The binding of a story

For whatever reason TheTorah.com is running the table on "the Akedah" lately - which indie gamers might know as the Binding of Isaac. A professor with a career all over the greater Germania holding the improbable name "Christoph Levin" is discussing its intertext, hoping to garner how the tale was coagulated. I think something be missing.

In 1997/8ish I stumbled onto an account that suspected the story was composed, at first, for offering one's first born to the Temple. In old Canaan that was often for sacrifice. Carthage - Tyre's colony - famously was big on this. In fact it may have been so big on this that the colony ended up not Tyrian at all: genetics and personal names show Barqi Graeco-Berbers (like Hannibal), or various Sardinians and Sicels, or their own hinterland Libyco-Berbers. Back to Abraham, the story has Abraham and Isaac go up the mount and only Abraham return.

Meanwhile... where's Sarah? Genesis doesn't have her dying until after this event. Most Christians and Muslims hold Sarah as a type for Mary; Jews don't. In fact Genesis=Bereshit Rabba in some recensions has Sarah dying of a broken heart. Not so in the Gospel of John!

So if Levin is opening the Akedah to deeper excavation: verse 22:19 in blue is indeed a deep text, "zeroth" composition or first revision. But the black verses where ram is swapped in for Isaac have to come later and should not be black.

How Richard Carrier defeated Andrew Wilson

To read Richard Carrier, he faced Andrew Wilson's side of alt-right at Wilson's best and still made him his bitch. Rhetorically speaking.

Carrier might not be the best source; some fellow atheists find him hard to suffer, like Tim O'Neill who cooked up a whole blog for atheists like him. To read Carrier himself, we get a hint why people dislike Carrier personally: the man needled Wilson, to waste time on a definition, namely of "fascism". A quick aside from Wilson to the effect "this is not a fascist movement and I'll thank you not to insult us" should do. To Carrier's thought, Wilson-ism might even be worse than secular fascism, so Carrier could have stuck with that, as Carrier in fact did with most of his arguments.

Trolling the opponent may well get you a win on points. It certainly unveils where the opponent is a bad face for the movement, and might even suggest why the movement attracts bratty autists into authoritarianism.

Although if we were shown why it is bad to let Wilson lead us, I feel more comfortable that Carrier not be leading us either.

A wolf taming example

We're sometimes told to distinguish "domestication" (e.g. cat) versus "taming" (cheetah). So maybe that's going on in a Baltic island 3000 BC. Presently the dog is tame and domestic, housebroken or at least kennelbroken; from a wolf ancestor. Last I heard, that ancestor was a Eurasian red wolf no longer seen today. We did not domesticate, nor tame, the - say - jackal.

Sometimes wild wolves are tamed from cubs and will accept a human caretaker into their pack. But they are not dogs and remain not easy to handle. Some dog breeds have been made as half-wolf hybrids (like in Alpha); this process also happened in our deep past with special breeds like, I think, the husky. In reverse America (at least) has some wolves with coyote and feral dog introgression as well.

Anyway: the Baltic protoGermanics (I suspect) were able to coëxist with some local (grey) wolves. I don't know how far these canicated lupines were domestic... and, in fairness, "domicile" might be itself fungible to a near-Arctic population of likely seminomadic shellfish-gatherers.

I ponder if we may extrapolate. Consider any pygmy wolf from any island or isolated valley - not in fringe Denmark, but in the Indonesia (or Ingushetia, wherever). As noted you can't bat a wolf's nose with a newspaper, nor with an empty softwoven reed basket in the old days. But you can so assert your alpha status against a smaller animal, like a fox. As the thus-tamed fox can be domesticated in a few vulpine generations, a pygmy wolf should be.

BACKDATE 11/30

Luke credited Stephen for Hebrews

I've been alerted to connexions between Luke and the Epistolary Homily to the Hebrews, like Adamczewski's hyperlink-commentary. In that spirit Ross Carruthers argues to read Stephen's speech in Luke's Acts 7, in particular, alongside Hebrews' warning to wavering Judaeo-Christians in the Church.

I do not find where one can download the Carruthers dissertation all at once. The link goes to a popup which the Australian site will take down at untimely moments. So, every chapter or so, I had to note the pagenumber, refresh the page, and manually return.

Carruthers focuses on the historically important Hebrews 5:11-6:8, a warning to the reader. His thesis relies on heretofore-neglected Noel Weeks, “Admonition and Error in Hebrews”, WTJ 39 (1976), 72-80. Important here is 5:12 tína-interrogative over tiná, the former as translated in Latin; and that "anastaurise" means not staurised twice, but just the emphatic staurism - that is crucifixion (consider "nailed up" v "nailed"). In addition, all other warnings in this tract refer to Torah example. Thus, the passage is also not an instruction to the reader, but another reference to the past: a type/pattern of Israel at Sinai.

Likewise Stephen's sermon to his Jewish persecutors. The next question Adamczewski would float is, in which direction the dependence. Richard Carrier has been assuming that Hebrews is first-century and Luke's stuff, second-. Carruthers does not venture this question, only pointing out that Acts is our only "historic" record of Hebrews' controversy. Which record, Luke doesn't attach to any correspondence. I suspect Carruthers allows to Luke more credence than Luke deserves.

So I'll venture this. Luke is (well-)known to cite our New Testament putting its comments into the Apostles' lips. John is made to quote 1 John, Paul quotes his own letters, and so on. Mind, Luke is also prone to cross-pollination: he has Peter cite the works of Paul, likely to elide the ambiguous relationship the two held in life. As to Stephen: even if Luke does have him reach into Hebrews, the author himself might not have been known to Luke. The name "becrowned race winner" tends to be applied to martyrs in early Christian homiletic. Carruthers himself ponders if Barnabas actually wrote the thing with Stephen being the schlemiel caught spreading it.

So I daresay Carrier is vindicated.

What's an illegal order?

Some "ex" CIA and retired military, including a currently-serving Senator who remains under UCMJ, recently posted an impartial commentary on whether to follow a manifestly illegal order. In short: you can't. That Senator can't, either.

Jim Hoft's site argues that this statement is a (passive-aggressive) leadup toward a "color revolution" - public disorder leading to legal but extraConstitutional régime-change. It might even come from antifa itself: the "Lawyers' Guild". The best counter would be to provide a specific example of an illegal order from this Administration, but the politicians in question don't gonna answer questions from their opponents, so refuse to answer.

I submit that an order to delete data in wartime (as opposed to: classifying it) would be illegal. I further consider deadly and/or debilitating diseases to be a wartime situation. (This blog suggests to formalise it by Constitutional Amendment: to set declarations of disease-emergency under the Senate; but that hasn't yet happened.)

In that light, the decision to delete vaccine data was illegal. The HHS and GAO decision to back up what their Secretary, Kennedy, ordered deleted was correct. Admittedly they did this secretly, but they may not have had a choice.

How the devil seduced Schacht

I saw my comment on Europa and its discontents was getting long, so I'll poast a sidebit on Horace-Greeley / Hjalmar Schacht, on whether he was a Nazi or not. The rebuttal/review claims "Schact" (sic) was exactly that. Wikipedia says no. My answer is coming to a Maybe.

On looking into Liaquat Ahamed, Schacht was a first class jerk. But for awhile he was Our Jerk. He (a Dane) did not set out as an ultranationalist; Ahamed names one whom Schacht edged out. Schacht was a staunch ally of Streseman, the Chancellor of the 1920s; he became wildly popular when he killed the 1923 inflation without any beer hall antics.

Schacht was however a man of middling ethics and lower morals. He tried to start some socially-democratty parties but they didn't take off, mostly because nobody trusted this bastard. Then in one of those late-1920s attempts to get out from under the Reparations, Schacht put Danzig on the table. Streseman wanted many concessions from the Allies, but even he knew that retaking Versailles land was not (then) on the table. If nothing else - him and what army?

Schacht did wrangle a few tidbits, but at the cost of angering literally everybody.

Why not rain fire on them?

Going through Stapp's blog of variants, cometh a cluster around Luke 9:54 then 55-6. This is where James and John axe Jesus to pull fire from heaven upon a recalcitrant town. The KJV adds "as Elijah did" to v. 54, and injects "For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" between vv. 55 and 56. Also KJV includes the Red Letter logion "you know not of what spirit you are" in v. 55.

Stapp supports KJV on Christ's words, but would footnote the other two. I think he's right... for Luke. Luke makes a to-do of the Spirit, even concocting the Pentecost story with that; the old creed, 1 Corinthians 15, had that it was Christ. So Christ talking gnomically of "spirit" in life fits Luke's thought well. But it also would make the anecdote difficult to readers.

Enter Stapp's homilists. They would relate the Apostles-to-be as like Elijah; and make clear why Jesus as secret-Christ on Earth was not (yet). The homilists were working from the para-Acts understanding of the great miracles of the first Saints, like in Hegesippus and in Mark 16:15-18, when Christ Himself perhaps was not known as present on Earth pre-Crucifixion. At the same time, the homilists must contend against the Infancy Gospel of Thomas which had Christ decidedly on Earth, putting opponents to death.

But I have another thought. The whole anecdote is (canonically) hapax to Luke and to those quoting from that Gospel. Luke like Hegesippus wants a unified Apostolate, which Luke would imbue with the Spirit; so there's no real motive to name names for disciples axin' stuupid queschins. But Luke had sources: Mark, ultimately, and probably Matthew too, who each did have disciples just-axin' (and getting slapped for it). Why not more?

Extant is Oxy 4009, which has bled into some Lukan MSS and fed the ancient homily "2 Clement". Also extant is Oxy 5575 which came to Justin. A pro-Petrine Gospel would support an anecdote as to make John and James more foolish.

Luke supplied the "spirit" comment, per Stapp. "Peter" would have had a wholly different comment. "For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" will do. If so, that variant now in KJV is a harmony.

The Georgian Bible

The present Kartuli version of the Bible - the textus receptus of the Georgian Kingdom - comes to us after the revisions of one Saint George the Hagiorite. We Catholics appreciate him for putting in a good word for us when the anathemata were flying about in AD 1054. Georgians appreciate that he asserted to the Antiochenes that Georgians shouldn't be subject to Antioch, nor to Constantinople for that matter.

This saint is a big deal in the culture as well, since it may well be due to him that the Kartuli of Iberia / Tblisi persisted as the church language, against the coastal Laz/Mingrel. Laz in particular strikes me as something that should have been more prominent in the 600s and 700s.

Anyway, Ibero-Georgian spread to Trebizond. When the region looked like it was going to be OTTOMANED, some priests in the Panagia Chrysokephalos Church hid some boxes in plaster. The church became the Victory Mosque and there it stood until last March. When an earthquake cracked the wall.

In these boxes are the four Gospels - in Greek and in "Georgian" certainly Iberian. The synoptics are Byzantine (yawn); but John is family-1, Lake Group. That's one of the groups as transpose the Adultera pericope, in this case after John 21 (itself probably a transpose).

As to the classical Georgian, one possibility is that it precedes Saint George, translating instead a nonByzantine text. Which might, again, be a lectionary text for John.

Neolithic apocalypto

As long as we're going back to 2019 content on this blog; let's check back in on Herxheim. This was notable for a massacre of non-Herxheimers. It wasn't alone.

Central Europe in the Neolithic, when no bronze was known, was united in the Linear Banded Ceramic culture, abbreviated "LBK" because they're Mitteleuropans; therefore, the LBK language. Pottery itself was a fairly new product at the time. This LBK was trundling along fine until the last century of the 5000s BC. This span, by the way, is amenable to dendro' should any logs survive (in peat?) and anyone think to do it - a Miyake had flared 5259 BC, not implicated in the collapse of course but certainly in range of a solid log cabin.

In 5075 BC the town at Vráble set up a citadel within itself. Normally this would hint at an aristocracy organising itself for layers of defence. One kink in this town-plan is that the town was divided into sectors some of which had different customs from the others. This may imply migration from other towns or even from the hunter-gatherer groups, who'd been hustled north of the LBK band when it formed, but weren't dead yet.

A generation later came the beheadings. We haven't found the heads. That is an annoyance since heads usually come with teeth and inner-ear-bones, which we've been using to extract DNA. Enough can be known that these were, in fact, mass executions and not just an ancient cumulative gravesite, nor even the mass grave one might get from a plague. Yersinia, I think, will come to Europe millennia later, with the Cucuteni before the IndoEuropeans, IndoEuropeans also not yet bothering with that Europe place just like they weren't yet in India.

This all reminds me of the Classic Maya. As aristocracies form, not everybody gets to be a high status polygamist. Wars commence. The losers die. Seeing what happens to losers nearby, smarter people in nearer cities figure they might be more comfortable further away. Maybe they go to another town. Now the second town's old guard has Diversity.

Further notable: the ox drawn plow won't arrive until the 4000s BC. This may have spurred a second wave of minor urbanism, including the Cucuteni in the Balkans but not just them; with higher Gini, and the mouse. Achenheim (also infamous) is middle 4000s BC.

34 Tauri

This is probably how Uranus was first spotted in the sky in the first place: when it's in opposition, shining as we are in the way between it and our shared Sun, so closest. But that happens annually. We're hearing about it now because Uranus is in Taurus... again.

In 1690, Flamsteed marked it as "34 Tauri". Every 84 years, it returns to Taurus. It is in Taurus, it seems, it is most visible. In 1775ish it should have been visible there again; Pierre-Charles Le Monnier saw it 1750 through 1769 but didn't connect it to old 34 Tauri (interestingly, by then returning to Tauri). William Herschel, it seems, took the measurements of the thing 1781 - on its way out of its 1690 position - and noticed it looked more like a comet than a star.

I don't know why the Seventh Planet be most-visible when it sails through Taurus, of all zodiacal/elliptic constellations. Darker over there? UPDATE 12/1: Retrograde. So it slipped out and slipped back in again.

Isaiah's poetic successor

Samuel Koser is calling shens on Isaiah 40-55's date. Davila points out that the "Classical Biblical Hebrew" / "Late Biblical Hebrew" distinction relies on a short dataset: the Hebrew Bible literally fits into one Book, and the various Judaean ostraca wouldn't add much of an appendix. Koser illustrates how, with a few Psalms here and a few Proverbs there, we can get wildly different vocabulary in each bucket.

Mind, if you'd been reading this my blog: you'd know that. We should be sequestering Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah into their own dialect bucket, which is indeed late, but doesn't define all the Hebrew spoken then. Esther - sharing a late basis - gets flagged as making deliberate reference to the elder language. Same for Daniel.

In 2 Isaiah's case, reference is made to Jeremiah MT 31 and to Isaiah 28. The crosspollinations to Hezeqiah's time (חזק), that earlier great deliverance from Mesopotamian tyranny, assuredly inspired late-Persian copyists to keep the two Isaiahs together (and away from the Prophet of Lament).

Given the intertext, we should hardly be surprised to hear 2 Isaiah's narrator sing in the same prophetic register as his predecessors. Our man really did want to be the second Isaiah. As far as I'm concerned he's earned it.

As for Koser, arguing for 2 Isaiah's place before the exile is wrongheaded. A better tack for his argument is as a "Steel Man" for 2 Isaiah apologists, to explain how certain old arguments have been too facile. Overall they were still right, though.

Zork on MIT

I ain't got much, but I can at least link Zork. That's the 1-3 series, which some nerds did in the late 1970s and then sold, via their "Infocom" brand. Until Infocom fell down went boom. Lately the present holders of the property are Microsoft which property they've now released to some sort of public domain, here MIT's.

Go click the link to see the peregrinations of Infocom's intellectual-property, if you care. I'm not sure I care. Reason? It's just the Z-machine. We've had interactive-fiction on the Z-machine, by hobbyists for free, since the middle 1990s. I was unaware anybody was enforcing that copyright. Could they enforce it?

Microsoft do retain a hold on Zork's lore, like the Flathead history and the Borphee / Pheebor alluvial plain. Which is fine. I hope Microsoft can use it, to put out a game as good as Zork Grand Inquisitor was good. Do so with my blessing and please take my money.

But rights to the code, legally, seems like a dead-letter to me. Probably to Microsoft too since said code's been on github since 2019 (before MS bought the rights). This was 1970s code, overtaken by events in the 1990s. Just an artifact of computer history.

Kiss n' capture

I promise this is not an Olivia Nuzzi poast. There's enough of that spreading around. The whole Internet needs penicillin.

No: this is about Pluto and Charon (pronounced like the French: consonants Hebrew-defective שרן, vowels Greek Χάρων). The theory is that Pluto/Charon formed like Terra/Luna. Except: slower.

That suggests that we don't have a Theia situation where the impactor was simply obliterated, with the larger body's crust forming the moon. Instead, protoPluto and protoCharon maintained their integrity: they were always (mostly) just Pluto and Charon.

I take it that they model this because both bodies are alike. A hard impact would suggest Pluto got smacked by a comet. Instead, these are two bodies on the same basic orbit, which by Kepler-Newton is a very slow orbit, compared to inyalowda.

Evangelical subtext

Ian Mills is bringing the term ὑπόθεσις back to light. The literal Latin would be sub-positio; hence why "supposition" is a near-literal, if not entirely semantic, translation of what we call a "hypóthesis". In the Hellenistic-to-Roman era, Greek-speakers independently of the Latins developed the ὑπόθεσις rather to mean more like a "subtext".

Mills points to the Gospels. They clearly share a subtext, or at least the synoptic trio do. Christians came to claim that the synoptics further shared subtext with John, and with Paul; digging into what they might share as a common theology, which has become the Creed. Having picked on these bases, of the Passion and Resurrection, such writings as did not affirm that basis were ruled out. Thus, the Gospel of Thomas and more-so the Valentinians were claimed to come from an alien hypothesis. Mills sees Irenaeus as the pioneer and Epiphanius as its best interpreter.

Durie would assuredly agree, considering this stuff so much voodoo. One might even see Durie as Epiphanius' heir, this time against Islam.

BACKDATE 11/21

The day of Mordekai

"Mordekai", or Mordhekhai with Aramaic aspiration, is noted in Ezra-Nehemiah. To him was held a festival in Alexandria. Aaron Koller wrote a book about how this festival inspired the book Esther over in the Babylonian-Susan oriental side of Diaspora. Jacob Wright reviewed it, and now I'm finding out about the review.

Esther is assuredly a postMaccabean production if only because its Jews are following "laws" - on their own, and not enforced by their priests. Because out in the boonies, Esther is unaware of priests. Boonie Jews of old like in Elephantine island at Aswan were attending religious services, but not following day-to-day laws outside the sacrifice. The friction in Elephantine came about due to the Jewish priests' sacrifice of taboo (to Egyptians) rams. Esther inhabited a different world than Elephantine.

Esther's book is famously absent from Qumran, in a way the other book-length absence - Nehemiah - is not. The Christian movement... is a little more questionable. Jesus Himself ignored the story, as did the Apostles. The Evangelists however may have reacted to it: in the John/Salome cycle, which perhaps predates their work. Salome is the anti-Esther.

One tidbit I didn't know is that the Genesis Apocryphon may be reacting to Esther, too. That would mean Qumran was aware of the story. They simply didn't want it: compare, Judith, or 3 Maccabees, or even Kiddushin 66. But you know who did want it: the Iraqis, and they're the Jews (Kiddushin 66 notwithstanding) who compiled Talmud for us.

Koller/Wright are saying that Esther should be viewed as a latter Torah. The Torah imposed the Babylonian week upon the old lunar sabbaths, and built an Exodus story around Pascha. Likewise, Esther imposed an Arabian-nights, or anyway Elymaean-nights, tale upon the Day of Mordecai.

BACKDATE 11/21

Family 13/Ferrar

I stumbled onto James Stapp's site and found this on William Ferrar's grouping, specifically John 8:44. This is Ferrar's finding that manuscript 13 = BNF 50 gr is also like MS 69 and others. That's the group which sticks Byzantine "John 7:53-8:11" into Luke instead. The group is now subdivided: MS 13 heads up group a, and 69 b.

The earlier survivors of this family (b anyway) cluster around AD 1052, associated with the Greek-speaking church in Calabria and maybe Syracuse. The region was claimed as part of the Rhomania, based in Constantinople, although the Normans were coming to push them out of their last Italian foothold, rather toehold. So what gives with the non-receptus shifting of the pericopa adulterae?

Ferrar thought that this was not a reference text - "The Bible" - so much as a liturgical one. Old lectionaries had circulated, in this case Byzantine ones perhaps from the reign of Constans II. These readings entered this text. After Constans' murder and the Eastern "Roman Empire" retreat to Constantinople, said Empire full of Greeks wasn't much able to dislodge this archetype, and/or didn't care enough. Then when the Normans took Calabria and Sicily, the once-obscure book got loose. High Mediaeval scholars deemed it of interest; Erasmus, for one, knew MS 69. Hence copies all over the Med: from the Escorial to Mount Athos.

Back to Stapp's John 8:44, he finds its omission of "tou patros" be deliberate. It would feed an antiMarcion agenda; the phrase also is absent from Bohairic, a Nile-delta Coptic which became the liturgical language in the High Middle Ages. My thought, however, is that nobody should care to fight Marcion on the ground of John which gospel the Marcionites didn't accept. The same Demiurge/Christ division is found in Gnosticism, and here we do find use of John. Such a battle can be had in Egypt.

BACKDATE 11/23

Breaking the skin

This year's TC journal is out. Apart from the nitpicks of a MS-sorting nature, is a standout: Psalm 22:17, or 21:17 wherever MT Psalm 10 be considered the continuation of Psalm 9. Bestial enemies have beset the narrator. Then something happens to his hands and feet.

One difference between standard prose and rhetoric, especially poetic rhetoric, is nuance. Seth Postell reports that earlier translators have failed to reach consensus. That is because they were translators. Suppose, however, the verse had a reception-history? How was this verse read entails, who was reading it - besides Christians. Why did its Jewish reciters read it so?

Some argued that lions dismember their prey, so instinctually the prey draws in its extremities. So either the narrator is protecting his hands and feet, or else the beasts are attacking them. Both work in context. Postell can at least rule out piercing or even binding.

T Corona-Borealis update

Last year I was all agog over the blazing 80-year star T Corona-Borealis. I actually thought Johnny Kepler'd seen it, blurring out the real star in that region. Well not so far this year; nothing's happened.

Bradley Schaefer says that it won't spark a Type 1a. Still: it's supposed to be gathering mass, so maybe, uh, next year. Like Texans fans say annually about the Super Bowl.

BACKDATE 11/21

Green energy mitigation

In LiberaWorld, all you have to do to demonstrate you are a Good Person is to talk about "Green" or something ending -ibble, usually "renewibble". In ConservaWorld, you just grunt "boondoggle". Some of the smarter of the latter point out that solar panels degrade leaving a lot of toxic waste, and that windmill blades can't be recycled either - and, also, julienne the birds. Since Planet of the Humans the former should at least not be talking about "biofuel" (= wood).

Add to the above, the Green Ibbles are competing with improved ash-capture from coal and general improvements in nuclear fission.

Everyone benefits from better energy storage and efficiencies. But those are being drunk up by AI farms these days. So energy production remains necessary.

Over on LinkedIn, although I might not have the links, some of the Green Ibbles have taken to heart some of the naysayers.

Bad solar panels are being reused for less-efficient local purposes, like powering a lightbulb in a bus shelter and/or serving as a roof. Meanwhile work is being done to make windmill blades more visible to birds, like painting some of them to different colours. Or there's the idea not to spread the blades over wide areas. Blades can also be more biodegradeable.

The panel-to-shelter idea seems like cope. I like the windmill ideas though. They still won't scale and remain vulnerable to ice, but at least their pollution / kill rate will be lower.

BACKDATE 11/20

Von Neumann, the Einstein of computers

The Vox Day / Ron Unz side of the 'web likes to discredit Albert Einstein by pointing out that he'd stood on some shoulders. I always felt this was misguided. Now Erik Hoel is pointing to, perhaps, a more deserving target: John von Neumann.

Von Neumann was an also-ran in my 1980s-90s education. The Curies, Bohr, Rutherford, and of course Newton and Einstein get the top billing. Turing and maybe Dijkstra, for computer nerds. It's recently we've been hearing of von Neumann again. Maybe in the same way we've been reviving Hamilton's quaternion: because computers are just so much more important to us today.

Hoel seems to endorse The Man From The Future, in an otherwise-skeptical summary, so I'll take that as the book worth reading on JvN. A book I suspect I'd read first is Hoel's own proposal on aristocratic tutoring. With the caveat that TGGP and others have had comments deleted by Hoel; so, Hoel might not be getting the input he needs from his reviewers.

In Flanders Fields is not in the Armistice spirit

"We are the dead", says John McCrae; arrogating to himself their stilled voice. It gets worse from there: Take up our quarrel with the foe: ... If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep.

So we're to fight forever, then? or to fight until ... when exactly? Assuredly once the Hun is gone from Flanders, but then what? What are your conditions for peace, dead man?

It was a 1915 poem, and it shows.

Let's not revisit the Armistice

Since national-socialism is in the news again lately, thanks to Nick Fuentes and those who are taking him seriously for their own reasons, I've been alerted to Europa: The Last Battle. This is a NSDAP answer to Frank Capra. And it has pushback, from one "Consistent_Score_602" over on Reddit.

I'll lay out my cards that I sympathise more with CS602 than with her(?) target. I've been reading Liaquat Ahamed (2009); he's pointed out the bankers didn't want the First World War, including the Jewish bankers. There was in 1914 a transnational economy. Jews are supposed to thrive in that state of affairs. On the flipside, beyond some technicalities I'll get to [UPDATE 11/25] in coming weeks...

I was unimpressed with CS602's comment on what started that War Of The World in the first place. Germany declared war on Russia, yes. Did she have to? Russia had already ordered a mobilisation. That might not hit Germany. But Russia was certainly going to hit Hungary, and that would have been a disaster. There were plenty of moves Germany could have made at least to keep the French off; I mentioned last year how bad von Moltke's plan was unfit for 1914. But the war was primed to happen anyway. Moderns are overall forgetting how far war mania was spreading around the Continent, even if THE JEWS didn't want it. Among the gentiles who did want it, it wasn't just the Germans.

On Bolshevik-cum-Soviet leadership not being Jewish, that might have been true in the 1910s but by 1920s, the promise of emancipation and the Russian civil war (White Terror, for us) drove many Jews off their lands in Poland and Ukraine into the Bolshevik-controlled cities. There, they were recruited. The Holodomor aside; we can talk of the Gulag. There we must ask after Genrikh Yagoda (opportunist, who should have known better). ctrl-F "Yagoda" ... nothing.

The documentary Europa further talks the vile state of Weimar-era Berlin. CS602 poopooes its claim of hundreds of thousands of children trafficked in Berlin, on account that would sum to the entire child population of the city. Would it, though? Ahamed cites 100,000 prostitutes of any age (and sex) in Berlin at any given time, probably sharing a source with Europa. Such children don't stay children, nor always survive to escape childhood. We are talking about a decade for the process. And it might not be Berlin alone. Also if we are in a conversation about numbers, uhhh....

As to German prosperity, the review correctly points out that NSDAP Germany was not as prosperous as was 1920s America - nor 1930s (the now-greatly-depressed Americans having already bought all those cars, and garages; and chickens, and chicken-pots). But, uh. Who was? I don't think you compare the Germans to the Americans at the time. You compare the Germans to the French, or to the British or to those luxuriating under the socialist paradise eastward.

CS602 claims 700000 rural Germans leaving the farm and swarming the city. Sigh, numbers again. Either way: that process was happening anyway with the introduction of the tractor. It was happening in the American rural South; Germany was if anything catching up. Certainly Russia was.

These are nits, because they don't much affect the thrust. In fact I may even have improved the argument, inasmuch as I am not seeing THE JEWS being for the 1914 war, nor for the 1917-18 phases of the Russian Revolution, nor for the collapse of the German lines on the Western front.

However. Liaquat Ahamed does lay out a case for transnational money doing better from the 1923 inflation in Germany; and I do see Jewish recruits into the early Soviet system causing a lot of damage. (Ekaterina Jung has implicated more the Latvians, but that's neither here nor there.)

As to the Nazi punks in the 1930s, they were genuinely crooked and leeches upon the German economy, such as it was. We agree on that much.

Denisova 25

This preprint came out some weeks ago, but is worth noting now: A high-coverage genome from a 200,000-year-old Denisovan by Stéphane Peyrégne among others.

We have lots of material from that cave; Peyrégne-et-al.'re now up to #25, apparently. We can now add that to the six others (or, eight; but #11 and the best-preserved #3 were hybrids). Which are all a lot younger; in fact, they replaced the sort of Denisovan this #25 was.

D#25's ancestors had mixed with Neanders (who'd diverged much earlier). Then, as noted, his - this was a male - descendents left the region before the other seven got there. Did D#25 contribute to later populations?

Mostly what this super-ancient molar is giving us, is a triangulation of the Denisovan tree. Such that, confirmed is that the Denisovan contribution to Melanesia differs entirely from that to East Asians today.

BACKDATE 11/15

No, Noah did not store tablets in Sippar

Zimbir was an important city in Sumeria, which parasemitic Akkadians later elided to our familiar Sippar. The Sippar sun-temple archive has "renown"... today. Because it is a library; we like lie berries here. Saddam's archaeologists dug this one up in 1986. Unfortunately it got looted thanks to George Bush II and the locals who used him as an excuse. But some of it might be coming back, or got photographed before the lootage.

The late news comes from Enrique Jiménez and Anmar Abdulillah Fadhil. This is a hymn to Marduk, oft-copied, but fragmented - or so the article argues. It seems that AI was used to gather the fragments, as to associate them all to the same hymn.

It's been neglected. Not only was the text scattered in fragments, they also date to the 7th century and even later. This is the Neo Babylonian era, or perhaps Terminal Babylonian - mostly the Persian or even Greek/Parthian era called "Hellenistic". I don't know if the hymn was ever sung at the courts of, say, Hammurabi.

Since the archives at Sippar were for the sun god, that Marduk is here praised suggests Babylon's influence. Indeed from vv. 25 on, the hymn shifts subject: a god is praising Marduk; I expect at Sippar's sun temple that would be the sun, Shamash. And vv. 100f praises Babylon, then the Babylonians. And-and, some of the reconstruction pulls from Babylonian texts as well. By Nabu-Kadrusr's time, the Babylonians were draping the glory of Eridu upon themselves. They also nodded to the ancient stele, which the authors associate with that of Hammurabi.

So I agree: a work of late Babylonian propaganda, disseminated throughout all the lower-Mesopotamian scribal schools.

But what the actual hell is this nonsense: One of the key goals of the LMU-Baghdad collaboration is to decipher hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the renowned Sippar Library and ensure their preservation. According to legend, Noah concealed these tablets there before the flood. I do not find any reference to some legend of Noah in Jiménez-Fadhil. Also stupid is this which is claiming the tablets are Middle Bronze Age which they are not.

BACKDATE 11/12

Grokipedia fails the most basic test

On this sad day of James Watson's death; we must discuss those who refuse his life's work. Which was biology - and genetics, which Watson helped invent as a field.

Scientody, if you don't like the word "science", concerns models of the physical world which models may be tested. You may or may not ever have liked Milgrom's modification of Newton, but it proposed to be testable. And it got tested, and proven wrong. It was still science.

This is not the case for "intelligent design" which is why ID got thrown out of a Dover court. It was always a philosophic stance, coming out of Near Eastern societies' need to enforce a common cultural frame of reference. Later the Greeks eavesdropped upon some of these conversations such that we got David Sedley's classic book on the their "Creationism"(s).

Grokipedia has failed to understand this. It's picked up whatever its AI has picked up. I suspect: from American Right sources. Like when Microsoft's Tay got fed inputs from 4chan.

This bodes ill for Grokipedia elsewhere.

On attending Shabbos dinners

Evan Myers is being strugglesessioned because he won't attend Shabbos (=Sabbath, for KJV).

First up, if a Jew is going to complain about a Gentile not attending a Jewish ritual; said Jew must then explain why they cannot sit in upon an Orthodox Sunday Mass. "Idolatry!", the Jew will respond. Which is fair enough! Jews as Jews do not, can not, recognise Jesus bar Miriam as Christ. In fact, some edgelords among them consider him a momzer boiling submerged in a nasty substance in Hell. And you know, they're right: per CS Lewis himself, if Jesus was wrong, that's the afterlife he deserves. I can accept that those who do not believe what we believe are not going to want to partake in the rituals in which we partake. (We at least agree upon the Saracens.)

How can a German participate in a ritual based in an ancestral exodus from a land they never knew? The German might not always have been German (geneticists are now saying the culture came from the Bottenviken) but such assuredly were never Canaani. And this assumes Evan is not an Ó Meidhir, nor a Cymraeg - they've never not been Irish or Welsh, respectively. The ritual is simply not theirs.

Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica I-II, q.103, a.4 agreed; this entered the Canon Law too (1917) #1258. I recall the Letters of James of Edessa preaching against attendance as well; although not in our confessional tradition, Jacob's statements of praxis represent the Late Antique baseline of transconfessional relations.

I will here disclose that I could accept an invitation to a Sabbath. But... I am a good part Jewish. Saint Paul has granted dispensation to my kinfolk who are Christian. So I cannot speak for Myers.

Overall, Myers' decision lies within his own conscience. It should be assumed to be in good faith.

Co-redemption: a Nestorian take

Return To Tradition points to Cardinal Victor Fernández, who no longer wants CoRedemptrix as one of the Marian titles. RTT considers this an insult to Our Lady. I consider that over-emotive. But we can look at the semantics around the title.

A paper can have one main author and several co-authors; usually this can be seen if the main author is out of alphabetic order. But it also can just have a gaggle of co-authors. OnePeterFive were earlier punting on the argument; now seem to be bringing past authorities.

In the Catholic (and, more so perhaps, the Orthodox) perception, we don't say that Jesus was a CoRedemptor. The focus remains upon Christ. As to why bring up Mary here: that's because she shared some of Christ's suffering.

... on the other hand, Judas wept too, in Matthew's Gospel. As did Peter, excepting in the Johannine tradition. Maybe the women who prepared his body for burial.

1 Peter argued, yes, for Christian grief and mourning to be taken on par with Christ's suffering. I have long promoted 1 Peter as essential for our canon (as opposed to, say, 2 Peter); I have prayed the Stations. But I do not see where any Apostolic text would extend that to Christ's death - and resurrection. Am I a co-redeemer for praying the Stations? subhânalmasîkh

And Saint Paul, that great apostle of the Resurrection, quoter of that hymn on the Incarnation for the Philippians, author of the "born of woman" creed - didn't bother with Mary's postpartum role.

Fernández sucks for several other reasons, some of which go to Mary's One Job as a woman. But once Mary had done that job, she became as any other female saint - or, really, as a male one, like Joseph.

Coredemptrix she is not. Fernández deserves credit for laying down the obvious.

Delayed Huronian

Cyanobacteria, they say, contributed to the Oxidation - but didn't trigger it. The former spread before the latter. Dilan M. Ratnayake, Ryoji Tanaka, Eizo Nakamura proposed (August) a model as to why: urea and nickel.

Urea has nitrogen and dissolves in low-pressure water, which nitrogen doesn't (N₂ dissolves in high pressure, hence the Bends). But urea seems to get too high a concentration with nickel about. Also not good for plants. I guess?

Anyway eventually the nickel dropped off and the urea got to a decent level, allowing the cyanobacteria to bloom. Oxygen ran riot, the temperature plummeted, on with Huronian.

Iliad #10

Robin Lane Fox wrote a large book about The Iliad which wrote off the tenth chapter of that book, called "Doloneia". The rest of Fox' book dealt with the Iliad without it. Whatever conversations Fox was engaging with wider Homerian scholarship elsewhere, here we cannot blame Fox: Fox was delivering the consensus scholarship of AD~2020.

But maybe the Doloneia isn't a bust. Maybe it is merely corrupted. Christos Tsagalis is making that argument - and Andromache Karanika is agreeing. (Kind of a Dorian or Arcadian last name... shouldn't she be "Andromacha"?)

The deal is that this tenth chapter mirrors the ninth. As, we suppose, an insertion would - or a chapter composed after that one and before the next one. Tsagalis, apparently, is pointing out elements of this Doloneia as do not mirror the ninth, and are further absent from those afterchapters.

Homerists will know "wergon" as the common euphemism for bloody work of swords. This chapter plots a μέγα wἔργον of Greek assassins against Hector over there on the Troy side. - rather, it was supposed to plot so. Somehow, in the retelling, the "work" became nerfed to a ... spying mission. This retelling involved Rhesus of Thrace (whom the Greeks kill) and his horses. Consolation prize!

Or maybe all that Rhesus stuff didn't belong in The Iliad and was stuffed into this tenth chapter. So the book and its reviewer argue.

When the Imamis had three books

In 2022, Amin Ehteshámi got "The Four Books of Shiʿi Hadith: From Inception to Consolidation" published. Sort of the Shiʿ complement to Jonathan Brown's work on the canonisation of Bukhari and Muslim.

In the Middle Ages, the Shiʿa had three books. In the late 800s/1400s Ibn Abī Jumhūr found a copy of Kulayni's Kafi and promoted that as the fourth. Barqi had a Mahasin before Kulayni, but Ibn Abī Jumhūr didn't rate it; most likely, he couldn't find a full copy. We still can't.

It may be that the Kafi wasn't easy to find either. In fact: none of them were. Shiʿites didn't always have secure scriptoria over the centuries, like the Sunnis enjoyed. A lot of these scholars complain about that; other scholars give up and advise jurists, if you can find one of these three (later, four) then you can go ahead and use that book to run your court. We may suppose that's how the Buyids had muddled by in Iraq.

I take it that when the Safavids took Iran - which had Qom and Mashhad - the Shiʿa could copy those books again. That's more the 1000s/1600s I think.

Colavito gets mean again

I fully accept that gates exist as need keeping, and Jason Colavito is an effective keeper of the gates. Except when he isn't; and he has a bad habit of falling upon college-basement tropes ("homophobia!", being common on his blog). So here he is with a mean spirited review, of Manvir Singh. At least Colavito's being honest... this time.

The drive to find a common source of Western languages and mythologies, is a Western drive. Which is natural to Westerners - you'd think. But somehow it's a problematic when Westerners do it; and The New Yorker needs to mention it. Because Whiteness.

The fun part is that Singh doesn't engage in any of the pseudohistory that spawned from this drive... and isn't even Western. He's probably one of those Baltoslav offshoots given his name. Actually given Singh's name you'd think Colavito would be more interested in how he's bucking the Out Of India theories.

Toward an orthodox king of Britain

To continue Charles Coulombe's musings on how Catholics should recognise the Saxe-Coburgs:

Charles Coulombe lists some GermanEnglish monarchs who may have converted to Catholicism on their deathbed. Charles II springs to mind but he may always have been a closet case, like Sepharad-born minister Ben Disraeli the Marrano; anyway Coulomb is concerned with postStuarts. Coulomb claims Victoria wavered - but, truly wavered; she didn't take the leap, nor was she holding to the santa fé in private like the former Charles.

Her son Edward VII however might have taken that leap. Additional speculation swirls around George V.

The above stated, our Charles III - reports Coulombe - had his chrism blessed in Orthodoxy. That is not the same as Catholicism; but Orthodoxy is taken seriously in OnePeterFive, where we consider Anglicanism a LARP, which it is.

It may be that Charles and Prince William are tacking toward the Antiochene communion. They'll still not be Catholics, but they'll at least not be a joke.

The Jacobites no longer exist

With due respect to Curtis Yarvin over the late 2000s, the Stuart claim on the English throne is the Norman claim: conditional on its loyalty to the Altar and on some credible ability to assume the Throne. For us said Altar, since Charles II's (probable) cryptoCatholicism and of course James II's overt Catholicism, is Saint Peter's. OnePeterFive ain't the best Catholic site at present but on this much, Charles Coulombe seems to know what he's on about.

In 1766, Pope Clement XIII recognised, on the death of James III, George III as King. There remained outside Britain a Jacobite Pretender; but, in 1807, that one up and died. The line can go through females among Stuarts same as for Saxe-Coburgs like Georgie over here. I mean, heck; Queen Anne was a Stuart, just an unlucky one (and Protestant). To this day, via various female Pretenders, the Stuarts may boast a male - in the House of Wittelsbach. Problem: this one is trying to marry another man. That blasphemes a Sacrament before the Altar therefore blasphemes the Altar itself.

Yorks also survive. Simon Michael Abney-Hastings Earl Loudoun is living an 'umble life downunder, and is a Catholic to boot. Coulombe isn't concerned with them.

Sample Size Compensation

The Fatima apparition spawned a heresy against the Dormition, unfortunately rife in the Western Church which - ironically - had earlier raised the Dormition to canon. (Its consecration of nonCatholic Russia is further an insult to the Orthodoxy of Russia, but I don't care about that, except inasmuch as it has erected yet another barrier to the reunification of the bishops.) Now Richard Hanania is explaining why it didn't happen.

What's lately happened is that Scott Alexander has been arguing for that apparition. Why? I dunno. Attention probably. It may take an attention-hound to fight an attention-hound.

Hanania is arguing similar to the "Big Data Fallacy", which he acknowledges, but says is different. What we skeptics notice in Biblical apologetics is how the apologists point to the fat stack of Byzantine bibles and cite it as proof of a Majority-Text. Well, no; it just points to the history of Christian takeovers of the scriptoria. To get to the text you have to go to the 100s and 200s AD, not the 600s. Fatima is actually different since the mass apparition is claimed to 70000 at the same time. So, more like the appearance of Christ noted by Paul, which "Saint" Luke perverted into the Spirit at Pentecost / Simchat-Torah.

Note how in "Pentecost" too we can see how an original mass apparition can be recast as something else and then canonised...

What Hanania is saying is that the peer pressure will be stronger in a crowd of 70000 from the same families, than in a small group of about a dozen. Also, the "Skeptics!!1" in the crowd told everyone they were skeptics BEFORE but now, after the fact: BELIEVE, BABY. They did not evince a paper trail of skepticism before the event.

Given the trajectory of the Papacy since the Fatima apparition, it may well be that it was at Fatima that the devil entered the congregation.

The myconid conquest

Two articles on the emergence of life before animals. Continent Nuna of the Boring Billion 1800-800 Mya is surveyed. The life on land, from 1400-900 Mya, spanning Nuna's breakup, would be fungi.

Earth had surface oxygen by then; thanks to the algae and cyano, but their home was water. The plants could make no foothold on land. Until fungi allowed for symbiosis with lichen.

Lichen isn't preserved well; but we have a few additional tools from genomics of fungi and plants today. They're talking about horizonal gene transfer, like when retroviri burrow into animal genomes. These events can be used as before/after date-markers. And then, I guess, related to what events we can know about, like the timeline of a supercontinent connecting all the shoreland.

When Christ nearly died

Checking back in on Richard Carrier, we can sum up three theses. 1. Six of Saint Paul's letters are indeed Paul's. 1. Besides those six: 1 Clement and Hebrews also come from the first century. 3. Papias was kind of a moron.

Ignatius of Antioch by contrast was no moron. But, you know... neither was Paul. So why does Ignatius' Christology look so much like Antiochene Orthodoxy today, and so little like Paul?

That - says Carrier, rather said it in 2017 - is because Christianity suffered a terminal-Permian blow. Among the gentiles Pliny the Younger couldn't find many acting Christians in Bithynia, which is northern Anatolia not too far from whither Paul was sending these letters or even his successors, like whoever did Colossians on his behalf. With a collapse in Christian membership, became possible for men like Ignatius to promote an alternative Christianity based on the Gospels; or, at least, whatever Gospels that Ignatius could find. (I suspect he had the Gospel of Peter, rather than something good like Mark.)

BACKDATE 10/29

Charlie Kirk's Quaker nationalism

Daniel McClellan is critiquing the late Charlie Kirk - unfairly. I may as well take this space to explain how to do it fairly.

Charlie Kirk was one who thought on his feet - and then spoke from his hip, if I may. He does not always say everything properly. That said, I think I can explain what he's talking about in the video which McClellan is calling "lies".

Kirk brings the "Liberty Bell", which McClellan points out was not called that until 1830 when it had the crack, from its origins as a Leviticus 25:10 bell, which even then "proclaimed liberty throughout the land". For the Holiness Code, libertas was Sumerian amargi: relief from grain debts and freedom for the debt-bonded. In 1830, the people associated libertas with, well, freedom: from oppressive governments. Inasmuch as Philadelphia was founded by Quakers, they intended the same.

This was not an "Enlightenment" slogan but a Christian one. The Quakers who struck the clapper on that bell for the first time were ringing out their Christianity.

In that respect, Kirk is reading the same targum upon וַיִּקְרָא as the Quakers had done. As for "The Founders": although the Declaration might be Jeffersonian, Deist, Enlightened and generally Left; since the Constitution and the First Amendment, the Union Of States was decidedly more conservative in its stance. I do not believe it is an accident that this Government was then assembled in Philadelphia. (It had to move later because of the yellow fever but - let's not get too far in the bullrushes here.)

Kirk perhaps worded his argument poorly, and the Quaker reading was at base flawed. Neither of them are coming off as poorly, however, as McClellan; who is simply slandering the man.

BACKDATE 10/28

Cretaceous Park

Geologically 70 Mya wasn't that long ago and ... we got an egg. NYPost thinks there may survive DNA.

That won't be the last egg we'll find. Elsewhere we're hearing that dinos were doing fine here in Parias until their asteroid-intercept system blinked out. This blog's readers will recall hadrosaurs were out-n'-about the whole time. To the extent fossils haven't been found, much of that is because our continent remains lush.

It would be a supreme irony if the Americas were an outlier; with dinos doing more poorly in the Old World, whence the most successful placental mammals spread out. Because of course the Chicxulub target-site was right across Our Gulf.

Gliese 251

GJ 251 is within the ten-parsec range (18.2 in ly), and is known for a close-in planet b. Today the news feeds are pointing me to c.

This planet orbits at a 51 day year and is, I suspect, tidally-locked. It is unfortunately four times Earth's mass. Whilst that does mean it likely still has its atmo; this also suggests a crushing supercritical atmo, such that "atmo" might not even be the word. So: no life.

At least we've seen c. The 51 day periodicity might be easy enough to spot in a high-mass planet against a M dwarf this close, but... GJ 251 is a flare star. That is why it has taken two decades to nail c down. And we only tweezed b in 2020.

Ayy lmao!

Sabine left this open for comment: Palomar transient events.

If we don't believe in aliens, and today we should believe less in aliens than they did before Sputnik, the answer seems obvious - to me anyway. The early Soviets were covertly researching how to get Sputnik to work. At the time, the US was concentrating on aerodynamics (and nukes of course) and not on space so much. Even ICBMs were designed to land ballistically upon Russia, not to circle the planet back to the Americas. That is why Sputnik was a shock: it leapt frog all over DARPA.

If the Soviets launched a sat that was broken and not circling the planet many times, that didn't count and the Soviets basically hoped the US wouldn't see 'em.

The dumbest Habsburg

The last Austro[I]-Hungarian[IV] emperor was a Karl, "Charles" to Anglo-Normans. I am unsure why he is first-of-that-name in Austria; several other deutschsprachig Habsburgs had ruled Austria before him, not least Charles V.

Anyway he's beatified. OnePeterFive just treated him with a tongue bath. Those who knew Karl I/IV best, said he was a thirty year old who looked twenty and had a ten year old mind. So who's right?

The Allies, which my ancestors were for, can appreciate that the man reached out to France to nope out of the war. Geopolitically: the correct move, given the Americans' imminent entry and the Russians' weakness. But he botched the handling of it. Austria stayed in there despite this move, and famously lost.

Karl got Religion in his final years, but then... so did John Plantagenet of England (and not of much France) 800 years ago, also first-of-that-name. When are we getting a second John? Probably not for another eight hundred years.

That OnePeterFive slobjob reminds me of those tiresome hagiographies littering the Church Of The East, like Thomas of Marga, as Victorianly translated by Wallis Budge. Catholic laity are cheap dates.

BACKDATE 10/22

The plagues under Akhenaten

Disease was just an unfortunate fact of life in the ancient world, and Egypt had some malae ariae on the Nile Delta. So when records reported diseases under Akhenaten, historians naturally connected these with the turbulent in-and-out of the new capital at Tel Amarna.

New reports would disconnect these plagues. They might have been ill down north, but not in the dry land - not much, anyway; tuberculosis did affect some, and others suffered from the effects of hard manual work. In fact that was likely good motive for the 18th Dynasty to stick with the lands of Amen away from the delta of Ra: it was just healthier up there.

Plagues would be a better suspect for the failings of Dynasty XIX which followed the Amarna Age.

BACKDATE 10/24

The Way of Horus

Tuthmosis I of the 18th Dynasty is considered, presently, to have ruled 1504-1492 BC. This was well after the Thera eruption and at a time the Hittites weren't doing great, also the Minoans seem to have been sharing Crete with the incoming Greeks. Whatever was going on in Libya or Nubia, the Pharaoh didn't care. His eyes were on Canaan. Problem: desert.

This Pharaoh figured rather than bypassing the desert, he should build a land route. Yesterday was announced a fortified waystation: Tell el-Kharouba. Latinbros will know it as the via maris; Egyptians called it ḫꜣt Ḥr. (The "King's Road" seems to be the road right through Sinai to Eilat.) It's dated to Tuthmoses 'coz pottery got his cartouche on it.

BACKDATE 10/24

Pleistocene lead exposure

We are all, I think, aware of arsenic exposure upon early Americans from Albuquerque to Chile. This led to the survival of the AS3MT mutation, expressed in the liver. It turns out that the Old World had toxic mineral exposure too. In our case: lead (plumbum; -208 mostly).

These early hominins had to have ingested the lead somehow, because it's right there in the remains. And we can't blame modern contamination. The bones are dead, dude; if there was ambient lead it should coat only the outside.

The claim is that lead salts had dissolved into cave water. I'd have thought that sedimentary caves like limestones and sandstones go more to calcium and silicon. But some caves are volcanic, or are simply ... downstream of the mountains. It gets worse: lead acetates hit the "sweet" tastebuds. So people - meaning, anthropithecenes - would actively seek out the lead-infused "mineral" water against pure tasteless water.

Eventually, back in Africa, our shared ancestors evolved brain defences against lead. Which, in Roman times, evolved brains as could tell that lead should not be ingested; and in modern times, that could tell the rich not to blow it into our environment.

The first Australian tektites

About 780kBC something scattered tektites across the Sunda. Here, slotted for 15 November, is an earlier field: 11 Mya. h/t ScienceDaily.

They haven't found the crater for this. There should be one: tektites form when the meteor hits the ground. Australian ground tends pretty dry today; but the Pliocene was warmer for Australia (which is also a moving target) so might have been more erosive.

Sedeprivated Canterbury

The see of Britain collapsed with the Roman province, so had to reëstablished: in AD 597 at Canterbury amongst a Saxon people. Thence Saint Paul's Cathedral was set up in London-wych AD 604. Canterbury weathered the Danes, the Normans, the murder of Becket, the Magna Carta, and even the Reformation. The last Archbishop in communion with the Romans was Reginald Pole under Queen Mary I. The present "Archbishop" of the Anglican schismatics is AWFUL, as the acronym goes.

Presently the leading Cardinal who speaks in communion with Rome in Britain is Nichols. That does not mean Cardinal Nichols is "Canterbury-in-exile", symbolic as that would be. It does mean that should Anglicanism be dissolved sooner rather than (inevitably) later, it would fall upon Nichols to choose his cathedra.

Unfortunately Nichols is not delivering results, either.

Collision detection just got fixed

According to Dr Carroll of "Two Minute Papers", Ryoichi Ando has fixed A Cubic Barrier with Elasticity-Inclusive Dynamic Stiffness (pdf).

Collision detection in games and movies had been done with a logarithmic barrier. If the object was too thin however, seems there might be a singularity (Carroll calls it "panic"). The collisions would not get detected and the thick object would break through the thin one.

If you are playing with late 1990s polygons then you just sucked it up. But movies - for one - are supposed to be photorealistic. So if Superman has a cape or, worse, you want realistic flesh and skin over a skull, "artifacts" of the thicker structure would seep through. So editors would waste weeks and millions of dollars fixing these bugs.

Various methods of "clamping" could be used to kludge the collisions before human editors came in. It all reminds me of the Ricci Flow With Surgery by which Grisha Perelman fixed the singularities in Hamilton's partial proof of Poincaré's Theorem - and beyond. Which made it a perfect proof. Some might grumble that was kludgey too; but if the kludge is mechanically applied and works by induction, it's a proof for any given finite or even countable solid. Unfortunately for artwork, the clamping didn't catch all the (literal) edge cases.

Ryoichi Ando would use cubic barriers. They don't have to post-process the artifacts. On the flip side: the new algo seems to be slower.

So it probably won't be used for games except in cutscenes. The speedrunners and plain ol' cheaters will be fine.

Anyway here is the github, refactored a fortnight ago. It's in CUDA 12.8 which looks like C. The paper was published last December, so as you see nobody took it seriously until some actual code was produced (which I totally understand). I don't get Received 20 February 2007; revised 12 March 2009; accepted 5 June 2009 in the paper's end though (since it relies on a lot of recent work); that looks like a stray from a template.

'Ali Ibn al-Madini

Tabari's history on occasion reaches back to one 'Ali, "Ibn al-Madini". That means his ancestry was of the Madinas: Ctesiphon and Seleucia. The Mada'in would lose its status to Kufa and then to Baghdad.

As of 2022 we now have a critical study. Our 'Ali is considered a coward and/or a crook in Salafi circles, starting from Ibn Hanbal's time. Everybody else has tried to give him a fair shake.

'Ali lived in the wrong time, AH 161–234/ AD 778–849; for the places he taught. He was no Umayyad fanboi and never visited Syria. He straddled instead pre-Hanbal Sunnism and Ja'farid Shi'ism. The consensus enforced by the Caliphs was that the Quran was created like any other Revelation including the Torah and Gospel, however flawed and incomplete the latter might be. Ibn Hanbal taught otherwise. Ibn Hanbal would have the legal profession in the Deuteronomy-to-Montesquieu stream. More the former inasmuch as the Quran was the new Torah except more so.

Since I do not believe the Quran coëxisted with the Lord, nor was revealed by Him in its present form: I am most on the side of the earlier Caliphs and, therefore, of this 'Ali. If we want Law as separate from Executive, which I do, then the Quran is not where I should start. Just to lay out mine own biases here.

So I feel for 'Ali, between tyranny... and bigotry. He could see that the ahl al-hadith was going toward the Hanbalite direction. It appears he redoubled his efforts on critiquing the Hadith as a corpus: 'Ilal, they call it, or jarh wa-ta'dil. Yahya bin Ma'in is his clear successor.

I suspect Bukhari was similar. They say he too didn't like the preëxistence theory. He carried Ibn Hanbal's ahadith (which Ibn al-Madini didn't), because Ibn Hanbal actually was very good at the Hadith; but not his theology / coranology. Bukhari wanted a hadith-focused Sunnism that didn't have to be Hanbalist.

BACKDATE 10/27

55 Cancri grows again

The 55 Cancri system technically has two stars, but most astros have neglected B. B is a M4.5V red dwarf at 1065 AU from the barycentre. If you consider how dim our own Sun shines at that beyond-Kuiper distance, you'll get a picture of how Cancrian colonists might even forget their companion exists.

This might be changing. B has planets. One of them is in its habitable-zone.

I'm pondering how stable this cluttered menagerie. It may be we need to keep watching this system to add, or rule out, more planets.

BACKDATE 10/19 ht Kyplanet

Zernaki Tepe

Tepe means "Tel" in Turkic. Zernaki is a Tepe around Lake Van. Yesterday, excavations found some inscriptions.

It seems to have been founded under Aramaean influence, given the new inscriptions, whose content we aren't provided. I don't know if that means Assyria - it seems, not, although the use of Aramaic couldn't hurt. Later I understand that Urartu extended its hegemony over that lake, which would explain why some of those inscriptions are defaced. Eventually the Assyrian Empire would crush Urartu.

I suspect the main contribution of this site to History will be insights into the preImperial state of the Aramaic language(s).

BACKDATE 10/24, yeah we're behind.

Battle of Ascaran

Islamic lore is heavy on the "Battle of the Camel" between 'Ali on the one side, and the rest of the Hijazi aristocracy on the other. 'Uthman al-Umawi had been killed. All the antiUmayyads then bickered amongst themselves, chasing 'Ali to the Iraq out east. 'Ali won and became the caliph of all the antiUmayyads. The battle is called of the Camel because ...

At the time, outsiders called this dustup the "Askaran" in Armenian. Scholars refer to 'Aisha's name for her camel, 'Askar. It always smelt of folk-etymology and of poetry to me.

I learn here that 'askar in the Iraqi dialects of Arabic means "camp". There's another link you have to pay for.

This makes more sense. Maybe the 'Askar (Syriac 'Askhara) was a nascent misr like al-Hira of old. Sites were fluid in those days, Tawwaj used to be an important misr in southern Fars and was later abandoned. Other amsar like Mosul near Nineveh and Tunis near Carthage have overtaken the ancient cities; heck, Najaf has overtaken al-Hira and indeed even al-Kufa.

BACKDATE 10/27

Martian ozone, past and future

Mid last September, we learnt about Martian ozone. Venus and Earth have polar vortices. It turns out that Mars, with an Earthlike axis but much less atmo, also produces ozone.

Mars might not produce all that much ozone; but when it does, the O₃ stays there. Because the Martian caps are - presently - 40 K below the temperature of the rest of the planet. Also although the perchlorates might (I think) help produce those infamous CFCs, said perchlorates are locked in the Martian soil. To the extent they're kicked up in the dust storms they're not getting to the vortices.

Now: I don't know how long this will last, because unlike Earth (and I suspect Venus) Mars' tilt is unstable. Earth has a heavy moon. Mars has a couple of drifting rocks. As a result the feedstock of Mars' volatiles is eroding.

BACKDATE 10/19

Constraining Prox B

Just to fill in the gaps: RISTRETTO. This is the proposal to constrain Proxima b's vitals.

Since we do not yet own a manned lunar or asteroidal presence, and since LEO isn't for shadowed 'scopes, it is expensive to do SCIENCE from a space environment. So squeezing the most out of Earthbased 'scopes is the best choice. When I say "Prox" I mean that closest system in the Centauri constellation which is southern, so the South is the place to do all this. There, the best altiplano is Chile's (although I wonder about Antarctica); which already has a ESO 'scope.

I wish them well. They say that RISTRETTO can study our ice giants too.

BACKDATE 10/21

For hate's sake

Jane Goodall was, in life, a brilliant primatologist whose insights led to a revolution on how we see primitive sociology. I don't think "chimpout" will ever leave our lexicon.

So it distresses me to hear that, with her final breath at 91 years, she wanted me off this planet. Two years ago she was talking about how a third of this planet was unnecessary; Elon Musk called her out for that. Goodall has (vindictively) added Musk to that list of people she didn't want to see anymore.

Goodall after a lifetime of studying amoral animals died an animal's death. Talk about taking the wrong lessons.

Planet Y

Planet Nine has taken on some brutal constraints up to last July. Then in August, Amir Siraj, Christopher F. Chyba, and Scott Tremaine instead proposed a planet with different parameters. The study has now trickled into NASA Space News.

The study is of the classical Kuiper Belt. Some KB-Objects have entered capture or at least resonance with that monster Neptune: Triton, the Pluto system, Orcus. These are excluded (unless/until someone can figure out whence they came). The paper looks instead at the reservoir as has avoided, thus far, this fate.

Our solar system has an "invariable plane", close to (but not quite) the ecliptic plane of the Earth's present revolution around Sol. The paper defines the invariable plane from the angular momentum vector of the whole system. The KBOs within 80 AU, where not Neptune-resonant, remain Invariable; but those past that, cluster at their own angle, which is not the Invariable.

Siraj-Chyba-Tremaine would resolve this by proposing a Mars-to-Venus-ish mass in the 100s AU inclined over 10°. At that distance I'd expect a lot of bright ice and lacking Pluto's dark tholins. They think the Vera Rubin should be able to see it, with its LSST survey.

Karnak

University of Southampton has posted Ben Pennington's history of Karnak. We learn that in primordial Egypt, this was a sandbar which became dry land after the Nile Flood. At some point the Egyptians thought this a symbol of the emergence of land from the Ocean. So, 2200s BC, the Thebans built a temple on it.

Even then the pyramids downstream were a few centuries old. To give an idea how colossally ancient this civilisation is.

Thebes followed the Sun-god as Amun, as you'll see in the Pharaohs' names of the 18th Dynasty; the more-Delta-aligned 19th preferring Ra. We're starting at the Sixth Dynasty - or later; the rise in Thebes' profile might herald the intermediate period when Egypt fractured into "nomes". It seems suggestive there's already a ref to "Ra-Amun". The Amun-Ra syncretism is famed in the Pharaonic Dynasties, so it surprises me to see this so early.

The "Ra-Amun" ref comes in the 2000s BC from one of the three Intep petty-kings. It may be they were aiming to reünite the Two Lands. Not long after 2000 BC, Egypt would be one again.

The Global South in the premodern age

A couple days back OnePeterFive ran a (qualified) defence of our Pope. That site caters to Catholics on the furthest Right, and as such became rebels against the previous Pope we had. That Pope was a north Italian raised in Argentina. Argentina, when Bergoglio was there, was a sort of decrepit Southwest-European colony. The present one is a Chicagoan whose main ministry was Peru. Argentina was not really a poor nation. Peru, on the other hand...

OnePeterFive is trying to get across the concept of "real poverty". The American South had this after Reconstruction and its failure, when the South lost its slave structure and evolved into a serf-to-peasant structure. We are now hearing the same held for India. Early seventeenth-century England was hardly a nice place to live, true; that's one reason they had a civil war, and so many fled west. India at the time was more like the fourteenth century.

I think it fair to call the Mughal administration a colonial empire on about the same level as the French in Saint-Domingue, or the Spaniards in Peru. Where is a throng of cheap labour who are not you, you don't better their lives. You pay them the least possible and invest in personal security.

As for the American South, from the youtube I linked the farmers were already (belatedly) replacing their sharecroppers with machines. The children of the liberated sharecroppers just remembered not seeing their parents over their childhoods, which they resented. Do we judge them for their resentments? The Pope would not judge them. OnePeterFive is not ready - yet - to judge the Pope.

I suspect however that 1p5 won't be long in following me.

Boron salts for rocketry

On topic of efficient rocket fuels, here's something on the chemical end: Manganese dyBoride.

MnB₂ is a halide salt which is a solid at the usual inner-system temperatures, like pure aluminum. It also seems about as safe as a table salt... until you add kerosene, or maybe methane if we're adventurous. It's not so much the weight that excites them although that's good too (20% more energetic than aluminum); it's the volume (150%!).

They conjectured that this salt should exist in the 1960s but couldn't actually make any back then. Now they have Arc Melting.

The scale of production cannot be high. I think they want it for low-earth satellites. Unlike metastable nitrogen we should be able to ship this stuff up there without it blowing up en-route.

BACKDATE 10/6

The other Mubtada'

In 1989, Gordon Newby produced the Madinese/'Abbasid Old Testament, which he or his editors mistitled The Making of the Last Prophet. It's his translation of an assemblage of mediaeval quotes from Ibn Ishâq, mostly Tabarî. Newby presumed that Ibn Ishâq had composed a book which he, speaking Qurashi, would call the Mubtadâ. This summarised, for Madinans and for 'Iraqis alike, the foundation the Muslims were supposed to accept from the Christian Bible. The "Book", proper, was by then no longer fit for Islamic instruction.

Newby got some reviews (pdf); the most famous might be the one Ibn Warraq reprinted, back when the Internet was weaker. Personally I dislike Newby's output where he opines on current events. But I never call him a "pseudo scholar". Newby's book remains an excellent index to Ibn Ishâq, and a cogent argument that the Mubtada' did exist - if only in Ibn Ishâq's own notes.

I just found out that someone else wrote a Mubtadâ, and that this one survived in real manuscripts. These (three) MSS unfortunately are fragmentary. However some of it may, like Ibn Ishâq, be reconstituted, from later quotes. Ibn 'Asâkir seems to hold most of them. We owe this, once more, to the indispensible Tron Honto: Ishâq bin Bishr. As these authors were addressing Easter.

I know, I know: a lot of Isaacs are running around over here. Maybe their oh-so-Israelite names inspired them to go on that hunt for Israiliyyat. They related some Christian lore as well; except, so Sean Reynolds argues, that this too was had from the Jews. Unlike the Jews these good Muslim felt that dear departed Yashô' was, nonetheless, still the Christ. I'll leave all that to the Honto.

I'm here to ask how come we haven't got a publication of this other Mubtada' yet. Get on it!

BACKDATE 10/6

Trajectory

Philip Lawler has a column over at Catholic Culture. Most Catholics were on the "cautious optimism" level a month ago. On 18 September, Lawler was still there. I had abandoned regular Mass attendance by then, after the 13/14th (Vigil); this pope was leaking support even before that. Mike Cernovich had called out Cardinal Prevost as a false shepherd years before; Prevost is now "Leo XIV".

Subsequently archbishop Cupich, also highly despised in the "trad" circuit, bestowed an award upon Senator Richard Durbin, an excommunicate for other bishops. But not for Cupich. And not for Prevost / "Leo".

Moving off of Lawler, bishops like Cupich are promoting a bad Bible. That's no problem for those who can read the languages and navigate their versions, who can take or leave this or that mistranslation - but how many of us do that? This problem is for the layfolk: what gets read in Mass is supposed to be The Word Of The Lord.

Catholic Culture hasn't even got into the blessing of a block of ice lately-performed. By The Old Gods And The New: water is "Living" when it runs through the font, and only then is it fit for washing. You do not bless the Others.

This may explain why churches are targets now. The Communion is weak. It doesn't stand for anything. Its congregation is legacy. The Scripture that bests suits it is the scripture of Solomon in sura 34.

Christian Identity is not Christian Nationalism

I don't know that Mr Greenblatt will still have a job after all the hits he's taken, but one of his recent tweets does raise a good point. This concerns "Christian Identity".

This isn't Christianity. It is not, either, neither: "Christian Nationalism". Christian Nationalism is what Peter Hegseth believes in: a Crusader / Church-Militant mentality. This is, arguably, Latin-coded. It is not racialist. Pope Gelasius and Saint Augustine were African Latins; Columbus' whole mission was to recruit Americans. We can argue to what degree any of this did any good, or if these men were Good For The Jews - but we cannot say they were racist.

Where Christian Nationalism is a stance within Christianity; Christian Identity is not. You have to listen for "dog whistles" with the 'Nationalism; which tunes honest Christians cannot hear. Christian Identity is the howling pagan wolf. The Jerusalem Cross is not the "Celtic" Cross.

As dogs go, in that old fight between the ADL and the TPUSA: I had none. We did however note how the ADL considered TPUSA "Hate" which it did not for Antifa. The ADL has a defence for its definition of Christian Identity, and we should accept that defence. There was no defence for the slanders the ADL levied against TPUSA, and we've found the ADL deleting its glossary as a result.

As the ADL's future goes, honestly I wish it well. Jews need advocacy as any other nation does. Its commentary on the Celtic Cross remains useful. The ADL should build upon correct research, and should be more careful about its positions against neutral parties (like TPUSA) who do not intend harm to Jews nor to anyone (even if we disagree).

Primordial Earth

Add Kruttasch-Mezger to the growing pile of evidence that Earth formed inside the soot line. From Bern's presser, which admittedly is imprecise over carbon.

From the ⁵³Mn-to-⁵³Cr clock, Earth must have coalesced into a cooling ball within three million years. This has a serious knock-on effect: Earth (and Venus) formed where volatiles like nitrogen, ammonia, and methane could not exist. Nor could the big one: water. Carbon doesn't melt or vaporise at these temperatures but tends to mix with such volatiles to make hydrocarbons, which do.

Therefore the volatiles we got, down here beneath Mars, must have been transported hither. The study proposes Theia for us. It could hardly... not. The same must be true of Venus.

I am less sure of Mars. It has trouble keeping its volatiles to this day given its low gravity and room-temperature summer days. On the one hand, congratulations for providing something close to our null-hypothesis. On the other hand: how much of these molecules were delivered in the old days and when?

Two roads, west or east

Earlier I was pondering the near-total wipeout of Central Europe and Balkan populations, courtesy the Slavs. Lately comes news from the east. How did they get to be (Russo-)Slavic?

The region is Volga-Oka, which means southeast of Moscow. Everyone here is R1a: specifically R1a-Z280 which gave rise to -CTS1211 and -Z92. So, still the old Russian taiga-steppe after the Indo-Iranians left for Andronovo and Sintashta.

CTS1211 is first caught in Lithuania, so presumably Baltic; 1900s BC. But it's all over the place now. Z92 seems rarer and stayed in the west. The demic spread long precedes the cultural shift to Russian. (This is a good illustration of how pots are language, not people.)

As to what they spoke before converting to Russian: it's hard to say. I don't think we have loanwords. More likely, they were already speaking a dialect more Slavic than Baltic. They pulled Old Russian toward them away from, oh, Jugoslavic.

We must now talk Uralic, with its male N signature. This is well known to have intruded into the west probably in the Iron Age. Some of this Volga-Oka territory is now Mordvin / Mordovian (yo, Quest for Glory IV!). The paper takes pains to separate Erzya from Moksha. But their ancestry is R1a too. Contrast the Finns and the late Hungarian nobility.

So I am guessing to the extent some of the Mords speak Uralic, they did this (independently) to interface with the Uralic fur-trade, and were not conquered. They probably spoke this paraSlavic beforehand. Maybe the Old Hungaria, now Khanty, had demic conquest but not the Mordvins.

An agnostic case for not summoning demons

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I don't believe in G-d. (That much shouldn't be a difficult assumption for my longtime readers.) Let us further assume that the barrier between this our Universe and the Warp is impermeable. (This much, for sake of argument only.)

The Jezebel coven last month called into the Warp anyway, against Charles James Kirk. Said coven received what they requested. The Cernovich side of the Right, like Megyn Kelly, are crying foul.

We Catholics are told, constantly, that prayer works. If you are an agnostic, the case for prayer - even if you don't do it sincerely, or can't - is that the object of your prayer might feel that he's getting a powerful Patron on his side. Also it might inspire you, yourself, to do something concrete to help, because there's something tugging at you that "thoughts and prayers" are empty. Maybe even especially if you are bad at praying.

It happens that Catholics believe in a god of mercy and justice. It is not in us to pray for evil deeds, or it shouldn't be. Jezebel have appealed to different gods.

If prayer works for agnostic reasons, then prayer works no matter your motives and no matter your request - for those same reasons. A prayer to the Dark Powers hardens your own heart, and it makes unstable people ponder if the Dark Powers might give them aid. That aid would, of course, be towards doing fell deeds.

In short, Kelly is right. Jezebel engaged in a dehumanising discourse and raised the cause of evil against that of good. No good could come of it.

The Getting Started math subs

So we got a TRS-80 Color Computer and it came with manuals. At the age of nine I got interested in the Getting Started With Color Basic subroutines out back; in the 1982 edition anyway. These were for cosines and other functions not offered in the baseline 4-16K versions. We had a 32K Extended CoCo, so a lot of these were in fact offered in this manual's sequel. So why bother with the original?

My interest then was in how come there wasn't a SQR(-1). The "SWR" algo in the first manual seemed like it might allow it; when I duly typed this in I saw the numbers never coming to a stop. Later on of course Gleick would be mooting the Imaginary Number, which opened up plenty of other angles, but we certainly weren't taught those in the third grade.

It occurs to me that the BASIC square root function might retain some interest otherwise. There exists also a function for exponentation. Why not just... ^.5?

In the manual, what happens is iteration. It starts by setting up a value Y, which is just the input halved. Then comes the incrementor W: (x/y - y) * .5. Repeat until W=0. There is also a Z to remember the previous value of W.

This is, clearly, Newton's iterator. Why we need Z I dunno. I also get the feeling that initial Y doesn't need to be the input halved. Can we not bithack the input like q_rsqrt? That'd start with VARPTR in this tongue. Although maybe that would require we do all this in assembler.

On topic of assembler one Walter Zydhek in 1999 wrote Extended Basic Unravelled which - I trust - does what its cover promises. Behind the scenes, the CoCo was running Taylor (12) Series for the ATN function. Which looks much like what the manual's ATN was doing. The EXP also uses Taylor (8).

We find the SQR in assembler was not Newton. It just sets the exponent to .5 and then slips into the power (^) operator. Which then does the same LOG-then-EXP calc as the manual was doing. Why even offer the SQR in the first place?? /rant

One should point out further that Taylor means self-multiplication, and a lot of it. So x^2 is (much) more expensive than x*x. Honestly even Newton SQR should, generally, not be as bad as the ^.5 we're given. Hence why Q_rsqrt exists against ^-0.5.

UPDATE 9/28 for mantissa tricks, Kasper Nielsen's collection (pdf).