Marginal Revolution used to be a mainstay at Instapundit's. I am unsure that site will be welcome postMAGA.
There's an influenza in the cattle population. It is H5N1 which is a bird flu and, yes, humans can get it. A vaccine exists... in England. Meanwhile the double digit IQ Right here is hrr hrr'ing about not gettin' fewled agin.
I have the dark suspicion that the outgoing Administration is of the opinion "fine, Great Barrington said let 'er rip; rip on, then".
Once again I am on a writing postfacto spree... for the end of the year that was. Anyway: we had a service "today". This involved the presentation / abandonment of Eli to the Temple at Shiloh. The Psalm was MT/Jerome #84. The Gospel was Luke when Jesus was twelve - which may be deliberate: Pharisaic bar-mitzvah happens at thirteen.
(Psalm 88 might have been better as a composition by Samuel's grandson, but - read on.)
It all reminded me of the nonDavidic Psalter. One way to tell might be the reference to the Lord as God of Jacob, not of the Jews. The Joseph story is certainly Ya'qubi subsequently Judaised; even the Samaritans couldn't restore the original. The Samaritans perhaps should have made more effort to preserve the nonZion Psalms.
Psalm 84 is however Zionist, and being linked with sura 65 (Elohist) perhaps always was. Inasmuch it invites the north (as Psalm 87 invites everybody), it invites to shift face to Zion. As part of Book 3 of the Psalter in the order 84-89: the arrangement may even be postZionist, for the exile.
In our service, our Psalm 84 extracts did not sing of Zion. In Jesus' times the presence of God was immanent in His person.
BACKDATE 12/31
Reinhard Kratz over at TheTorah breaks down the Jewish accounts of Antiochus IV in Jerusalem. Kratz holds that the Greek king of Syro-Palaestina did less than the Jews claim he did.
Kratz inherits David Ganz that Daniel 11 came first. Kratz diverges from Ganz on it being true prophecy; Daniel 11 fails accuracy after the initial "persecution". Also - argues Kratz - it "predicts" that the Greek king didn't order the wrongs done to Jerusalem. 1-2 Maccabees and Josephus, and Jewish lore generally, are in agreement that the king was a blasphemer himself.
Kratz sides with Daniel 11 that the king wasn't a "blasphemous tyrant". That much is a trope. It was already a trope: applied to - for example - Nabunaid of Tayman. In reality the local priests would sometimes halt the sacrifices in protest. If the priests' party won, as shah Cyrus won, they would restore the sacrifices and blame the old king.
All Antiochus did was quash a rebellion, sort-of. His troops, however, weren't even Greeks; mostly they were Syrians. These guys had to be kept on a leash or they'd take out their frustrations on historic enemies. This is the Near East we're talking about. Antiochus seems not to have kept his leash tight enough. So Daniel 11 doesn't even blame the king, it blames "they" - all the hosts with him - for disrupting the rituals.
One wonders - well, I wonder - if really what we're talking about here is the calendar. The Seleucid calendar was lunar with scheduled intercalated months (so was the Roman calendar back then). The Ptolemies, who'd had the place before the Antiochii, were Egyptian so solar. The Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls are full of invective about the calendar.
Here is Trade And Antiquity (pdf): page 14 has been linked, here.
If you wanted "what happens when the whole of Anatolia sinks into the ocean", that's pretty much what we got. Late Antiquity, once more, applied to when Constantine's City is truly the Roman Empire, everything else revolving around it. After that, it's all islands in a hostile sea. Byzantium still exists, yes. But so does Spain. They're about as useful as each other. Somewhere below there are Sicily and Morocco, maybe Tunis and some sites in north Italy. Rome is, basically, nowhere.
What we get instead, in the time of the caliphs, is two rival island continents. One is the continent of Syria; the other is the continent of... Neustria-Austrasia a.k.a. northern France.
This still looks like a Dark Age to me. Unless you were lucky enough to be a Syrian, or attached to the Carolingian court.
As we're talking 'Abdisho', one commentary stands out: Abraham of Bet-Rabban, AG 9th century = AD 6th. On the son of Sira, "Ecclesiasticus".
We now have this in Greek. Ben Sira was done in Hebrew originally: some Dead Sea Scrolls, bare references in Talmud, and the Cairo Genizah. But the Jews went through their backlog, after which Ben Sira went the way of Tobit. I think even Jerome was stuck with the Greek.
Out East I'd thought that translation from Greek was done to Syriac later and by Paul of Tella the heretic. (The Melkites were doing their own thing into their own Aramaic.)
Of interest here, supposedly (Stadel credits Si'rt) Mar Aba the Great had beat Paul to the punch. But some of Aba's words on Genesis survive and nobody accuses him of taking from the Septuagint, like Ephrem was using Diatesseron. Might Bar Sira be taken from the Greek though?
Gorgias are promising a Bar Sira from the "Peshitta" or, at $90, perhaps "threatening" is the word.
BACKDATE 12/31
Lately the Qaeda offshoot having taken Syria has promised to "study" the phenomenon of the Damascene female judge, along with segregating Syrian universities. Here's a woman listing how we've seen this before. For those readers thinking "based natalism" - here's a woman arguing that point.
I somewhat wish that Rex Nebular game had been better. (There never was hope for Space Quest IV/X.)
I'm looking at "Whispers from the Sources". This is a list of exegetical work known, or related to, Assemani / "Ebedjesu" in our Middle Ages.
In those days the Mongols at Tabriz were allowing to these Christians perhaps their last era of protection. 'Abdisho' is the last we'll read of many of these commentaries.
I wonder if one reason the commentaries failed to survive is their very success; the gems are stored in the Diyarbakri commentary and by Isho'dad of Margiana/Merv.
BACKDATE 12/31
Among cosmic phenomena that actually don't exist: Dark Energy. That is because we can apply the time-dilating effects of gravity to the earliest galaxies.
This was predicted by David Wiltshire in 2007. If these results be further replicated, it will kill off dark-energy for good. Wiltshire may end up with a Nobel (not that prizes matter, as Perelman can tell you).
Poor timing on some people's part.
About a year ago Stover and (copypaste) Woudhuysen put out The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor. What I didn't know is that as ebook it is free-o'-charge; also on academia.edu. I owe this to its recent Bryn Mawr review, in Italian.
I tend to agree with the review that most of their work looks legit.
We learn Victor was the historian of late Latin letters. He focused on the administration, presenting a Fürstenspiegel for the post-principes. He cast a somewhat dim view on "the Spartans", as Moldbug would have it. Latin was still the language of administration.
Latin was also the language of the army. Ammianus Marcellinus - the authors argue - was a reaction from the military faction; although more a Greek himself, he aimed his own history at Latin-speakers. Ammianus must exonerate the soldiers at Adrianople. Although even Ammianus had to admit that Victor was serious.
Less serious is that Malalas-like "Historia Augusta", which also used Victor. The authors explain this as a fraud by a nonhistorian, perpetrated upon a history-buying public. Sadly it mostly worked.
None of these histories survive in full. Ammianus is missing... a lot; later readers were interested in its later sections, discarding the rest. The "Historia Augusta" is missing Philip the Arab. Victor meanwhile survives - the authors say - in two parallel abridgements: the one drops sections of prose, leaving a mess that must be reconstructed from elsewhere; the other - they say, from one Paul, Deacon in eighth-century Italy - an opinioniated summary, to supplement where (especially) Paul was using Victor in other work.
The authors contend against that common statement, the more trustworthy sources on which the author of the HA could rely had halted somewhere in the course of the narration about Elagabalus’ reign
. Nah. HA had Victor and Victor was fine; also HA should have known, say, Dexippus.
Victor and Ammianus agreed against Christianity, although at least Victor was willing to pull from Lactantius, much as Lactantius was an idiot. From our Catholic side, Jerome, much as he was a grouch, had to admit of Victor's excellence as an historian.
Victor has suffered in posterity on account of the former abridgement, making him look like the peddler of nonsense (which nonsense the authors, frustrated comedians, send up) rather than his abridger taking that blame. On the other hand, Victor held an inferiority complex as wide as the northern African coast in which he grew up. He was constantly alluding to Tacitus and Sallust; we might call him a pioneer of the jeweled-style. Ammianus also presented his history as the next chapters of Tacitus but he doesn't abuse the Latin language as much.
Victor shares with Cassius Dio, that the Severans were a reflection of the Julio-Claudians, and a poor one. Not for Victor the Historia Augusta's laud for Severus Alexander.
For all our authors approve Victor (and Cassius Dio), they cast shade on Herodian. Dissin' Herodian is quite the team sport in academe. Was Herodian that bad?
I've been wondering how come Theodore Beale at the Vox Popoli blog has been on a tear lately on how everything is fake like Einstein is fake etc etc etc. I remembered that, last month, he claimed nuclear fission was fake - excuse me, "might be". But then Beale implied 30 November that Russia had access at least to radioactivity. If you're not Beale then radioactivity is a function of atomic number, meaning protons; governed by quantum effects and by... relativity.
Now I find that Russia's government claims that Western nukes don't exist
.
Vox Popoli is in alignment with Kremlin propaganda. Even where said propaganda might be obscure to the West.
Well anyway, Russia's nukes might not be working well for much longer. Russia, Iran, and Brasil all seem to be tottering; meanwhile Argentina is taking-off and Thailand just joined Artemis. So much for the BRICS, then. What be left will be brutal tyrannies like Burma propped up by Xi. And their bootsniffing sycophants like Vox Day.
Yes, Orwell hated prose like "not uninterested"; but - bear with us. Trappist-1 is back in the science news. And not for its outer worlds: they're taking a new look at the innermost, "b".
The surface is dated to only a millennium, 1my, a thousand Earth years. That's... young, like Io young. That would imply a highly volcanic world such that its farside probably would have an atmosphere, if a highly toxic and hot one, constantly replenished.
Also possible is a hazeworld above a carbon-dioxide layer. They're thinking Eyeball-Titan, rather than Venus; hydrocarbon smog rather than acid.
Presidentelect Mondale I mean, Trump has sided with our mobbed-up and/or communist ports against America.
It has been also noted that longshoremen aren't the only bottleneck in the harbour-to-market chain. Also limited are warehouses. To be sure: warehouses are waste, the AGILEbros tell us. More to the point might be the rails and roads from the warehouses to the rest of us.
One question is if the bad ports are, also, a stealth-tariff against China's regime, which - as Perot observed, before it was cool - is a slave state. Garlic, for one, doesn't seem well-grown over there. To the extent this be a stealth tariff, the local state governments along these coasts should consider taxing the longshoremen.
We should seriously consider supply-chains as bypass even road and rail. Zeppelins aside, Elon Musk may well have one in the Heavy Booster and Starship-as-cargo. Probably why this talkative soul, which likes money, hasn't piped up.
The Roman Empire, after a brief interlude under Julian, made a decision about Jerusalem: it wasn't Jewish. Over in the "Chaldaean" Iraq, angry Jews put some choice touches on their Talmud there, which you may read in Peter Schäfer's Jesus in the Talmud. When the Sasanians took Jerusalem, the Jews got to act on their impulses.
It... wasn't pretty. We've long had Gideon Avni, "The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 c.e.)—An Archaeological Assessment", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (February 2010), 35-48; from which, G Greatrex, "Khusro II and the Christians of the Roman Empire", Studia Patristica (Peeters Publishers, 2006), 14.51 exculpated the shah, if not quite exonerated him. A key document, probably an eyewitness document, was Strategios' homily which he composed on behalf of his abbot.
Sean Anthony and Stephen Shoemaker have now edited this homily, from its translations, and double-translated the result into English. And it's a LAMINE imprint! which means we get to read it for $0, although you might want to buy it in print anyway.
My main critique is that some of the footnotes are long; likewise the digressions to splat this or that argument by other scholars. Shoemaker is notorious for this latter habit. I can only repeat my earlier comments which is put them in appendices. I kind-of get why, oh, Patricia Crone might want to pad out the main text with a lengthy digression (Slaves on Horses, only 80 pages, spent many of those about the... Mongols). But in this case, the main text is the homily. All that introductory fluff doesn't need to be long.
If/when you get past all that, you will learn that, yeah, the invasion wasn't pretty. The churches weren't destroyed; but they suffered a lot of fire-fire-fire. The authors also blockquote Avni on the "mass burials". (All too common around there.)
Strategios reports that the Persians did the initial damage, and then took the survivors into the reservoir of Mamilla. They first plucked out those with skills, to be deported. (A common Persian practice.) Those left behind were offered to the Jews who, we can surmise, came in from elsewhere. Christians who renounced Christ could become the Jews' slaves. But the Christians refused. At which point the Jews bought them up anyway - to be slaughtered.
The Sasanians quickly moved to fix the damage - we're told Yazdîn dipped into his own funds - if only to keep the tourist drachmata and dinerii flowing. But the population sank; and many monasteries became easy prey for opportunistic "Saracens".
BACKDATE 12/17
Unlike at, oh, Saturnine moons like Rhea; on Earth, ammonia has to be manufactured.
Apparently we've been doing that by crashing hydrogen into nitrogen (or just bypassing it with urea, formic et al). Hydrogen is a bear to store and to work with. And the reaction is costly enough - and necessary enough - it's contributing to energy use, competing with us schmoes who live here.
The new, cheaper plan is a catalyst: mix of iron oxide and an acid polymer with fluorine and sulfur
. Humid air would pass through this mesh at room temperature
(or warmer) and sea level pressure. And if supply-chains are at issue, farms in Iowa can buy this mesh and just make the ammonia right there in springtime.
And shipping can also run on ammonia, so it will be cheaper for them too.
BACKDATE 12/17
Go away 4chan. That done: melanin under UV fire.
A. niger is a black mold. Melanin is just the result of proteins and a mold has DNA code to produce it just like humans do. The argument here is that, besides the purple bacteria which feed off of methanes, a black mold is king when the ultraviolets run too high. In amplitude; we'll get to frequencies...
UV can get that high when the sun flares... as happens a lot on Prox next door. But also UV is high when the UV is too... low. It seems counterintuitive (to nonregular visitors here) but if there be oxygen but the lightcurve is too low for "UV-C" to push ozones, the low-freq/high-wav UV-B breaks through. Life can't get out of the shallows. There's the K stars ruled out.
All this suggests dark lichens colonising the shores. Earthworms of course. Bugs under the shade. There might never be vascular plants or land vertebrates.
BACKDATE 12/31 h/t the wonderful one.
An "independent magazine of culture" is promoting a Bar Kochba revisionism. In AD 131, Jews in the Legions mutinied. They then attracted support in Judaea. Haggai Olshanetsky argues that Bar Kosiba, later calling himself Bar Kochba, manoevred his way as the movement's messiah.
That smells to me like modern revolutions: the rebellion suffers disorder, and when it's not quelled in time a strongman steps forward. Iran teaches us that the strongman might not agree with the ideals of the initial rebellion; he might even arguably be a heretic.
I suspect that Rabbi ʿAqiba (pronounced "Okeeva") was the hand behind Bar Kosiba's messianism. Mishnaic caliphate let's goooo!
I think fair that, when the rebellion finally failed, Jew and Christian agreed that someone should take the blame, and he may as well be the putz who lost the thing. The pagan Romans meanwhile kept better records, Cassius Dio being decent as their historians go. You will search in vain for a "Barcochbas" or "Cochbaïdes" or whatever in a saecular history.
BACKDATE 12/17
Christina Buttons has been many things over her life, as her not-a-manifesto today lays out in detail. Overall the theme is that mental illness exists, but not as a chemical imbalance. My late father was big on the chemical-imbalance theory... probably because his mother, during my infancy, contracted Alzheimer's which absolutely is a physical brain-tissue problem.
Abby-Normal's brain, like Buttons' Asperger brain, will instead induce bad decisions. Their consequences will give to Abby a sad. Fatalism - the belief that you don't have agency - encourages bad decisions over good ("I couldn't help it!"). Koreans call that feeling, han. Fortuna is a demoness; Sura 53, in our canon, is correct to ban her cult. (The CounterJihadTM can quibble over the move to make G-d "al-Mané" instead.)
I do need to point out, with David Cole\Stein, that the Trump side of the American Right... ain't much better. Let's look at Miranda Devine yesterday: The J6 riot was not an insurrection but a protest that escalated into an out-of-control riot because then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was denied intelligence about potential threats that day
.
Devine here concedes that many involved in "J6" were violent. They weren't all FEDS!. Those who weren't FEDS!, should have owned the internal peace not to engage in riot. Devine is denying that they had that agency. Call it, the han-defence.
Trump won anyway. I suppose a nonfatalistic citizenry wouldn't even ask for politicians to save them. And to be fair Buttons herself used to trust in politicians, from the other side.
Just as Hebrew has dialects - Classical Hebrew in 1-4 Reigns, a Temple dialect around Nehemiah and Chronicles - so does the translation of Hebrew into Aramaic. I've been looking into a term for "the poor", meskinë in Syriac. The word recurs in the Aramaic Psalter for the Jews. Edward Cook found that this Psalter shares its not-Syriac with PseudoJonathan, Job, and Chronicles; more-recently Targum Sheni. Also found is that the Psalter depends on the Midrash... but not the reverse.
Hence the L in LJLA. This means that, where Christians often translated the Psalter into their vernaculars, Jews seemed less interested in Aramaic. Jews absolutely did translate their Psalter into Greek; I will not be shocked to hear if they also did Old Latin. But for Aramaic, Jews did not create a canon Psalter until mediaeval times; the Syriac Christians beat them to it, like the Copts beat them to it up the Nile.
We can allow some ad-hoc renditions were done, but nobody quoted them. This all reminds me painfully of the Psalter in Arabic.
I suspect the whole Late Jewish Literary Aramaic project be a reaction to Syriac. LJLA would be an artificial language. Unlike Syriac, Palaestinian was never a strong Christian language; so a Palaestinian basis would work well for Jews stuck around Galilee and Lebanon, and the Nile Delta. Why not; nobody was using it.
That might, further, explain how the Aramaic Proverbs looks like a clumsy and mechanical Peshitta.
BACKDATE 12/16
Black holes got mass (so volume), spin (so shape), and maybe charge. Here's an alternative, in the too-heavy and simple file: the gravastar.
Best I can tell, these are bubbles, not singularity-with-eventhorizon. You'll still get torn to pieces, but the pieces will (eventually) fall upon the bubble surface. Which will increase the size of the bubble. The size and mass we're looking at, would be Middlesex (or "London") and ten suns. So a bit denser than the neutron-star.
Since there is a shell, and not a simple cutoff of "in universe" and "not in universe", it doesn't emit Hawking. It is dark.
Because the outer shell is so rigid it is also cold. It doesn't move. Shining a light on it would just add energy, to make it larger. Some EV light would bounce back but with very long wavelengths: so, blackbody curve skews to the radio, leaving little for infrared.
So far this is a theoretic entity, so it can't be distinguished from that other really small, really nonemissive heavy thing. Unless it crashes into that other thing. Which is what instruments are now looking into.
BACKDATE 12/11
On topic of TTV, a habitable-zone planet was just found through its effects on Kepler 51d. The perturbator, which sounds dirtier than it is, would be "e". Year is 264 Earth days, so d:e is not-quite 2:1. e is also noneccentric, so would be Venuslike here; but for K-51-A which is a lighter star and new to the mainsequence (I'll get to this) e's Earthlike.
... but very heavy. e is a miniNeptune like the other three "cotton candies". I think TTV allows some constraint on true mass given that we do, in fact, know the masses of the b,c,d. Better now, in fact.
I didn't say superearth. Yes e doesn't transit; yes that means we don't know its volume. I can guess, though, that if the inner planets are puffy and hydrogen-rich then, so much more so this Sudarsky-II outer planet. Barring some crazy impact event but then, wouldn't its eccentricity match that?
The star is young; it spins eight days and (I learn) astrologists (heh) consider this a 500 My age. There is also noise from activity. Youth would assuredly explain why the inner worlds haven't lost their (opaque) clouds yet. Mind, this extreme youth further suggests a coming expansion of the HZ leaving e too hot. Well, e's moons, that is; although if it's got any I expect them to look like Ariel over around Uranus.
It took fourteen Earth years to spot d floating into transit so early. The virtues of patience. Maybe the improved maths we're promised will help find these things faster.
New readings of Venus' atmosphere are telling us that its volcanoes are not exjecting more water into it. Volcanic gas is at most 6% water.
Mars has ice under the surface (and sometimes on it). Earth has enough underground for a true Noachian Flood. Our volcanoes blast much water upward. Some of this is mediated through tectonics which push the ocean's water back underneath; Venus doesn't have tectonics (supercritical carbondioxide apparently not being much of a lubricant).
Venus is looking like, not only has it lost much atmospheric water, it never had much on the surface either.
Okay, last month I had VERY little to work with, but here we have bioarxiv for Indoeuropean populations. Big fez-tip to Razib Khan for 'splaining this to us genecels.
Italo-Celtic[-Lusitanian] is Corded Ware, aligned with Battle Axe in the German forests and, by male genes, R1b. This paper is saying Greek and Armenian came str8 outta da steppe. I assume that for Armenian, whose attestation is poor before their Grabar Bible, the paper has strained out all that Parthian and, before them, Cimmerian which meanwhile supplanted their whole ruling class. Greece, especially the islands, didn't have that little problem.
One surprise: the linguistic precursor of Armenian was introduced to the Caucasus by the end of the 5th millennium BP.
That's 2050 BC. That might agree with the earlier, less-documented collapse of the Ur III and Fifth Dynasty Egypt, known to be a difficult time. What 2050 BC is not is the collapse of the earliest twelfth century BC. So the Armenians were already living in the Caucasus, presumably around Trabzon and what's now the southern Georgia coast, where we now find the Mingrelians.
Quite a claim. Why isn't Armenian in the Hittite ritual-texts? Hurrians and Urartians in the way? (Same goes for Phrygian, still.)
Watching Paul Gilster go off to BlueSky "for obvious reasons" was a blow. It actually hurt. Not the move, but the "Kamala Obviously" attitude. Peter Woit, well... I never had much respect for that one, so his "post-truth" tantrum washed over me. And then there was Daniel Suarez calling Trump an authoritarian liar but, somehow, hoping we'd all come together after November to buy his book (by all accounts a decent book). But: enough of the negative.
Here's the positive: Casey Handmer on the d.o.g.e.
Handmer conducts a master class in gently advising the people in charge, whoever they might be in January, what benefits might accrue to this populace if the governmental-efficiency is NOT a sword to use against enemies. It could be used - generally - against pork, which trends actually highly Republican, as much as Democrat.
I admit I don't default to this attitude. I am not saying I always agree with Handmer - although, he's convinced me on battery storage and even on solar. Overall if you want people to take you seriously, this seems the best attitude to have. It may be too late for Gilster and Woit but Suarez could learn from this.
