Perovskite update, III

Checking in on the perovskite beat: vacuum-based production, perovskite-silicon tandem cells. Theoretical efficiency is 43% so, that's their target; the Chinese think they've broken the 33% barrier already. The local degree-mill has arguably the best sum-up, if you ignore their "carbon!" nonsense.

Which is causing Erkan Aydin on the tandem side to ask: why we're not seeing them yet. It seems that manufacturers are not updating their factories to use the same technique which has offered such wonderful marvelous results in the laboratories, nor vice-versa. Labs use solution-based deposition; factories still use vapour. The labs aren't researching the vapour-based techniques (which cost a lot, because it's built for scale), and also aren't scaling up their solution-based option.

The research-path to sorting these out appears to be vapour, like the factories do, so fixing the labs.

The Fatimids as liberators

Somehow I missed Jeremy Johns' excellent article on the Palermo Koran, as I was (perfunctorily) researching the Maliki takeover of Spain. The same madhhab - actually a cult, out West - took over Sicily. It happens both Spain and Sicily were taken from the same place, North Africa; and back "home", the locals might not have been so quick to shift.

Hallmarks of the Malikiya were the Warsh Qurân of the Madina... and the dogma that this be ghayr makhlûq / laysa bi-makhlûqin. The Qurân if Divinely-created is a Thing; suras 6 and 13 hail God as creator of everything. If this text is not Created, then the Qurân is inextricable from Him.

This MS's ghayr rejects a "heresy" as assuredly as the Dome rejected shirk, there and then the local Melkite Christianity. That 'Abbâsî-era heresy had been the Mutazila of caliphs Ma'mun and Vathek. Johns teaches us that when al-Mutawakkil overturned this policy, the Aghlâbid vicegerency out West kept it on. Their mosques did not include ghayr makhlûq.

But the (Warsh) codices of the Malikiya, like the Palermo MS, injected it. It also appears that, as in Spain, some amirs bowed to them.

The locals - looking at Berbers especially, who still had some Haruris out in the bush, but also leftover Christians - interpreted the Malikiya as totalitarian tyranny, which it was. But in Islam exists a third option. Where Sunnis like the Aghlâbids are suasible to Sunni arguments, the Shî'a are not. Some Africans rallied around one such sect, led by a selfproclaimed descendate of Imam Ismail (not counted as Imam by most Shî'a today). These "Fatimids" (Ibn Khaldûn considered them frauds) attacked the North African cities and, er, won. Then they took Egypt.

The Shî'a regime couldn't take Spain (which simply raised their Umayyads back into the caliphate) and it seems they didn't have Sicily either.

Why the Emperor prostrated himself

James Bogle brought to OnePeterFive a Catholic take against dropping those two bombs on Japan, on Nagasaki in particular as it was something of a holy city for us. The argument is lazy, at best.

One annoying critique, or canard, concerns the terms of surrender, which we've already handled. There is however a challenge not yet addressed on this blog: whether bombs even were worth it. It occurs to me that this is the necessary background into what induced Japan to soften its terms.

Bogle points out that bombing costs money. It cost a lot more in the early 1940s, because most bombs... missed. If they didn't miss the chemistry posed limits on how much damage they did and on how far they were effective.

For various reasons, both sides figured that they could make it up in volume. First Schiklgruber ordered the shift of the Battle of Britain to the Blitz - against bombing RAF and toward bombing Coventry. This did not make that side of mine ancestry any more inclined to swap out the blue for black. Then upperclass twits like Lord Cherwell figured that since they'd started it, we should do the same for Dresden. Dresden did have some military value - but mostly outside where the people were living. So that bombing didn't work either. (Cherwell was born a "Lindemann", so maybe felt he had something to prove.)

We are in agreement that carpet bombing was an expensive mistake. But what if it could be made cheaper?

The true constraint on bomb damage, as Bogle knows, isn't chemistry. It's physics: it's mc². Assemble enough nonchemical ordnance, and that frees up bombers to do conventional work. Like guarding those convoys, or knocking out carriers and the Yamato. Blasting civilian concentrations remains a mistake, but a less expensive mistake.

We could also cite Malcolm Gladwell's probable-best book, The Bomber Mafia. Precision bombing - "smart bombing" - was meanwhile lowering the cost of hitting those military targets.

Now we're ready for the actual argument. On to why Fogle even poasted what he poasted. (I mean, besides that he doesn't read here, and, yeah, I'd understand why trads might not love every poast I poast...)

I actually don't think that Fogle holds any brief for the Axis (as some "trads" held at the time), especially not its Shinto side; any more than the Pope at the time did. Likewise it's risible that Fogle has been secretly rooting for the eventual victor of the war to gobble up Hokkaido too, which he would have (make the Mosir, Ainu again?).

I can only conclude that Fogle's was an exercise in pandering. He's singing The Very Sorry Song. He's making his (lame) argument to show the Japanese establishment he's one of the good 'uns. Then maybe-just-maybe Japan will be more inclined to set up Nagasaki as a Catholic site.

I grant to the Nihonjin more credit to their IQ.

Our haftorah by the tomb

I was pondering Sheol, this week of all weeks, and stumbled upon a synagogue over at wiki and in Holešov, with a Biblical passage. But it wasn't from the Torah. It was יְהוָ֖ה מֵמִ֣ית וּמְחַיֶּ֑ה מוֹרִ֥יד שְׁא֖וֹל וַיָּֽעַל׃ (not Czech) 1 Samuel 2:6; an extract from the Song of Hannah vv. 1-10 which their Tanakh calls a "prayer". Was it always in Samuel's book?

In this Jewish year, apart from inscriptions, Hannah's song will be cantillated in haftarah / haftorah - rather, was. It may not be half the Torah; but it is at least half the Chumash, worthy of regular recital alongside Torah. Various Jews tell interested parties it features on the first day of their year. It may as well be half the Torah!

How long has this been going on? The incantation bowl "Moriah Bowl II" features 1 Samuel 2:2 / Psalm 86:17. I suppose that is Cyrus Gordon, "Magic Bowls in the Moriah Collection", Orientalia 53 (1984), 220-41 although JSTOR isn't letting me in there.

Around here Emanuel Tov reported that vv. 2 and 6 both differ in the Old Greek "Reigns" (including Lucian - so, maybe Old Latin, and/or Sahidic). Syriac, like Targum-Jonathan before and Vulgate on the side, is a new translation from our MT. Dr Tov discussed these versions, but mostly looking around these two verses, to vv. 1, 8-10; he punted v. 2 and didn't comment on v. 6 (Κύριος θανατοῖ καὶ ζωογονεῖ / DMS mortificat et vivificat and that usual translation of Sheol to "in [Hades'] Inferno", I wouldn't even count as variant). As it happens the song's versions aren't in the same context. In this the infamous 4QSam^a presents a hybrid of preLXX and preMT; which clearly did not catch the attention of either tradition, any more than Moriah II did. Meanwhile our Church Fathers included it in Odes 3.

INTERJECT 3/31 Then there's the Song's internal content, preElohistic, even in its LXX Vorlage hence Κύριος [<*YHW/H].

This tells us that Hannah's Song was important to the Jews from a preBiblical age. Overall it is a song against enemies: nobody has contested v. 4. That bowl even attached it to bellicose Psalm 86. You could say that the Song started out as a haftorah... perhaps on Psalm 86 for some, but ending up in the Book Of Samuel on account of v. 5. By the time protoSamuel joined the Reigns corpus in the Deuteronomic History, the practice of cantillating this song was firmly established. Passive-voice; on account the Christians were likely doing that too.

You would have crucified him too

Earlier today I dealt with a couple of lies - and by pre-dating those posts, technically I committed two of mine own (OPSEC and all) - so, tonight, I shall deliver the Truth. Andrew Torba comes close to it, announcing for tabsheer that old redundancy that Christ is King.

Where my brother in Christ sets feet slightly off-track is where he concentrates on the Jews as Christ's killers. He veers into abject haeresis when he says you cannot pick and choose which parts of God’s Word you want to defend and believe in. Self-contradiction in fact: Torba has picked 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15 in preference to Saint Mark. That's not God's Word; it's probably not even Paul's.

The core of truth behind the hostility against Judaism is that when God looked upon this world, observing the civilisations upon it, He could have chosen to make His point in Egypt at the time of the Ramessides, or China under the Han, or Persia under Darius I. He did not. He chose Judaea, and not even that of the Hasmonaeans but the subject province under the scheming overlordship of Sejanus.

We're not even here to answer, why then and there. We are here to ask ourselves, if Christ had appeared under Torba's possible ancestors, the Turks, preaching His message - would the great khagan have treated Him any better? how about Slavs?

How about the Cherusci under Arminius? Were the Germans at the time any better than the Jews? (Are they now?) What would shah Darius have made of a pretender to the House of Babylon? We don't even need ask him; he told us all an earful at Behistun.

No: God chose the Jews, at least to set the stage for His passion-play. For that, we get to bear Christians' blame (and Muslims').

If we are to pray for the salvation of the Jews, I agree it will come through Christ; but it will not come through Torba.

Rennin

Rennet is used by cheesemakers (blessed be they) to curdle milk. Vox Day and other members of that side of the 'Web have noticed that most rennet is now a GMO. By Pfizer. BOOO

Er, except that this has been going on since 1990. Paul Shapiro recalls the 1980s movement toward less-cruelty against domestic animals, which forced food-producers to find alternatives. Once we got those alternatives, like fermentation-produced chymosin / rennin, nobody cared that this was GMO except Pfizer-haters, on the far fringe of Big Granola. Then came the 2019 lableak. Note that this leak wasn't even from Pfizer's lab; all Pfizer did was create a safe and effective vaccine against it.

What smarter nonleftists used to say in the 1990s, to the extent it was even on the radar (it wasn't on mine) was that synthetic rennet was a huge win for vegetarians (like me this month). We now didn't have to worry about animals being harmed for the product. At least - not as much; we take victories against cruelty where we can find them.

Not that Theodore Beale ever cared about cruelty, or basic honesty.

Having scotched one talking-point, I now have to ask if Pfizer still holds the "90%" chymosin monopoly we're being quoted. Shapiro lists some competitors here: some of them powerful (like Dupont) some smaller ("organic"?); some not even using chymosin. At least animal rennet is no longer the monopolist.

Yes, hash-Shem was in the Old Testament

Vox Popoli has been laundering a load of disinformatsiya lately, so tonight this blog will address some of that. For now: The YHWH word did not appear in any Old Testament text until the Masoretic Text of 1000AD!. Quite a take.

This take is false.

It should have been debunked in 2005 when R.H. at "remnantradio" posted it. I suppose we must do that here - so, Vridar: Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh. (Godfrey posted that all of two days ago.) Before AD 1000 we could look to "Jehovah" in Saint Jerome's text, hardly a name mah boi would make up for himself; that doesn't really dispute R.H.'s point but it does show that the MT is no product of AD 1000. For the Tetragrammaton being treated as a nomen sacrum: that pesher on Habbakuk 1-2 called "1QpHab" used the Canaani "palaeoHebrew" script for the Name in the main text, with circumlocutions in the tafsîr.

At least 1QpHab was published in AD 1951; R.H. is aware of such Dead Sea scrolls. R.H. is further aware that the northwestern Semitic kingdoms in the times of Judah and Israel were rife with theophoronyms, like "Hazael" among the Canaanites and Aramaeans. Israel had names ending -yw where Judah, speaking almost the same language, had -yhw. This is, like, Biblical Archaeology 101 so it's good that R.H. knows it. R.H. also knows that the Jews' sacralisation of the name came later.

R.H.'s rambling shouty 2005 mess implies - I cannot say "argues" - that the Septuagint came first and that the M.T. (and S.T.!) were translations therefrom. I don't know that even such Gmirkinites as at Vridar claim that. To that point: early Greek manuscripts of the Prophets and Job bear the Four Letters, in Canaani.

As for Christ - that our Lord avoided some Helleno-Aramaic vocalisation of "YHWH" puts him alongside that commentator upon Habbakuk. The Gospels had Jesus say "kyrie" which just translates adon[ai]. Jesus (or, if you're Godfrey or Carrier, Jesu's inventor) assuredly had the Bible in Hebrew and in its (Aramaic) targums. That Jesus used "Father" also is notable; but not unknown to Jewish prophets such as Jeremiah, Malachi, and trito-Isaiah.

It is difficult to tease out what R.H. was arguing, or if he even holds any of those positions today. Overall I catch the scent of an essay which was much more sure of itself back when it was, er, wrong; and later, as facts trickled in, it got revised... and revised again. R.H. could either admit he was on the wrong trail and delete the thing, or he could puke what he had onto remnantradio's badly-formatted website with le IT JUST IS, OKAY wojack-face.

American Christians, amirite. Sigh.

Quantum gravity constrained

Another of those article-headings I dislike came in. "Scientists on the hunt" at the mainline; blah blah question mark over at Science Daily. This one is about neutrinos being affected by quantum gravity. NOT

The neutrinos most people want come from, like, supernovae or quasars or neutronstar-mergers. Most neutrinos are simply created right above us when a hypervelocity ion ("cosmic ray") whacks our atmosphere. Luckily these hit us from all directions so, if the detector is somewhere nobody else lives - like our south pole - it can pick up neutrinos from through our earth. Even potentially the NORTH pole. Tom Stuttard's team pondered if, over 12700 kilometers, neutrinos might experience quantum gravity to the degree they could see it.

After a lot of blah blah and 300000 neutrinos later, the article finally allows Stuttard to admit the fact that we didn’t see them [effects]. It seems 12,700 km is insufficient km to notice a quantum gravity effect. That's... something, I concede. Doesn't really merit the headlines tho'.

Where would be a better producer of atmospheric neutrino? Saturn from the perspective of Mimas' orbit? A floater atop Uranus? Maybe that's where the next experiment needs setting up.

starquaKe

Epsilon Indi A at 3.6 pc owns a superSaturn at 11 AU - thrice Jupiter mass; also that browndwarf binary (Ba/b) out at 11600 AU.

Projected temperature of the planet, at 4 Gy, is 200 K so is an infrared opportunity - that is, Webb. The planet's orbit is eccentric. This leapyearday another reading picked up a ten-Jovian mass, maybe a second planet.

ε Indi itself just made news for quaking. This was not spotted by the JWST. Rather: the ESPRESSO spectrograph, mounted at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). The team, headed by Tiago Campante and Bill Chaplin, hit the stellar temperature at 4500 K (we're 5500). The quake stands to get us a look at the star's innards. Constraining this star stands to help constrain main-sequence K stars... everywhere.

Chaplin reports a discrepancy between the predicted and observed sizes. I didn't know that K stars had been predicted wrong - we're right next to one, orbiting Alpha Centauri, so I thought we knew more about them. But maybe our observations are outdated and/or distorted by the main α.

Shinfa

The Longhorns came to graze at the Atbara source Shinfa, northwestern Ethiopia. They were looking at 72kBC. They found the Toba layer.

The map is in conflict with what I see in Wiki. Atbara is not the Blue Nile. Atbara goes to... Atbara; the Blue Nile goes to Khartoum upstream. There've been dams, in the meantime. And anarchy in the region, namely Tigray; and in good parts of Sudan over the border.

Back to 72kBC: the Texans think that the Nilotes here experienced a drought. This led to easier fishin' ... at the truncated waterholes. So they taught themselves archery to go after smaller and quicker game they couldn't trap and weren't going to (what was left of) the waterholes.

Also suspected is migration. These are not our ancestors; for one, our ancestors may not have learnt archery (the New World had to learn this independently). So the Texans (must) speculate: migrations east of this watershed, where they haven't done digs.

Upload #211: can I get a witness

Since the last upload I returned to how "Sodom's Elephant" was dating sura 105. Since I've been on an Arab-poet kick, I pondered if we could find any of that as might be relevant. I got as far as the poetry in Jahiz' book on animals, and in Ibn Hisham's relation from Ibn Ishaq. Then I gave up. I'm yanking that project.

We need a project on that poetry. To follow up on W1, I propose to explore the "Songs of the Meccan Hanifa".

I've also tweaked "Without Peer" (bringing in Jeffery's "Foreign Vocabulary"), "Jesus' Arraignment", and "Daniel's Main Points".

Madrassa.

Fusion pulse rocket

Whilst the Saturnbros are awaiting Direct Fusion from Princeton, a few days ago various outlets have been relaying some press-releases about the FireStar from RocketStar. Where Direct Fusion is NERVA-ish, FireStar is Fusion-Enhanced Pulsed Plasma Electric Propulsion - so, more Orion-ish. The (boron) fusion is happening in its afterburner.

As Pixy pointed out yesterday, the device does spray ionising radiation all over the place. Keyword, in his Kiwi dialect: "ionising"; that is: not neutrons. (Yay boron!) Ions, we can handle, with magnets.

Now, I don't think anyone will allow RocketStar to use this to get us off of Earth, for the usual test-ban reasons. But limited Orion above the Van Allens might not face the same regulatory hurdles.

So first we need to get this stuff up there.

The excruciator

We Latins talk about "excruciating" pain, as did Harry Potter readers when they were still allowed to do that. I'd figured it was a mediaeval figure of speech. So I was surprised to find cruciaverunt in Revelation 11:10, to translate the annoyance (ἐβασάνισαν) which the two prophets caused... to sinners (Quoniam hi duo Prophetae cruciaverunt eos...). When did Latins start using crucio so casually?

I can firstly reassure my readers, my boi Jerome dindu-nuffin. Vetus Latina precedes the venerable doctor here.

One such (pre-)text can be had from the Gigas. This "giant" codex is mostly Vulgate, excepting "Laodiceans" - and Acts, and the Revelation. These latter two are not in Vulgate form. Vogels' intro to the 1920 edition argued for Gigas as preserving the V.L.; we now call that texttype, "I". Vogels deemed Vulgate a revision of that. In fact Jerome's quotes from the book are from "I". (One wonders if Jerome even did the edits or if his students did.)

The Vulgate, and one presumes "I", translate the Sinaiticus ℵ/01 - so far, so Nestle-Aland. Vogels p. 169 has cruciaverunt just like Vulgate does.

I don't know if veterior is a word so... is there a senior, to "I"? I looked at Victorinus and did not find that he'd commented on verse 11:10. I don't own Gryson's reconstruction of Ticonius; nor Gumerlock's translation. Some commentaries act like this verse isn't even there, like the Irish De enigmatibus ex Apocalypsi Johannis.

I do have Augustine. Augustine's 11:10 reads the exact same as Vulgate's. He cited from the same text VL 74 cites in parallel, given that VL 74 is a lectionary which restricts itself to 20:11-21:7. Augustine depended also on Ticonius - famously. (I always did say the Donatists were dyotheletes avant le lettre.) Primasius ("C") hasn't been edited lately (and the MS is unreachable) but at least we have Migne: cruciaverunt. Mind: Primasius used Augustine.

So the earliest notes of ApJohn 11:10 I can find are: that translation of ℵ's texttype called "I", and that text behind Augustine(>Primasius) and VL 74 - probably also ℵ. The questions I have for 11:10, are: (1) was this verse even in the earliest Latin translations, (2) where's the first mention with or without cruciaverunt, (3) was every Greek instance ἐβασάνισαν?

Assembling a galaxy

I expressed a lack of enthusiasm earlier this week for the latest scheme to rid us of dark matter. It pulls the universe's age too early. Any real determination must, I think, first constrain the age of our own galaxy.

To that end, we'd pick apart where our galaxy has ingested other galaxies - like the Kraken, 11 Gya. We now may have the merger which shared it all, a billion or two years before that: Shakti and Shiva.

As an aside, if dark matter does exist, here are yet more constraints. On the other hand... they may have constrained that it does exist (which, for one, Milgrom et al. failed to prove for Modified Newton).

Pharaoh Ishmael

Ahmed Bahador's "Essay on the Prophecies Respecting Mohammed as Contained in Both the Old and the New Testament" laid out the case for Islam as the inheritance from Abraham. Sha'i ben-Tekoa counterargues that, from a Jewish perspective. I predict that ben-Tekoa will convince zero Muslims.

Ben-Tekoa points out that Jews hold genetics from the mother. He traces ancestry back to the Ark. There, he has a problem. The impartial judge would admit that these three sons of Noah had wives, which women they did not share in common. If these women are so important to The Dên Of Noah ... what are their names?

For Noah himself, ben-Tekoa must read "Noah's wife"; or, perhaps, "Umm Sarah", like Jubilees (for her birthname, Naamah seems popular). For Shem he'd read "Shem's wife". On topic of Jubilees, this one is big on supplying the names which Torah omits: the mother of Shem's children, here, was Sedeqetelebab.

Ben-Tekoa's next problem that he does not accept Jubilees, despite its existence as a Hebrew text (this or that chapter aside) at the Dead Sea. He dismisses 1 Maccabees as "Koine" where it was, in fact, Hebrew too and has been made (great in) Hebrew again. (The additions to Esther don't look Christian, either.) A kafir of Jubilees must fall back upon the Torah.

The Torah has patriarchal origins and that is why, unlike Jubilees, it doesn't bother with all the womens' names - these were not matriarchs. Islam, like the Mormons, has taken a different reading than is done among the Jews.

A Jew would shift his stance, then, upon "the oral Torah". I concede - this existed, supplying lore to preQumranian text like Jubilees (and Tobit), despite such text's heresies (like incest). But when did this Tradition exist? Yonatan Adler elsewhere is saying the very Torah didn't exist before Ptolemy I Lagides. The quotidian praxis of what the Maccabees have dubbed "Judaism", and the oral lore around that praxis, would be datable to ... 1 Maccabees.

Some apologists for Jewish tradition will include the preservation of the text. I hope Ben-Tekoa does not take this to the same conclusion as we Catholics do for our own New Testament, because this just takes us back to those Ptolemies. To such apologists: Jews preserved a Torah. The Samaritans and the Greek Jews of Egypt preserved recognisable Tawrât also; mostly inferior, yes, but not in all places, which is why biblical-critics still get paid. (and as transmitters i'll put up, say, the greeks' jeremiah against the masoretic scramble any day, come @ me bro)

As for Ishmael as a Hamite: I'll spot him one and not mention the ancestry of Zipporah. I'm more concerned with Moses' whole tribe, that of Levi. This tribe in general proliferated with Egyptian names. Manetho came right out and said it, to Ptolemy of Mendes: Egyptian heretics, not Jews, ran the Tabernacle. The Banu Levi were at least as Egyptian and "Hamite" as are the Banu Ishmael.

In short, Ishmaelite Arabs' reading of this text is at least as valid as is Ben-Tekoa's and if he doesn't like it, too bad for him.

Esther's first revision

The book of Esther was cited in our New Testament - for as long and wherever 1 Clement was copied. Jesus, Paul, and the Evangelists didn't use it (although maybe a narrative trope or two got into that Herod and John story). The Jews of Judaea didn't use it either. But Esther was wildly popular out east and, well, the orientals did the Talmud. So a local Jewish story in Susa became the basis of Purim, in Esther 9: bringing into Judaism the Achaemenid Bonfire-Night, Herodotus' Magiphonia.

Esther took on many accoutrements to become worthy of the pious west of Babylon. As far as I know, 1 Clement was the first to cite the story. if he had it in Greek, he had an expanded version as notes her entreaty to God, still in force among the Orthodox [UPDATE 4/1 now I've reread it]. Josephus, later and more-proudly Jewish, also accepted it.

David Frankel thinks Esther was already being expanded in Hebrew. Esther was not intended to support Achaemenid brutality against rebels - at first. But as a rule throughout any empire, the saecular court could expect the "exile" population to support him over the natives and his own priesthood. So in Susa, Jews supported the shah against Elamites and the magoi. In Esther's text, was how they did it. Outright Achaemenid proclamations made it out to Elephantine up the Nile and even, at home, into Ezra's book. [Clement has nothing of these calendrical details.]

Later on at home, one imagines that most western Jews should have soured on Empire, in its Italian form. But, well... Josephi gotta Joseph.

The Awza'iya and free-will

Among the letters which Michael Cook presented in Early Muslim Dogma was a risala against the free-will doctrine espoused among the Mutazila. This was ascribed to no less than 'Umar al-Thani the caliph. If we wanted the full text, we of little Deutsch had to find van Ess' German (somewhere) and run it through Google Translate. Belatedly, Sean Anthony has supplied us with a new translation into English.

The letter is a faaake. It is at least falsely ascribed; it quotes a Kufan hadith from al-A'mash which 'Umar shouldn't have known, and four (out of seven) also transmitted by al-Awza'i (AD 707-74). One tradition looks like something Awza'i cooked up himself, given it is first heard from his lips.

My suspicions were already raised by the letter's citations from suras like 23 and 44, which I deem late.

Awza'i happened to be an Umayyad diehard. It's within possibility that something like this Letter went out from caliph Hisham's court or maybe by authoritarian dissidents against al-Walid II or Yazid III. Awza'i would have been in his middle thirties, which is young, but not too much so for a "young-turk" intellect (especially if he left his own name off it!). And I don't have a problem with a full Quran, even an "'Uthmanic" text, in Hisham's time.

But this letter is not 'Umar's. The ascription to him would have suggested itself to one appealing to a wider audience, 'Umar being more popular than Hisham and also from an earlier time.

BACKDATE 3/21.

Dark matter under question

We keep ruling out candidates for dark-matter. One remaining support for its existence as something, anything is the 13.7 billion year universe. If it were, oh, 26.7 Gy then it wouldn't be needed. Rajendra Gupta, supporting the older universe, is dismissing dark-matter.

Gupta combines how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time (covarying coupling constants) and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance (tired light).

I'd still like to know why unseen mass is inferrable for some galaxies (like ours) where not for others. And I'd like to know where are the stars or whitedwarfs in our Milky Way older than 14 Gy. Last time we looked at candidates (which were too light for main-sequence), these were too young. Light losing energy over distance suggests it experiences time, like neutrinos. This doesn't seem Einstein-compliant, but maybe it experiences spacetime; consider, it has momentum without mass. Or does each photon spread out over distance, like groups of photons in reciprocal-square?

UPDATE 4/2: More darkmatter not found.

Dioscorus

When we compare Ephesus I, Ephesus II, and Chalcedon - we see vast differences in how they are remembered. The mob ruled Ephesus I. The mafia ran Ephesus II. As for Chalcedon, the Empire oversaw it - but did not direct it. As Ch happened only two years after E2 - it is through Ch, how E2 went down in History - as the monster of Dioscorus of Alexandria. Nobody contested the content of Chalcedon's minutes; but Chalcedon effected an overhaul of E2's minutes. Michael Gaddis takes Chalcedon at its face. Should he?

Critiquing these latter events, Volker Menze is pleading patriarch Dioscorus' case. Colin Behrens has a review. Menze presents an excellent case for stripping Cyril of sainthood among the Copts, let alone the rest of us. But Dioscorus will probably not be sainted anytime soon, himself.

Cyril corrupted his Church toward the aim of ruling the Church abroad. He had also bankrupted it. Dioscorus was elected to clean house; Menze claims he did this, Behrens is less sure. As far as politics abroad, he submitted himself to Theodosius II. This, I gather, because he had no choice; Behrens seems correct here, that our man was less a fighter of corruption and more a cats-paw in Imperial consolidation.

Dioscorus was, at least, sincere. In the circus which was that second Ephesian Council, Menze presents Dioscorus as not the ringleader. He was rather the emperor's "henchman" - one among many. When Imperial policy changed, under Marcian, the Chalcedonians couldn't (yet) blame the prior emperor, and didn't feel up to blaming all Theodosius' very willing stooges. Some were still popular at home. Dioscorus was the most-prominent Robber of that Council, still willing to defend it at Chalcedon. The new emperor now had what he needed: a fall-guy. He got Dioscorus' surviving allies to pin it all on him.

BACKDATE 3/19

The stiffening of knees

TheTorah posts about prostration in Judaism. Once upon a time Judaism was an Oriental religion; Orientals do kowtow. The Romans and Greeks had a tradition of personal or at least familial/political independence. Upon taking the Orient, first the Greeks and then the Romans accepted some Oriental practice. Some Orientals under their sway bent the knee to them. Others figured they should reserve this to G-d.

Judaism went in the other direction - the Western direction, yea even unto their Lord. How they went, is the debate. Jews in the Iranians' Eraq - like Hidyab / Adiabene - maintained a culture of kowtow, for more practices. Western Jews abandoned kowtow; one presumes that so did Samaritans.

We Catholics, thoroughly Western and Latin, have the priest kowtow only on Easter and Christmas as far as I know. Maybe monasteries do more. The congregation doesn't do it; we've designed our pews not to allow it. We do kneel and bow; but in Arabic that is only ruku', not sajda.

So - um. Arabic! Their religious sites were masgida in Aramaic transcription as witnessed in Greek and Georgian, from the start. "Place of prostration"; not "marki'a". If Western Jews weren't doing sajda and Western Christians were doing it only sparingly - whence the idea?

I suspect the Muslims inherited it from the Yemen, maybe that Eraq. Yemen had a Sasanian occupation, when it wasn't under the thumb of Axsum. Neither of these nations were keeping up with Roman or Greek fashions.

Scalable corn-monitoring

As we're learning about farming in space, one issue is how to check on the farms when humans aren't present. So: Ying Diao and Andrew Leakey.

The breakthrough here is a new sensor, with transmission; from the world of wearable electronics.

Near-term, we can have a satellite space-farm without humans at all. This would tell us how plants grow in space, before any humans have to rely upon them. Longer-term, these sensors should increase the ratio of plants-per-farmer. Every gram counts.

Right now it's corn but later this is needed for kale and other vegetable "superfoods" which astronauts might want to eat.

The whistle

The skinsuit of Matt Drudge isn't letting Elon have his W (even with-reservations). It links (I won't) to Obama mouthing-off about "hrrr fix Erf first before Mars". Classic Obama gaslighting, and a sideswipe against Musk through his statements rather than his achievements; nobody serious is talking Mars. For Starship we're talking orbit. We need orbit now.

(Between here and Mars, maybe asteroids: here's some dark-and-stony, en route to Jupiter. Maybe the Moon: although the Lunar Pole isn't looking great.)

Drudge's main link on that day was that de-Kessler'd spacejunk might cut our magnetic field, beyond the usual metal worries. This, from a nonreviewed paper; it may as well be a blog. Drudge is gambling for political winds as will take this space junk to publication. I fear Drudge is (politically) correct, now that he's pushed it to media attention. Journals will be fighting over each other to put it out, and nobody wants aligned with "the Alt Right".

I doubt Obama's statement is even meant to be taken seriously. It's a whistle for his army of Organiserz. They're the ones doing the lawfare down South Texas. It's a message to his holdovers in the "Biden" Administration as well.

The bird in flight

Today's Space Day. Hope we all got up early to watch the 7 AM CST launch (with potential fireworks) - which happened more like 8:30. Our Boulder-Denver area is blizzardy and under a Xfinity / power warning so this poast has been prepared in advance . . .

The launch of Starship into space went without fireworks. For the SuperHeavy it went without... relit engines; and the Starship r.u.d.'d over the Indian Ocean before orbit. I hope neither poses problem for the FAA; the Plan B was to splash into the Gulf and/or the World-Ocean, so here "and" is the keyword.

Americans are experiencing a race between freedom (misnamed "capitalism") and corporatism, the latter being done in Japan and China. Or committed, a Japanese or Chinese "Milei" might say.

Foiling Muaddib

Last Wednesday was noted that the Arrakis Strait cannot be used for communications no more. I was pondering if the Saudis could just run cable across the Empty Quarter. But also, satellites; especially if we can put larger cargo in orbit for cheaper.

We still have problems in shipping but I am hoping that supply-chains can be improved by making more Stuff, at-home; and by mutual trade with bordering and friendly neighbours. I leave to my readers which candidate for President, the former or the incumbent, owns the better record on that, over their respective four years.

EP Sanders' legacy

Ancient Jew Review is posting memoria to EP Sanders. Annette Reed is talking the Second Temple, wherein Sanders forced other scholars to consider Judaism as actually practiced. Matthew Novenson dilates upon Judaism as justified at the time - whether we are fair to call it "legalism".

Sanders' findings appear to have crossed over to researchers into Second Temple Judaism itself, such that now Yonatan Adler can doubt that the average Judaean monotheist even practiced this until the Hasmonaeans. It also appears that Sanders' intent was not to discredit Judaism but to defend it against the bugaboo of his time, namely the 1950s-era Sunday-School canard that Judaism was stagnant and text-based.

For the biblical-maximalists, Sanders forced Joslin McDowell to read Jewish sources, and to disseminate their existence among the Christians. McDowell, no antisemite himself, judged the best form of Judaism - Conservatism as of the late 1970s - as an imperfect Christianity. He might even have been right.

Sanders' influence, I think, went a bit far, to introduce modern canards into Sunday-Schools (thank you, Shelby Spong). Inasmuch as Gospel attacks on "Pharisees" read like strawmen, Saint Mark is in the company of the Rabbinic sages themselves. Sadducees existed, as did Qumran, and Samaritans, and Shammai and Ben Peraḥya deep in the rabbinic community itself. If you can read the Damascus Document and not immediately think "he's a legalist" then I cannot help you.

Also I wonder if Sanders (accidentally) ended up inspiring modern Unz-style antiJudaism anyway. His work gave a second-wind to the Muslims, who figure that the Jews misinterpreted G-d's Torah, even falsified it; Unz's antisemites have read Vridar and correctly interpret an alliance between biblical-minimalists and quranic-maximalists. Christians thereby got into the Toledoth and Paul Schäfer's "Jesus in the Talmud". Some of those reading all this got further into Talmud, at least as summarised in Shulhan Aruch. Again: Judaism as actually practiced, not Judaism as "logically-" determined (by goys) nor Judaism as Spong and, perhaps, Sanders would wish it to be.

The effects of Egyptian dialect on Late-Antique literature

One issue as is had in "Syriac" studies is dialect. This is acute when people start talking about the Qurân and Islamic literature generally, where it takes in loanwords as are Aramaic. Which Aramaic, Alphonse Mingana's readers should have shouted at him. Palaestinian Aramaic flutters around the edges of the essays in Christmas in the Koran but otherwise little consistent and serious has been done on these dialects until, I think, van Putten in 2020ish. Dialect also affects how the Christian Bible entered into Aramaic, and if a Jewish Bible preceded it; Joosten has been working this angle.

Anyway: the Copts. This blog doesn't recommend oecumenical dialogue with Miaphysites. However there do exist in Egypt, Catholic brethren as well, and some pay respect to the indigenous Christian language. But then comes the next question - which?

Coptic is negligible in Quran as compared with Syriac, even Latin (qasr, sirât, I'd add burûj). What Coptic does affect, is the translation-history of the Bible in Egypt, alongside apocryphal texts like "Thomas" (the upstream monks were... lax, on the distinction). What was the state of the Greek Bible, when it got up there? Also: we might be interested in the Coptic which formed the basis of the Patriarch histories, or of John of Nikiu.

Ḥnanišoʿ's episcopal court

I don't have much so I'll google-translate this from Mathieu Tillier, 205-21; 2.1.209:

Since the disappearance of the Sassanid Empire in the 7th century, ecclesiastical authors like Simeon of Rev-Ardašir took for granted that it was up to the bishop to resolve conflicts between Christians. The synods which succeeded one another in the Sufyānid period (660-683), notably that of George I, held in 676 in Darai/Dirin, affirmed that Christians must bring trials (dine) within the Church and submit their quarrels (ḥeryane) to priests – or, possibly, lay people – appointed as judges by their bishop. The latter exercised restrained justice and could be seized by a litigant who did not wish to address his priest. The ecclesiastical magistrate was therefore not an arbiter freely chosen by the litigants, but a judge established by a hierarchical authority claiming a monopoly of Justice.

If the practices of priests and bishops are poorly documented, a corpus of letters attributed to Ḥenanišoʿ I sheds some light on the judicial role of the catholicos at the end of the 7th century. The latter received the litigants in audience at the seat of the patriarchate, al-Madāʾin/Ctesiphon. Very often, the applicant appeared alone, his opponent having refused to accompany him. The catholicos could render a judgment or transfer the trial to a delegated authority (ecclesiastical or secular), in the locality of the plaintiff. The rescript he sent to the lower judge could contain a conditional judgment, depending on the result of the recipient's investigations. When the Catholicos already had evidence, he issued an unconditional verdict which he charged his addressee to apply.

I was dimly aware of this first Ḥnanišoʿ from Seeing Islam. He was catholicos from AD 686-91 (about when John bar Penkaye is bemoaning... everything); then in exile until 693 when ʿAbd al-Malik relented and let him back on the cathedra. Per Hoyland, 200-3: Hajjâj announced the office "abolished" in 695 - but our man lasted until 698, running things from his monastery. He wrote copiously, like Išoʿyahb III before him; and like that one, did not say much about the "shultane de-ʿalma". His (fragmentary, then or at least now) commentary on (Peshitta-) Matthew has a slight reference to the "folly" that Christ was a mere man, which credal statement was of utmost importance to ʿAbd al-Malik as the newly-anointed "David" in Jerusalem.

Islam being slightly weak in the 690s Orient, those lands having had to be reconquered, and its peoples still highly Christian, it makes sense that the Christians' courts were ... Christian. Ḥnanišoʿ, it seems, was well-regarded among the Christians as of AD 691, more so than Išoʿyahb "le grand" had been. Hence, the caliph's attempt to domesticate this Christianity, as a subbranch of Islam; hence, why that didn't work.

Ḥnanišoʿ wrote an argument for schools as the basis of Christian education. We fellow-dyotheletes in the Occident can assuredly appreciate the thought; Ḥnanišo himself perhaps just needed the schools dependent upon his cathedra. Beyond that his thought is had from his correspondence which I haven't read.

The Talmud in Late-Antiquity

It wouldn't be a Talmud without mutual arguments, so - Noah Benjamin Bickart versus Monika Amsler, on the Bavli / Iraqi compilation. Bickart seems less prickly than (say) Jacob Neusner.

Current Talmud scholarly-consensus is that Bavli is mostly Sasanian, with some sprinkles of post-Islam; much like that Iliad consensus that this epic-poem is mostly Archaic, with a few chapters spliced in later like book 10. (We're not here to argue Iliad.)

Bickart points out that if the Iraqi Jews had the Talmud, they weren't using it. Hey, much like Yonatan Adler is arguing for the Torah itself, under the Ptolemies! Although, I'd add to Bickart (I haven't read Amsler): the Talmudists were drawing from the same interpretive-tradition and popular-culture, as we see in Iraqi divination-bowls and ostraca.

Some of the pericopae are constructed according to Aristotelian norms, even Cicero. I didn't know they had Cicero or Seneca or other Latins in the 'Iraq. It is well known that the Syriac world had Aristotle in Edessene Syriac, which along with its Hatrene predecessor was intelligible to Iraqi Jews. Admittedly our copies come from Qenneshre which was the region around Antioch, the westernmost reach of Syriac and Miaphysite at that. But the political limes had been erased by then if not the religious ones.

These Jews also had medical texts. The Qinnashrin Christians had Galen in translation; Masarjawayh was an Iraqi Jew who had Ahrun's Pandects, from Egypt. Amsler dares reconstruct a medical text from its excerpts in Talmud.

This blog has long argued for crisis, as motive, for the Jewish sages to compile what "Judaism" even meant anymore. Much like those Zoroastrian texts, among the Aryans. It's just that we've pinned it on the AD 530s-40s solar blackout. Amsler would have me pull back the clock by a century, before the middle of the fifth century. This Talmud was done after the Jerusalem Talmud; Amsler says, in response.

That means: before Yazdegird II. A writing around the time of Yazdegird I would put it alongside the Christian synod of 410 which brought the Church of the East in full communion with the Roman Church (until Theodosius II and Pulcheria ruined everything). So the "crisis" would simply be competition.

If fifthcentury maybe that's exactly why Iraqi Jews didn't at first accept it. They deemed it a me-too and an exercise in scribal hometown-spirit. A work of vanity, in effect.

Of interest (to me) is the Talmud's arrangement of text by keyword. The same phenomenon Neil Robinson has noted in the Quran, sura-internally and across suwar throughout the "'Uthmanic" text. Thus the McDowell-ish arguments to which Raymond Farrin has subjected us, and to a less-annoying extent Michel Cuypers. I've argued keywording holds for Ibn Mas'ûd and Ubay as well, also the Sana' 1; which suffices to refute such apologetics, but remains a valid observation and technique, as Robinson had intended in the first place. Were the Jerusalem Talmudists doing the same?

BACKDATE 3/14

A Scar is made (not born)

Patric Gagne (should be "Patrice" en française, non?) writes about being a snake from toddler-age. This seems like opposite of the Gamma. The Gamma isn't born; he's spoiled.

And it's hard to unspoil something. It's likely impossible to alter a sociopath; her settings are Factory. By contrast the Gamma isn't a sociopath. The Gamma wants approval, in all senses of "want".

But the Gamma has a hard time getting that by merit. It isn't (anymore) natural for the Gamma to behave as people respect. And the Gamma likely has had a history of failing-at-it, thus ensuring he's been cold-shouldered early-on. How's he fixing this? If he's been ousted from the Cool People Table, with the Alpha and his Bravo betae (bayût?), naïfs imagine he could try another table; but now all the other tables see him as an upstart loser. Any attempt to rise above is getting snapped back, even by those he thought might be his friends.

So Can't Buy Me Love, if a real story, would frontload Dempsey's fall to the first day of school; like The Karate Kid did. The former film works mainly as parable cautionary for the Bravo-curious Delta (until the ending which is copout and Cope). Most Deltas don't dare that journey to Bravo, because they instinctively know to hit up the lower-status table first. And Omegas... well, whatever.

The Gamma has a ready solution against resigning himself to Omega status or trying harder with the Deltas: he can retreat into fantasy. He's Alpha in his own mind. He's Aragorn, just living out his Sigma phase. He interprets sympathy, or at least indifference, as friendship - that's as close as he gets. He convinces... himself. Everyone else knows (miles) better.

As to whether it's easier to fix the sociopath or the Gamma: who knows. They have to do it themselves. They have to desire it. The sociopath can at least fake caring for others, although not always longterm. The Gamma has to fight the urge to retreat or to overstep, every single day.

BACKDATE 3/14: not my bravest slot of poastage, mayhap.

Mary as living relic

As I was looking into Daniel for the AD 740s, I peeked over at what the Romans were up to. The first thing they were up to, was crowning a son of Leo as "Constantine V". This man remembered his forebear Constantine III, also from an unpopular family, who got unalived when he stayed home. So the younger Constantine, figuring himself healthy-enough, marched out on campaign.

This guy got coup'ed anyway ("damned if you do..."). So Constantine had to embark upon a civil war to get his throne back. Which gave the Arabs their opportunity to raid Anatolia as usual.

We own several sources for this; which reach back to sources we don't own, but can surmise. There's that "Syriac Common Source" but also Nicephorus, implying a Greek iconodoule history (now lost to us) up to AD 775.

These sources tell that Constantine, home again, enacted upon an iconoclastic purge. Meanwhile he'd called the blessed Mother an "empty purse", so they say. How does the policy align with this comment?

I hold Mary's status more to that of relics, than of icons. But "Artifacts and Relics", per AD&D, are similar inasmuch as to Christ (and God) alone is the glory. Icons are physical matter. Mary, after birthing Jesus, became physical matter. Not much point in venerating either, say some. Especially since there aren't any Marian relics on account of Dormition.

Constantine grew up aware of iconodoules who disliked that his father Leo had disassembled the Pantocrator from the main gate, along with his other disregard of "graven images". Said iconodoules could also look across the border to Yazid II, with horror. Saecular iconoclasm incidentally provides a ready excuse for a government to raid churches, for metals (and maybe artwork).

I would be unsurprised if the plotters in the capital had reached out to the old guard of churchmen, promising to reverse Leo's policies. The antijubilee! The plotters of course would announce all this as "veneration of our blessed saints" and other such tommyrot. Which would go up to Mary herself.

We're not here to side with one side or th'other. The whole of Constantinople is gone now. I confess a bias toward not starting chaos at home whilst a hostile caliphate sits next door (there'd come time for that when the caliphate is having its own little problems, in a few years...). And I generally agree with jubilee whatever motives are offered. The Blessed Virgin, I expect, can take care of herself.

Upload #210: signs of the times

Over the last fortnight-and-change, which seems longer than it was because February ends earlier than most, I was pondering chronology. So: new project, "Daniel's Main Points". Overall I don't have much to add to the (fine) essay by the authorial duo, except speculations; but I figure the speculations don't hurt, here.

To find chronological references relevant for that, I dove back into "The Rebel's Wind". I wasn't happy with the number of uploads I'd done on that, up to three years ago; so I hadn't bothered uploading more, since. All that put me in hock for changes made locally. So that's uploaded now.

"The Camel of Sacrifice" now has its second edition - although, here, I'm glad I waited those four years. Brought here, are Athanasius of Balad and James of Edessa; and Athanasius' Syriac correlation with Tur-'Abdin 819. I haven't yet read Animal Sacrifice and the Origins of Islam, at its $110 pricetag.

"The Suras of the Women", an older project from 2012, I just realised hadn't ever taken into account the 2015 publication of the Disputation of the Monk. Oops! That definitely needed in there.

And there's another new project, to balance out the project I summarily deleted last time: "Without Peer". Just the usual (boring) collection of sources of sura, here sura 30.

Madrassa.

HDMI considered harmful

I'm still on this elderly laptop with outdated USB support. So I am stuck with HDMI for a bigscreen (and I only get one). If I were to spring for a new machine, it is looking like I should do without HDMI entirely. HDMI charge royalties, are not open-source, and now the HDMI Forum is saying open-source have to pay up.

Linux... can't. That's not how any of this works. So AMD, who do Linux (of their own) aren't supporting it. Because HDMI Forum won't let them.

USB to its credit is using DisplayPort which actually is open source.

I worry a bit that I can't override this thing with a Linux distro but, maybe I don't have to. If we get to the point I'm buying a new box then I'll just be toting the old one on-the-road anyway.

UPDATE 4/5: Oh, and HDMI is an "ad" injection vector. I assume they can send HTML and script so - perfect for hackers' wateringhole attacks.

Notes on star and system formation

The astro news as came out the last few days concerned system-formation. Neural-networks are helping this along, since Google hasn't yet ordered the researchers to hire Sweet Baby Inc.

First up, we learn that in high-energy environments, like where Sagittarius A* and others are gathering matter, stars don't even form. This extends to large planets where O/B stars are forming like at Disc d203-506; ultraviolet is driving that process. Of course these yeet out the helium and hydrogen first. As to smaller bodies weighted to the C and S and iron - I dunno. But honestly, these rocks won't have long even to coalesce into planets before the whole thing implodes again. Overradiation might, further, explain certain of the youngest (visible) galaxies; the ones which quit creating new stars after a few hundred My. No gas, no stars!

For the rest of us, T Chamaeleonis has a solar wind. T Cha is ∼70° inclination to us; visible matter - dirt - is under 1 AU and at ∼20-50 AU. The inner matter is gathering into rock and/or spiraling into the star, but is not our direct question here.

The question here is how the gas and ice leaves an inner solar-system (defined here under 20 AU), where not locked into iceballs like Ceres or giants like Saturn. They are looking at neon and argon, which as noble-gas can't bind into ices; I expect these as a fair proxy for helium, before them. T Cha is ionising so expelling the free neon and argon out of the system; these gasses won't be seen from here for much longer. The force of the wind over time and the concentration of volatiles over time are hereby constrained, excellent data for modellers elsewhere.

And here is a survey of 86 young stars - from Taurus and from that aforementioned Chamaeleon I, both around 600 ly, and Orion at 1600 ly. The survey points to binary stars not having much material, here because they're double-teaming. I don't blame high-ultraviolet; we're looking at dust (infrared), not gas (spectral-lines). Respectable planets can form within binaries but maybe not so much where the stars be under 200 AU apart.

A plea to Fundamentalist Christians

Danusha Goska offers a sprawling post: in part a eulogy for late folklorist Alan Dundes, in part a summary of Quranic scholarship as typical by some first-time reader of 1990s-era Ibn Warraq (hey, I used to be one of those too... in 1999). I here request of Goska only the following: if you are taking Joslin McDowell's tack on the two volumes of Luke, then you should not opine upon the Quran. At all. Please. (h/t Sefton, who should know better.)

Goska quotes Merrill Unger on Luke's accuracy in the second volume; and then links... someone else. She didn't tell us so I must: it's Kyle Campbell... among the McDowell plagiarists. I suspect someone in Goska's editorial chain knows that McDowell is a disaster and that's why her post's giving him the Elias treatment. I pin more of this on FrontPage, which failed her as editors but, well... FrontPage. Was it they who suggested, to her, laundering McDowell through Campbell?

As to Luke's "incredible accuracy", indeed I give Luke little credence - as do more-or-less serious scholars like Richard Carrier or philosophers like James Still. The more serious scholars know that his Acts is no guide to Paul's thought - like any good historical-fiction author, Luke takes pains on the saecular background to get that correct and... different pains, on the ecclesiastic side.

Goska for bête-noire, instead, has fixed upon Bart Ehrman. I concede to McDowell's party: Ehrman sometimes fails, and where he fails sometimes the Dispensational side has the better argument, like on Rapture. But if anything Ehrman is experiencing more trouble on his Left flank, such as by Carrier and by the Morton Smith mystics.

As for Israel Finkelstein versus Kenneth Kitchen, back in the Old Testament: Finkelstein's side has been winning this one. If Goska was keeping up, she'd know to read Yonatan Adler (hey, when's Yom Kippur first noted?). If Kitchen hasn't backtracked yet it's because he is committed to the bit. Sadly. Tragically.

I worry about Goska's tendency to take names, often obsolete and/or controversial names. There exist Creationists who can't into biology so complain about "Darwinism", personalising a dispute. A few years ago I had to read an enormous tome purporting to explicate the history of Biblical text-criticism which was structured as a series of biographies about heretics. I suppose committed Communists might complain if you call their sect "Marxist" rather than "the dialectic" or "the material causes of history" or something like that; Objectivists dislike being called Randians. This personalisation is a tactic: not everyone can be right about everything, as witness Ehrman or indeed Marx or Darwin or Rand or even Carrier or McDowell, and we can always point to a (wo)man's mistakes whilst ignoring the overall point. The effect is to tar everything the original person said, thereby to discredit any succeeding argument, even if it came from one of the correct statements.

I rate that tactic as bad. If you suspect a serial liar, prove the pattern: like for Marx, or for McDowell (or for Luke or the final Quran for that matter).

But I'll give Goska more credit. I don't think she's a bad person. Anyway I should be a hypocrite if I proposed here to refute the whole of goskaïsme.

Goska is simply... credulous, as is her right as a human. She's certainly got motive; she owns a soul and she hopes to protect it (which I suspect otherwise for the McDowells). But, inasmuch Goska remains a naïf on the texts of religion A, wilful or not: Goska has little standing to critique the texts of religions B, C... or of Islam. I think I may be permitted to narrow my focus, thus.

Maybe Goska could do morals or philosophy. Gell-Mann Amnesia has existed since Socrates was pointing it out; but Socrates himself was wrong on occasion, such as on the Creation dispute.

The Church Defeated

In light of ChurchMilitant passing on to the next plane, I expect link-rot. I must take stock of where this blog has linked Mike Voris' site in the past. Luckily a few sites have mirrored the best articles over there. And we have not cited CM all that much.

So: here I'd supplemented a response to Barron (the next gym bro, some fear); and here I'd mentioned Considine. There are a few more pages where I pass along CM's reporting of Strickland's ouster but I'm leaving those links alone because, well, they're just news.

I have to admit disappointment. I only cited them what, thrice in two pages; but they had done decent work.

ONEPETERFIVE 3/6: Flanders' take is as good as any.

Elias bar Shenaye elided his sources

I am reading Marianna Mazzola and Peter van Nuffelen, on Daniel bar Mushe of Ṭur ʿAbdīn. This "historian" passed along some lore about the Marwânid era, its start and its end. In between? Nobody tells us, so these authors (to their credit, and to that of their peer-reviewers) won't speculate.

Most of the Daniel fragments (the authors identify four) and one of the two testimonies come from the same historian, also lost: Dionysius of Tell-Mahré. Mazzola and van Nuffelen note for exceptions "F2" and "F4", where Dionysius' tradents don't give Dionysius' source... but another Syrian does: a Nestorian, Elias / Elia bar Shenaye of Nisibin. Elias is here the only one who relates that the anecdotes derive from Daniel. Mazzola and van Nuffelen point out that the two pericopae as Elias lists, where not from Khwarezmi or the Nestorian abbot (we'll get to the latter), summarise what we know elsewhere to come from Dionysius. Elias admits to using Dionysius for other anecdota (n. 25). The authors doubt that Elias ever had a copy of Daniel direct. So they would restore "Daniel reports..." somewhere in that F2 / F4 text.

It might be in Elias' interest to avoid being seen to cite a Miaphysite and a patriarch no-less. Skipping his name toward pretending his source would be a nice way out, where Dionysius offered Elias that "out". See nowadays Bryce Ross and Kyle Campbell, bypassing the McDowells.

As for Elias' "Abbot of the Great Monastery": that monastery, for AG 1051/AH 122 (739/740), fell under catholicos Petyon whose death Elias records for that year (accurate for AD 740). The monastery would be the Mār Abraham on Ṭur Izla (I blew over a year of free-time on the whereabouts). As to which Abbot: I suppose one could look up Thomas of Marga or Ishoʿdnaḥ or maybe those Arabic-language Majdal texts. Um. Assemani < ʿAbdishoʿ? Anyway, have at it, dear readers; he's off-scope for this poast.

For Elias readers, all this implies Elias might have “Early!” sources only through intermediaries. Looking eastward, along with the nameless Abbot, Elias cites Ishoʿdnaḥ of the Mayshan and others. Did such come to Elias via such as Siirt and the Khuzestan miscellany?

Sons of Atreus

This blog does not consider Gaza to be Amalek. We're not here to turn that on Israel, either; I say "we" because this blog's in authorative company. Said blogger can identify for you who is Amaleq, rather: the soi-disant Ansarallahi in Yemen, led by the Houthi clan.

Today the Houthis say they are Stopping The Spice because of Israel's war - also Gaza's war. The Houthis and their mostly-Shi'a supporters don't see the war the way this guy (probably) did. For the Houthis as for Gazans, the aim is Death To Israel and - for the former - a Curse Upon The Jews. Why allow someone cursed to live among you? Yemen used to host many Jews; the locals expelled them. That gives an idea what the Curse should be: no place for the Jew in the whole of Islam, except under temporary sufferance, even that much we'll never see from Yemenis nor Gazans. For the Houthis Islam itself (in Shi'a form) deserves to rule the rest of us, meanwhile. They don't call themselves "Ansar al-Yamani".

If the Houthis are obeyed, don't expect The Spice To Flow. All Israel would need to be dismantled in a process speedy-enough for Houthi satisfaction. And what if some angry bastard somewhere in Tyler, Texas kicks a Koran in the meantime? Ooop! Up go the missiles and drones again.

Out in cinemas last weekend, the Harkonnens had taken Arrakis and thought they could use the local backlash to climb up the Imperial ladder. Obviously, they did it wrong. Someone's got to do Yemen right and we really shouldn't get hung up on how.

The fundamentalist McLaundry

I recently found an interesting synoptic-problem: Kyle Campbell and Bryan Ross (pdf), on Luke's work. These Scots-Irish sorts even share the same title for their posts: The Incredible Accuracy of Luke. This, and the content, they share with a chapter-lede from Joslin "Josh" McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict - either some older edition the Boomers used to push on us (1984?) or the updates (2007?). Of course they're running a literal Dark Age tactic of pretending to cite a real study (not having read that study themselves).

The literal meaning of "incredible" is "unbelievable". Authors paralleling McDowell should know that, and should know to avoid the word, unless they aren't just plagiarers, but lazy plagiarers. Likewise they should know better than to parrot their sources without critique. Otherwise: why wouldn't they? They're all friends here.

The McDowells' whole shtick (his son Sean has inherited the family-business) was summarising scholarship whose conclusions agree with the (fundamentalist Protestant) Christian kerygma. Joslin often had to dig back in time to find amenable quotes. Here, he was citing Sir William Ramsay and Colin Hemer (1989). The strategem of selective quotes laundered through layers of isnad is, how do I put it, not entirely dissimilar to how Muslims have supplied posterity with the Hadith. These fundamentalists have their own Quran, as well: the Protestant Bible. The McDowell oeuvre has been widely refuted for decades, one large reason McChristianity (and Christianity at large) has fared so ill in the West since Gen-X Christians got the Internet. I don't think the updates have helped the book.

As for Joslin at the personal level, he has issued claims (plural) of molestation by one "Wayne Bailey". The stories don't mutually agree.

Incidentally I just found out that ol' Joslin has been sidelined, since 2021, or Year Two anno floydi. He had said conservativy things about the Black experience which had been widely mooted in such circles up to the mid1990s intermezzo (including by many Blacks) but don't fly in Christianity Today.

To sum up, the McDowell family enterprise is sus as all Hell. Thus, the motive for Campbells and Rosses: copyists reaching back to sources which they likely haven't read direct.

The one I feel worst for is poor Emperor Hadrian. He should have built a higher wall and mined the coasts, too.

Iamanâya

As we're catching up on the diaspora of the Aramaean Euphrates, Gregory Crane reviews La Babylonie hellénistique proper. This was whence the classical Hellenists out west got their Mesopotamian lore, which they ascribed to "Berossos" - the equivalent to Manetho.

Crane includes the early years of the Parthian takeover in its Hellenistic era, which I wholly endorse, because the Arsacids of Parthia didn't start out as panIranian nationalists. They were more like Armenia and Pontus, appropriating Hellenistic culture. 'Tis possible that Parthians generally, not being Persians, considered the Achaemenids as failures. There'd be time to hype the glorious Iranian past, later (i.e. under the Sassanids).

These documents under review were not by Aramaeans or any Iranians, either. They concerned Greeks. That may be why they're in a dead language, the parasemitic Akkadian. This language is handy for our historians because it's on clay, not perishables. If only we could read it, or were allowed to read it (more on this, anon).

The Akkadian for Greeks was "Iamanâya". That looks uncomfortably like Late-Antique Syriac for Yemenites. I suppose context helps. I do see that R̥štivaigah, Attic Astyages, became "Ištumegu"; Akkadian orthographs preferred v-to-m transformation. This would happen in the middle of a word given they did not always do this for Huvaxshthra = Cyaxares (or Xyaxarus); they have "Waksatar" sometimes but also sometimes Úmakuištar. Behistun should have Akkadian for Fravartiš "Phraortes" also; wiki as reliant on the online Iranica doesn't help here. Although, to be warned, Persian names in Behistun were transliterated first to Elamite then to Akkadian, with the Old Persian text supplied last, in a script invented for the exact purpose of getting Persian written right.

As Akkadian / Greek direct philology is concerned, indeed some Greek did get translated into Akkadian. In reverse there's even Akkadian transliterated into the Attic alphabet! That fundament of the Axial oecumene, Behistun, might even count, being translated into Aramaic (I think, from the Akkadian) and summarised for Herodotus assuredly in Greek, although as far as I know it did not enter this book.

These Akkadian sources pinpoint the Battle of Gaugamela, lately famed for that Alexander bio (which is just Claudius Aelian). Also here are astronomical journals and chronicles, of which some blogs might consider the last years of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Crane hits this book for not including the actual Akkadian, just translating everything into French. That compares unfavourably with the Greeks and Akkadians themselves, as the book has presented. Maybe this choice is because the book is for students of Hellenistic cultures. They'd be expected to know Greek (like Aramaic scholars should know that language); not Akkadian. Maybe that's the problem: that we haven't been learning Akkadian because we simply don't have enough Akkadian in modern publication (Semitic students and Aramaeists in particular should be able to muddle through this dialect, nu?). Crane calls for ORACC to get that stuff out there.

The natives of Dirin

In May of 57 anno taeiorum, Mu'âwiya's anno legis fidelorum and our AD 676, the Nestorians convened a synod at Dirin. This was on the southwest coast of the Gulf, no longer a Persian Gulf. It is also called Darai.

But that this place was chosen, in the waning days of Mu'âwiya's amirate even if accepting his calendar, shows it was not yet altogether an Islamic Gulf, either. Mu'âwiya considered his age one of "Believers"... but based his state's Belief upon Saint John the Forerunner, as a Damascene. Heir-apparent Yazîd may even have flirted with Christianity, in its Dyothelete form against Constantine IV (before the Emperor'd convene his own synod). Nestorians, as Christians, refused Mu'âwiya's watered-down Belief, treating this age as like that of the Seleucides, a saecular age "of Tayyaye". At Dirin they used no Arabic, instead sticking with Edessene-origin Nestorian Syriac.

So who were these Aramaean-speaking Christians of the Gulf, loyal to Arab amirs but not yet swamped by Arab Muslims? Jessica of the Saracenarum points to the Bahrayn's genetics, for the "Tylos" era. Being an island in the Gulf it got humid over there as well as hot; so it is a near-miracle they could get any DNA at all out of these samples.

At Bahrayn the "Tylos" ends at AD 600. I understand the southwestern Gulf as Aniranian but still secure for the Eranshahr: indeed, a Parsic-controlled bay. Khusro II did however oust the Nasrids from Lakhm of the lower Euphrates; so, down the Semites' side of the Gulf, refugees are possible. Still: for the seventh-century Gulf, I demand specifics of demic switchovers before I assume them. I suspect that Qatar was already Arab Muslim before anno Hagarae 57; hence the Khuzestan Chronicler had found Islamic sympathisers. But I am not seeing this at Dirin. Tylos-Bahrayn can be a proxy for Nestorian Dirin.

The ancient samples show ancestry linked with "Iraq and the Levant". That, to me, means Euphratean - these were Aramaic Semites, not Arabs who simply spoke Aramaic for official purposes (as spoke, the Nabatis of yore).

The results find three instances of the G6PD gene. This had a Mediterranean origin, 4k-3kBC. It protects against malaria. In the modern Gulf, Emiratis have inherited the most of these. Most parsimonious is that the gene had been injected into Iraq, rather than around the Yemen. I suspect Aramaeised Iraqis who brought G6PD to the Gulf. Mind: Iraq's climate isn't much better than the Gulf's.

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The Christian defenders of Mairon's motte

I had "Today" off (for recreation) so didn't bring much in the way of blogging machinery. For whatever reason I checked in on Anxious Bench après-ski.

I usually grit my teeth before approaching the Anxious Bench (with rare exceptions). It is the home of several Saint Joseph Christians. You know the type; they are very keen to look after someone else's children, and to be seen doing it. On this occasion Daniel Williams salvages the term Christian nationalism.

Once the media started talking "Christian nationalism", Western nationalists who happen to be culturally Christian started pondering if this was just another motte and bailey. We are well-aware of the strategem from that previous media concoction, "Racism" - it means whatever the media want it to mean, but deep in the motte it means "being White". Of course the mainline Republicans have been ever-eager to twist that term so as to say dems r reel rayciss (how well has THAT worked?). Apropos of that or not, Williams defines Christian nationalism - as against civil religion, what Dubya-era bloggers called ceremonial deism.

I do not know if one might consider, say, Flanders over at OnePeterFive as a Christian nationalist. Theodore "Vox Day" Beale is a nationalist first, for all his protestations to preTheodosian Christianity. Both are in line with 33% of the US that we don’t need a First Amendment. Vox Day would argue for the Inevitable: we can enjoy a Christian-themed nationalism, or must suffer an explicitly antiChristian alliance of nationalists all against Europeans also.

To leave that aside, Williams accepts that modern Christians have engaged a “culture war” and that this is bad.

He has a point on the abortion issue: the Founders accepted medicines to terminate an unwanted pregancy. This went beyond the limits of JudaeoChristian "Bitter Herbs" - being deists or (in Maryland's case) eager to distance themselves from the Catholic culture of Québec. (The deist/Protestant ethical conundrum, instead, concerned "quickening" - when herbs would become dangerous, and a doctor needed to be called in.) As with the, er, Inquisition; assumptions of the past had to take on scrutiny, once the biological sciences - Scientody in Beale parlance - caught up.

I don't know about the Founders' takes on same-sex attraction - but on the "marriage" issue, let alone gender ideology (not "theory") I don't have to. Any religion or philosophy as won’t confront so obvious a mockery of Gnon is either too weak to live or else is itself false. If Williams won't fight untruth, he has no business writing - really, anything in the vein of philosophy.

The motte of Christian nationalism is "being Christian". Williams imagines that he can compose a Bible commentary in the Tongue of Mordor. And Anxious Bench by posting his handwringing is doing Josephianity.

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