (sic) Demodokos in Odyssey 8.267, singing in that Scheria / Phaeacia phantasia, will use εὐστεφάνου τ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης as will many imitators; although we do get Καλλιστέφανος for other goddesses. Note gender: also masculine. In light of the Dipylon vase: Greeks will be Greeks . . .

As paralleling so much the Archaic epic tradition, finding what sort of Greek composed this particular text is a trick. Miller does see some Eretrianisms through the poetic stock. So yeah: Euboean.

The eastern Med hosted a lively trade in Greek epic hexameter up to the tail-end of the Archaic Age. All Homer did was to cobble these tropes into the best (anti-)war poem we'll ever have. This might have been in reaction to Hesiod, who made up his own epic-style poems; or maybe Hesiod reacted to The Iliad.

So we may have a Euboean reference to The Iliad across the water, and associated Demodokos hymnody. Or, a reference to all Homer's antecessors. Or maybe this was a deliberately-archaising cup set to the kiln centuries later based on an earlier model - but it all looks very, very early to mine eyes.

Redwall redated

My work PC is on an interminable update / reboot cycle so I'm not even pretending to be productive this morn. So: in the meantime, I've found some Dark-Age news posted last night that I'd missed then . . .

Last year I dredged up a 2014 study about the Norse Mouse Expedition to Terceira and maybe St. Mary. (The Danish mice colonised Madeira; the other Azores' squeakers hail from western Hispania.) I went out on a limb that Terceira's intrepid Scandi varmints probably had help.

Pedro Raposeiro et al., "Climate change [drink!] facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times", doi 10.1073/pnas.2108236118. If I were Portuguese I'd have submitted this text in Icelandic rather than in English but hey. I also must protest this tendency to appeal to the peanut-gallery by noting muh climate in the paper's focus but, again - hey. We got a paper (well, an abstract) and we got it in a language I can read.

The lake Peixinho at the Pico island holds a record of charcoal and 5-beta-stigmasterol. That last is bullsh!t and Bockmist... literally, it's a compound from herbivore dung. The era of settlement was AD 700-850; there's more evidence from the 800s over at Corvo ("Crow Island") in the lake Caldeirão (which is what it says it is, a volcanic crater). Although these herders likely didn't use St. Bede's calendar.

So that AD 844 raid on Seville would have been about the last gasp of the former colony, most closely a stage-post. Running low on timber, mayhap. This may account for why there aren't physical remains: they dismantled their Germanic log lodges to build the last ships. Recommend a search for forges and hearths.

Island sheep survived to be spotted by the last Islamic Lishbûnatis. As of now, these islands Pico and Corvo have become our first candidates.

Looking earlier, I'm calling out as interesting that whatever rodents they now have in Pico and Corvo were not Scandinavian. How did Lisbon's little fuzzballs win? One notion is that those critters were there before the Norse got there. Might the Romans have been out there, from Lusitanian Olissipón? Tartessos? - More likely, that was Redwall: these first mice floated over in prehistory.

Next stop: the Danes from Madeira. I'm calling it that this outpost lasted longer, whacking Morocco AD 860ish.

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Teleologues

Although this guy is en no route to Heaven, there are some avowed Christians who might fare better. Tree Of Woe last Sunday summarised some post-Enlightenment thinkers he'd recommend.

This post shall restrict itself to the actual philosophers he calls out; e.g. Pinker's The Blank Slate is decidedly Enlightening, so we're not touching that further here. We are also not getting into whether T.o.W. is right that we need a wholly new religion. This looks a lot like Jim's Blog or (more coyly) V.D.: both arguing we should go back to one of our older ones, which both imply would be Byzantine in practice. We shall leave that question, as they say, to the philosophers.

Henry Stapp, following up on Quantum Theory and Free Will, suggests the Stoic logos for a universal Mind. Whether this incarnated itself upon our Earth is another question.

Also up is Roger Penrose for The Emperor’s New Mind, which (says T.o.W.) dovetails that. Penrose seems aligned with Eric Weinstein, both of whom Peter Woit endorsed back when he thought Weinstein was honest. (Whether you think Woit is honest is, again, another question.) In mathematics, Woit follows Penrose mainly for his twistor theory although Penrose has got awarded part of a Nobel for Physics. Branching out to a third direction, Penrose thinks the soul is quantum and not mechanical; T.o.W. would summarise it that mind is just a computer is false.

I had to look up Stephen Meyer and Thomas Nagel. Meyer back in 2013 tried to revive Behe and Dembski with Darwin's Doubt, but that book wasn't good. As of The Return of the God Hypothesis, though; Stephen Meyer has earned Shermer's respect. Nagel might have done better with Mind and Cosmos, arguing for teleology.

Teleology has been argued at least since the Greeks, who first stumbled onto the Anthropic Principle and came up with some creative notions around it, of which the Divine was one. The Multiverse was another which, of course, Woit and Penrose cannot stomach.

I stand by that we cannot have any of this in standard biology classes, but... I've also long promoted teaching creationism as history-of-philosophy, since finding out about David Sedley in 2006ish.