Brain drain

Nature ran a poll: 3/4 of scientists are considering the exit-door from the US. Leave aside we got this from Doug Cunningham at UPI, un-elected propagandist; and from Glenn Reynolds, likewise. The poll is credible.

'Tis true that many science-appreciators have got to be "Scientists" because they threaded the political needle back when their universities were very Left. However. I do not know that we can say this of Peter "Warp Speed" Marks nor of Steve Sailer.

Trump I believed in cutting red tape from biology. But he was betrayed, as Sailer must admit. Trump II has chosen, in retaliation, that crank Robert Kennedy. MAGA today, also feeling betrayed, has sided with the crank. You cannot today support THE VAXX in a conservative comment-board without getting dogpiled by selfappointed demon hunters.

Meanwhile creationists, about the clearest example of antiscientific grifters as can possibly exist, are feeling their oats.

If I were any kind of biologist, to the point of a practicing MD, I too would feel unwelcome in Trump's America. Expect rationing and/or higher premiums; expect to import any useful cancer medication. In the face of the epidemics which Kennedy's FDA will give us.

The pets of the classical era

Cyprus has always kept cats, like the Near East has long had bronze. Lately, we've seen Questions about when real bronzes actually got to southeast Europe - the classical Greece and maybe Cyrenaica. We're hearing similar about the cat. Some claim that the Greeks preferred polecats, that is the semidomestic ferret. Aristotle, for one, knew of tamed mustelids; it is probably the ferret, useful for rabbit-riddance.

Herodotus knew the cat well-enough to describe feline sex-politics where the cat isn't fully domestic, accurately as far as I know (it matches how male lions treat, say, cheetah cubs). He saved that for his account of Bubastis in Egypt. Some conclude he didn't see many cats in Greece. More likely, he just didn't like 'em: cats shared the reputation of mustelids, that they attacked birds.

The claim "yes ferret no cat" somewhat fails to account for the appearance of cats (and maybe the domestic rooster) in Etruscan grave-frescoes. Certainly as chickens and other fowl were being kept in coops, those keepers didn't want cats anymore than mustelids. Look what a pest the mongoose has become in Barbados.

Anyway: Sardinian cats were introduced, from lybica of course, around the Iron Age. The same study has that other cats extant in Europe today, besides imports like Milo's beloved Bengal, came later and separately.

To me this looks like feral cats roamed cities in Iron Age Europe but were not much beloved there. They were treated more as pests than as friends. It may have been the Hellenistic Era, when Egypt was integrated with the Greek and (increasingly) Roman world, that increasingly-urban Europeans acquired interest in cats as companions. Which cats they imported, rather than simply grabbing cats off their own streets.

The strewn field

Loeb-bros arguing for an impact for the Younger Dryas can take solace in the evidence for earlier impacts. One such formed a Tektite Strewn Field all over southeast Asia and Australia (skipping New Guinea). One Kerry Sieh is most-associated with the theory, on account he thinks he's found the crater: a volcano ate it. Specifically, the Bolaven in greater Thailand now part of Laos.

Not everybody is amused by that line of argument. Jiří Mizera, especially, accepts - I think - that a mess o' tektites has littered the southeast Old World. He just doesn't like where Sieh has set it. Anyway now youtubers with a sideline in bad AI are talking about it. So it's probably time to take note(s).

The present consensus might be Carling et al.: on the MIS 20 large meteorite impact (c., 788 to 785 ka) or 786-783 kBC.

pQeheq

A couple days ago I mooted that the Berber languages of the western Egyptian oases were intrusive, from the great Imazighen west. I despaired of figuring what was spoken there before the Dorian invasion of the Cyrenaica - hence the questionmark on the title. Perhaps I should have posted that two years before I did. A little rooting-around pulled up Silvestri 2023.

The Hittites were known for incorporating foreign-language rituals and vocalising them into cuneiform. The Egyptians, it happens, did that too; there's a famous papyrus in demotic transliterating Canaanite hymns. What I didn't know is if the Egyptians ever bothered doing that favour for the tjehenu, excepting personal names like Osorkon and Sheshonq (when Libyans ruled as pharaohs). Says Silvestri - they did. One is in the "Qeheq" tongue, written in Merneptah's hieratic.

The DOI is 10.3917/edb.049.0319; but we can't read that UPDATE 3/29 here. So here is Silvestri's talk about it.

Preserving propellant

Propellants get expelled as plasma. Most of them are gas at room-temperature, or at least subject to sublimation at the pressures afforded in deep space. Maybe we could store, say, mercury as a solid in the shade beyond 1 AU; but we ain't using that in Earth orbit. Peeking in at Handmer's place, here's something on propellant boiloff.

This isn't for microcargoes, for which we're doing just fine with Hall thrusters. For longer missions I'd add that interplanetary journeys should be using fusion, which will lower the amount of propellant the ship needs to schlep. And once said ship gets to Deimos or some C-type near asteroid they'll be able to extract more propellant thence and just use that when needed. As we learn in Agile and JIT, inventory is waste.

All well and good: but we cannot get away from inventory in orbit, and anyway fusion propellant is mad pricey. We need a gas station, in short.

Direct carbon scrubbing

This blog every now-and-then must remind, even be reminded: photosynthesis does not break up carbon dioxide. Effectively the process breaks up dihydrogen oxide; the carbon dioxide is rather absorbed, with the extra hydrogen, into glucose. This blog can compare the hydrogen-drinking Sabatiers for methanol, acetates, and formic acid. All quite useful for artificial biospheres... in an Antarctic summer. But what if they've rationed the ice?

Nanjing and Fudan universities (the latter is in Shanghai) is promoting a process inspired by the photosynthetic process, using a lithium compound instead of water, one step down the 'Table.

They're touting it for Mars because everyone is, but we keep finding more and more water reservoirs there. I like better its application for low-water sites: S-type asteroids, Venus stations, our own Moon. Unscrub CO₂ from the scrubbers, then use this to remove the C from the CO₂. Oxygen returns immediately to the rest of the (nonfarm) station.

I assume there is still a farm because, yay glucose (and wood, cotton etc.).

The evolution of Ministry

I was vaguely aware of this band called "Ministry" when I attended high school. Then I came back(?) to Houston for uni. In 1987 I was hardly old enough to watch the Numbers concert. If Ministry came to Houston in 1993ish, I suspect they would have upgraded venue past my means, Psalm 69 being their best seller.

But I'm not getting into all that. I've lately been wondering about their earliest stuff. Once I was old enough for #s (and for Power Tools, another club over there) I started (re?)hearing material like "Revenge" and "Halloween". This synthpop was very very different from "nWo" (which the venues also played of course) or that hotrod song. Ministry did interviews in which "Al Jourgensen" - not the frontman's Christian name, but what he goes by - had to address his first album. I recall he called With Sympathy an "abortion". We'll get to Al's 1990s-era edginess, too...

Al was adopted into the Jourgensen household, -ish, in the 1960s. He is in fact Cuban, a refugee from the socialist island paradise - but not by his own choice. In 1980 he got with some friends in Chicago and formed Ministry. They played several gigs, which were semi-successful, but when Al got his cut, it wasn't enough to live on. Al squatted in a 9th/Roosevelt garret, like Aladdin in that cartoon. Electricity was stolen, even the cable he used to steal the electricity was stolen (from Ace). There was no roof. "Halloween", although you'd think it was a poser song (he had money by the time the 1981-1984 collection came out with it) comes from real memories.

All these songs are readily available on Youtube and several other places: live performances, demos from indie label Wax Trax (where Al worked), and With Sympathy which Al historically hasn't cared if you pirate. It's even on archive.org.

Al's first Ministry was postpunk with a lusciously fake British accent. Among Sprite's 1990s radio-spots was a 1980s pop parody, mocking exactly that American tendency to fake accents. "I'm Falling" (1980) attempts to pick up from Joy Division's later work; later they lean harder on the synth. Not at all unlike... New Order! Although Ministry go more to the Rust Belt underclass experience, of working crap jobs, dealing with semiloyal women, and dodging the cops and the criminals both. Think more, Eminem's Infinite era; Ministry in fact played several gigs up in Detroit too.

"I'm Falling" ends up as a B-side to the funkier "Cold Life" (1982), bass from Lamont Welton. Somewhere around here is voice-distorted "Same Old Madness", "Hardman", and synth-driven "Revenge". Al now claims he also had "All Day", "Nature of Love", and "Halloween" in 1983; a version of "All Day" will end up on... Twitch. As Ministry became a synth band Robert Roberts became at least as important to the music as Al himself.

So in 1983 Arista / Clive Davis rang up Al, to produce an album. (They obviously hadn't heard the full set.) Al agreed - immediately. Took the money. Took the ticket.

Al gamely spent the rest of 1983 and 1984 promoting this album. His set had other work, like "So So Life", and minimalist "Anything for You". And... that was it. Al spent (almost) the rest of his four decade career dissing his own debut. Until, basically... now.

Last year Al delivered an interview, explaining With Sympathy and promising to play some of that stuff in future, at least "Revenge" which as noted precedes the "abortion". So here we learn: Al had the master tapes burned, excepting whatever his ex-wife had.

Clive Davis did tell Al what he was up for: final approval of everything. His manager became Eliot Roberts who'd done the Cars, which Boston studio he was to use. They cut his hair like Robert Smith, and made him wear Armani. One can also observe the liner notes: to the extent the Ministry playing the Lakes circuit had been an actual band; With Sympathy is just Al, treating his erstwhile bandmates like Rob² as session-musicians equal to whomever the other Roberts and Davis were digging out of the Boston scene. Whatever Ministry was developing into, was not what Arista was going to put out.

Because if you look at "All Day", it really is a step beyond "I'm Falling" and "Overkill". "All Day" is not about some older Marshall Mathers bitchin' about his jerb. Al now has the bossman (nice Caribbean word, b.t.w.) drinking champagne whilst Al works. We're questioning the hierarchy of business. We're close to questioning capitalism (although bossmen outside Reagan-era Chicago-Detroit, like Elon Musk, do camp out on the floor).

Well... Arista sure delivered that lesson on Reaganism.

On to Twitch and beyond... "We Believe" and "Just Like You" get political, asking English-speakers to sit out the Cold War. The title track of Land of Rape and Honey - an actual town slogan, in Canada - trashes the life of Moses, from Sinai to the book of Numbers; so the theme here is Christian televangelism. The band claim that both of these albums had stuff written way earlier, assuredly true of Twitch (which should have included "America"). I don't know about the later one although "Stigmata"'s lyrics read like a still-darker "Revenge". I guess the political album didn't have the room for a Christian-themed song, which a religious album opened up.

Anyway once we get to "Thieves" on A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, we're into the uninteresting Ministry we got now. This Ministry can do a "nWo" against neoliberal Bushism one year and "Just Stop Oil" for... globalist liberalism the next year. Rise up for freedom! - denounce "misinformation". There's no lodestone beyond "Republicans bad, death to America". Music For Your HR Department.

I think Arista broke the man.

Who were the Libyans?

A few years ago, I noted a conspiracy between the Libyans and the Sea Peoples as they made a play for Egypt. Yes, "Egypt": the pharaoh stopped them at the veriest house of Ptah; he altered his own name to "Merneptah", from that miracle. Today I'm pondering the Libyan side.

East Berber exists... today, and assuredly in Late Antiquity. I wonder however how long it has existed in western Egypt, or as far as classical Cyrene. Cyrene enters history when some Theran Greeks took it over and made it Doric. It then still had locals, perhaps the same locals as lived there during the Nineteenth Dynasty. But... who were they?

When did Awjila or old Tunisian Berber break off from the general Tamazight family? Nothing I see marks these languages as particularly deep in the tree, contrast Zenaga. In fact Awjila owns the same Punic verbs as the others.

If any "Nasamonese" was spoken there in Late Antiquity, it should, instead of Punic loans for literacy and technology, own Egyptian and Greek loans; allowing for some pre-Canaani Northwest "Amorite" Semitic. And structurally it should own some Zenaga-tier archaisms.

I must conclude that the Libyans were not Numidians and, whatever they spoke, might not have been Berber at all. It might have been some other branch of AfroAsiatic; it might have been paraEgyptian. I cannot even rule out that the Libyans in question, LBA to Early Iron, were simple Greeks, later to be Dorianised. We have evidence for Mycenaeans in old Sicily and South Italy; and of course Cyprus, maybe Pamphylia.

NEW CONCLUSION 3/28: Qeheq was Berber. We're at the stage of Libyco-Berber and the Canaries: enough consonant-inventory and syntax to assign it to the general Berber family; scarce on the actual, you know, words. Although, Awjili is no descendate of Qeheq.

Stable orbital rings

Although Dyson and Niven get the credit, and - at the stellar level - fame; their geometries simply don't work. Niven had not read Maxwell, who in the prior century(!) proved that Saturn's rings were debris-fields. Colin McInnes is handling the Lagrange for spheres and rings.

I think we should return to Maxwell, to apply this to Birch rings around mere planets.

Bonhoeffer's heirs

Eric Metaxas a couple decades ago wrote a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas today is MAGA, with all that entails. Last year 43/50ths of the surviving Bonhoeffer clan staged a tantrum. Project 2025 extreme Januarysixxenophobizzzz *snorkl* wait where was I?

We may all agree that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life-work was in opposing the Fascist State's claim to enforce orthodoxy. The Church in his day - German Protestant, in his line - was such that being on the slightly-liberal end of it may - superficially - look like conservatism today.

Wikipedia has every motive to make his "Confessing Church" a Church Of Happening Now. Dietrich isn't today able to express his own sentiments, the séance being frowned-upon in Christian circles.

The evidence shows that the Bonhoeffer family was close and has remained so. If there had been internal dissent, like within the Kennedy family over Robert Junior... we'd know. One might also consider the King family; Alveda vs Martin Luther III.

But surfing the Left wave of a Left-moving culture is a heady rush. The family, after Dietrich's death, has not ceased surfing: past Trump, past even the quite-mild "Project 2025". Would Dietrich have jumped off the board? If so, when? And who in this family has had the same force of character? To read Bonhoeffer, even through the Wiki lens, is to find a stern critique of government and of sin; sure. Would he critique it only when it is nominally nationalist and conservative? Is there a critique of a totalitarianism as might purport to be transnationalist and radical - say, against the Munich Soviet or Trotsky? (Being antiNazi in 1939 would at least come with antiStalinism in the package-deal.)

Ideally Bonhoeffer could have found a consistent stance in Pope Pius XI's Vatican. I must admit, however, that structurally this Vatican also included Cardinal Pacelli and, well, let's just say that the ensuing Papacy proved... insufficient, for a Bonhoeffer neoDonatism.

Metaxas smells much like 'Boomer conservatives of the 1990s trying to assure us that they were heirs of Martin Luther King Jr who was a Republican you know and that Dems are the real racists. And so's Darwinism. I think Bonhoeffer's family knows itself, and their ancestor, better than Metaxas does.

Although, Metaxas isn't Bonhoeffer's only Protestant (soi-disant) disciple. Consider also Jacques Ellul. Ellul is worth taking seriously.

SOFTENING REWRITE 3/22: My poast last night assumed a liberalism to Bonhoeffer himself which may or may not have been there. This rewrite couches that as questions. Actual questions, not disingenuous "kwesschins"; I honestly don't know, and want better people to answer them than the weakminded Bonhoeffer family or, on the other side, Metaxas.

Not her fault

I wasn't going to say anything, because I know my bias, until reports were forthcoming about Endeavor's "unmanned crew" Delta flight wot landed bellyup in Toronto. 17 February.

Any "womens' opportunity network", or other "protected" resource-group which can do things just as well as any pale male, is going to be under a microscope when something goes wrong. I'm going to buck my usual bias and say that in this case, I'm not blaming the pilot or crew. Annoyingly longhouse as they were.

Some commenters suspect a midair stall. We are dealing here with the North American Great Lakes in midFebruary. This is lake-effect on the ground, and a higher latitude than even our own "Windy City" (Chicago). I do not believe that an all-male crew of peak performers could have landed this beast with ease.

So no: to paraphrase Good Will Hunting, it was not her fault. The decisions were made elsewhere than in the cabin.

Now: although the "unmanned crew" wasn't to blame, that they made such a Tiktok of it all before now, introduced a factor into the decisionmaking. Consider 9/11. Anyone in the decision tree had to think, "if I block this flight, is HR going to talk to me about blocking Opportunities". If he's liberal there's no way he's standing in the way. If she's alt-right, she of course has not revealed her power level, but... she's thinking: "they bought their ticket".

The Cretan halter

Four years ago were revealed some ivory artifacts from Knossos. This last 3 March, one Anastasia Kanta cowrote with Palaima and two others, An archaeological and epigraphical overview of some inscriptions found in the Cult Center of the city of Knossos (Anetaki plot). The scenestealer is an ivory circle. So we're just getting to this "now".

This is in the "neopalace", Arthur Evans' famous "Minoan" labyrinth with the smooth downpoint red columns; "Anetaki" plot, sacred to Knossos before they built that palace.

What is had here isn't just the length, 119 characters of Linear A syllable and pictograph. It's the calligraphy. The script wasn't just for accountants. We never should have thought they were, because linear scripts just work better for papyrus (and plaster) than for clay. Cuneiform and other stampings work for clay. This would be the prestige Linear A to overrule local scripts, likely especially the southern Egypt-facing scripts.

One does wonder where the papyrus books be at. Could be, they were burned. Or just rotted: Crete ain't as damp as, say, Dacia but it ain't Egypt, either.

BACKDATE 3/21

Thomas Dalton's out

I'm of several minds as to this latest doxxing by the SPLC. Among its revelations is that Dr David Skrbina reviewed "Thomas Dalton"'s work... the sort of thing that got fellow antiZionist Glenn Greenwald into trouble, two decades back. Although, yes, Skrbina does own a PhD, as "Dalton" claimed of himself.

The news has floated as far up as JihadWatch, despite that the SPLC and JW ain't exactly porch pals.

So we see here the promise and peril of anonymity, balled into one. I always appreciated that some fan of Schiklgruber's ...creativity, took it upon theirself to translate the most famous product into English, rather than leaving it to amateurs and/or enemies like, er, myself. On the other hand the antiZionism is tiresome if only because the NSDAP was a Zionist ally itself; and arguably was more selfconsist when so.

Much as SPLC overuses "hate!", we must swallow the pill: Skrbina simply hates him some Jews, and that's the muse of his professional life. Antisemitism makes a man stupid. Stupid enough to sock a selfreview.

BACKDATE 3/21

The Tudor stage

Ron Unz, in Joseph Sobran's school, is talking Shakespeare. Unz has the motive to call Sobran a prophet; which we can take or leave, but the service Unz presents in so-doing is a good one.

Back in the early 1990s, Sobran (erstwhile English-lit major) thought "Shakespeare" was actually Edward de Vere Lord Oxford, paederast, based on the sonnets. More lately, McCarthy has found that Shakespeare's plundering of Sir Thomas North went beyond the Plutarchisms everyone knows about (which we remember from HBO's Rome if nowhence else).

I would note here that I don't think we have the same evidence for North's... proclivities... as we have for de Vere. Such hasn't stuck out to me in these plays, as it has for contemporary Christopher Marlowe's (more on him later). If anything gender-bending is played for outright laughs. The Shakespearean poems, however... maybe. A Sobran-McCarthy synthesis would account for this discrepancy: de Vere had no reason to insert this stuff in North's work, which he wanted to adapt for the stage, in mixed company (if not with female actors in said company). Itinerant players touring, oh, the old Celtic avons might have the female actors but assuredly would not want to allude to what the Tudors' Church was calling "sodomy".

We can see the difference when we look at fellow Tudor Marlowe. Marlowe wrote a whole play about that very topic: Edward II. That play's audiences would know what they were getting. The topic interested Marlowe, as de Vere; it did not interest North.

I have not explored a Marlovian dynamic in Julius Caesar where is handled the character of Brutus. We might also consider the forbidden love of, say: Romeo and Juliet. De Vere's hand might be in there. I am not a Shakespeare scholar. Perhaps one of those might explore that dynamic.

SCHOLAR 3/22: Dennis McCarthy says the satirists pinned Caesar and Romeo both upon North.

Awjila and Arabic

A few articles about Eastern Berber are out. One concerns Abû Ghânim's Mudawwana, an Ibadi work, so-far unpublished. He was a Khurasani so, one expects, the original was Arabic. But, after "Buɣanem"'s death AD 820, the Imazighen of Tunis/Kairawan and points-east adopted this text and translated it, with native commentary.

These East-Berber languages are not doing nearly as well as the great mainline dialects of the Moroccan Rif. The dialect of the Augila-now-Awjila (no j) oasis is down to its last dozen thousand, if that. Marijn van Putten and Adam Benkato are on that case.

Maltese is, famously, the last gasp of old mediaeval Tunisian-Sicilian Arabic; these precede the present "Hilali" dialects, swapping out panSemitic Q for "G". The Awjila's corpus of loans are, like Maltese, NOT in the Hilali family. Awjili took from an earlier strain, which still had Q; Awjili preserves these. This has allowed actual "G" to remain - and it is G here, not the "J" of Saudi tajwîd today.

The Augilic words for Friday and maybe even for the seven day week itself came from this clearly-Qâric Arabic. Several diurnal terms came from the religious schedule. Procopius tells us that they were still pagan until Justinian. If the Augila ever knew the Coptic or Punic Christ, their new Muslim overlords swapped out every hint of Him.

Whether this language is the same as was spoken by the classical Nasamones, must await posts dealing with the classical period.

Blowback

Back when Elon Musk was an Obama darling, making Tesla cars, he started funding a "Hack Club". Ostensibly, this was for getting high schoolers into coding. Last Monday, Laura Loomer has found out another purpose: funding Planet Over Profit.

Loomer is still on what P.O.P. has morphed into, which is a domestic terror campaign. Ayn Rand would submit that it could not be anything else. She would say that anything which subjugates the profit-motive, is collectivist. Whatever is claimed for the greater good - "the planet" in this case - isn't the greater good, anymore than extinction-avoidance for "Extinction Rebellion". This is just what Sauron tells gullible people. One should add that if one cannot distribute profit through government, one can still limit profit: by clogging transport, or by simple property-destruction.

I further submit that Elon knew all along - and counted on it. Because he was making Tesla cars. He bet on these vicious terrorists to be blowing up pipelines, sabotaging petrol stations, and slashing the radiators of SUVs.

Musk fooled around with P.O.P., and now he is finding out.

The Belt will be North Asian

David Sun does not hold a PhD, the Obama-Biden academy being what it is. So we'll have to read his psychometry outside it. Here, summarised at X, is the slate of traits humans require to survive the tundra and steppe.

These traits further affected the Han when they came to south China where rice was grown. There their native communitarianism scaled to collective-productionism: 共 产. The more-Chinese way remained village-oriented, as Confucius promulgated, as the Zhou ideal. This would have been a subculture under the later Shang, which Yin family still ruled Confucius' barony; the Yin, of course, had learnt their lesson, a lesson hardly lost on Confucius.

The Americas also proved to be village-communitarian, as can be seen through the plethora of local native languages. Although, as in China, mass production of grains would emerge, here maize and the Milpa system it requires.

I expect that space life and, later, asteroid life must select for Inuit/Aleut traits, which are also Finnish traits. The one possible problem is that, in space, the people will need a lifeline to the home planet, whatever personal pride/honor might suggest. Also needed will be allowance for quick on-the-spot improv: the stone age Arctic is low on tools where your Lunar base should have 3D printing and all the robots Starship can send.

Vector

We have a pretty decent line-of-descent for various yersiniae. It started as something you'd get in the wild, but not spread (much) person-to-person. It was, basically, like anthrax. Speaking-of, the bug has been found in a sheep. This one still lacks the Gained Function (as it were) which made it a flea bug, which they're calling for 1800s BC.

Which calls into question the sorts of yersinia as afflicted Cucuteni - and BellBeaker Somerset. These villages, unlike Eurasia, had granaries and urban rodents. Did their fleas not carry le Peste? Perhaps these first rodents were spreading the bug like a hanta.

After getting those mutations which made yersinia flea-transmissible, and once it got into rat fleas, humanity was over.

Fusion propulsion

In fusion news, Pulsar is plotting the Sunbird engine. h/t Angry Astronaut interviewing Richard Dinan, at the convention in London.

AA's own titling needs work ("faster"? really?). The website, naturally, is better: Duel Direct Fusion Drive (DDFD)... specific impulse (10,000–15,000 s) and 2 MW of power. Dinan in the interview is talking about deuterium + ³helium, to limit neutrons. They are testing in vacuum chambers now; 2027 for space.

This is an interplanetary engine: With Sunbird in Orbit: A spacecraft launches to LEO (~9.4 km/s), docks with a Sunbird, and then the Sunbird’s fusion propulsion handles the rest. 3–5 km/s to Mars or 6–10 km/s to Jupiter. The initial launch vehicle only needs enough delta-V to reach orbit, not the full interplanetary trip. Meanwhile it can also supply the Moon.

A slight problem I got with the lowered propellant mass is that the propellant is... deuterium and He-3. He-3 is mad expensive compared with, say, chemicals or ionised argon. So I see this more as a means to get to outer planets where, in fact, He-3 might be cheaper.

The high water of Russian imperialism

Every now and again some nationalist pipes up to claim that what their forebears did was not really Imperialism. Jennings over on Patheos has been posting rather a lot about the American side of jingo, and its discontents. One also hears from Spaniards how they were a greater Catholic Roman Empire whose recent conversos were all fellow subjects of the Queen just like Galicians. Now: let's hear from Russians.

One can hardly call the Soviet Union a nonimperial project, but luckily for Russians it was not exactly a Russian project either. (You know upon whom Solzhenitsyn pinned it; Ekaterina Jung pins it on Latvians.) Nah. Russians go back to the Tsar who never ever did any of that Imperialism.

Peter Hopkirk would beg to differ, on behalf of the Bukharis. The Chinese might also have some concerns. Landlocked conquest seems to count less than seabourne conquest, like what Britain was doing on the Northwest Frontier of India at the time. But what if... Russia was also doing a seabourne imperialism?

Recently I looked in on the Kurils, which the EU is recognising as natively Japanese. Russia would - and at the time, did - observe they were not even Japonic until the nineteenth century. They were Ainu. Most of Hokkaido was still Ainu; the Japanese clan Matsumae claimed only a southwest peninsula. And that clan, Irishly, offered little loyalty to the imperium until the Meiji forced it upon them. The Russians, by contrast, were not - then - interested in living permanently in Hokkaido and points northeast, preferring to trade with the Ainu and with the Matsumae, in peace.

The Russians were also on fairly decent terms with the Aleuts until they, like, weren't. Over the eighteenth century, it seems, the Russians out East got more and more imperious. In 1804 they attacked the Tlingit in the Battle of Sitka. Here is Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees’s The Last Stand of the Raven Clan. The battle was a Russian tactical victory, leading to a Tlingit exodus. This did not end the war, the Tlingit enacting a bloody retribution at Yakutat a year later.

The Russians were overextended. Much further into North America and they'd have brushed against the British of the Columbia River.

Which is not to say the Russians didn't try. And that's the point as needs making to these eternal victims.

X2a

In the dead of night, Razib Khan dropped this bombshell: Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al. "The Origin of Amerindians: A Case Study of Secluded Colombian Chimila, Wiwa, and Wayúu Ethnic Groups and Their Trans-Pacific Gene Flow". Wew.

Colombia by dint of its mountains and relative (to Peru) isolation has preserved its preColumbian tribes better than most. It happens these groups although not enduring spill-in, have spilled out: Chimila / Shimizya and Wiwa are Chibchan; Wayúu / Guajiro(s) are Arawaks. (Also brought here are Barranquilla, whence Rachel Zegler's mother's mother: creoles. Maybe as a statistic control.)

The Barranquilla, if a control, cluster with the Danes meaning, the Dutch and English - not with the Spanish, oddly (were they brought from Jamaica?). As to the natives: let's start with the Chibchan-speaking Wiwa. These are like Arhuacos and, at another remove, the Maya. The Aymara "Inca" are at a more-distant remove. This suggests an ancient barrier just north of the equator, or "ecuador" if you will, also noted by Pizarro's men in their difficult journey to the Tawantinsuyú. For the Chibchan, at least their canoes could sometimes get past the Darien northward. And of course the Arawaks went nuts over the Caribbean. The southern Quechua then Mapuche are early branchoffs - but earlier than I'd think (see below).

Chimila are their own whole branch of Amerinds, before the Na-Dene arrived. Like, a preQuechua break. That means they are unrelated to the far-foraging Wiwa. Which spoke Chibchan first?

Also surprising: the Wayúu sort of Arawak cluster with the Guaraní, together branching right after the Mapuche. I'm not seeing that the great north-Andean empires transferred peoples north on this scale. This looks like the Guaraní did their own great trek southward, as did the Aymara.

Na-Dene aside, North American groups all cluster with those South after the Arawak split. I can explain this only by the Clovis revolution. Chimila, Arawak-Guaraní, Quechua, and of course Mapuche would then be relicts of the older Americas.

Which brings us to the stinkbomb: X2a and X2j. X2 is Eurasian ancestress "Xenia"; X2a and X2j are sisters. Problem: X2a is American. Arnaiz-Villena's crew is bringing back Across Atlantic Ice, of pre#woke White Apocalypse notoriety (keeping in mind the Solutreans are not Whites As We Know Them, and anyway mine own Bell-Beaker maternities have no X2). If we don't like That Sort, we can have Baxter and/or Loewen for alternative with Americans showing up in Ice Age Europe.

I, needless to say, dislike either option. But the facts are the facts. If they are facts. We'll need reproduction of these findings.

Eritrea stranded

One nagging problem for some might be the presence of "Abyssinian" or "Ethiopic" in the Quran. It is difficult enough for the "Meccan" sira; it is positively worse for revisionists who swear up and down that Islam came out of Petra and Syria (alternatively, Iraqi poets or even Beqaa). In Quran, philologers like Hamdani have already accounted for Semitic Sabaic and para-Arabic Himyaric - you'd think. Chaim Rabin pondered if we are indeed looking at south Arabian (5v p. 52); I've been pondering complete Bronze Age fossils like Mehri. But Hamdani knew Mehri.

So: John Turpin has a MA-level summary on "Christianity in Western Arabia". In it, I read notes about "Ethiopians" in Arabia - all gathered from Irfan Shahid's own summary (pdf), from Lammens. That, I wonder, could be its own essay. Let's distill this from Shahid's notes.

The famed Throne of Adulis has that the Axsum kingdom started meddling oversea in our fifth century, the Greeks' eighth. Axsum spoke Ge'ez, related to today's dominant languages of Eritrea and the Tigre. By 490ish/800 it was also Miaphysite Christian, following a failed attempt by earlier Eunomian Christians who came also to Najran. In our sixth century Philoxenus of Mabbug (d. 523 / 834) consecrated Najran's first Miaphysite bishop. Relevant to us, here weren't just Syrians: later events suggest that to the Yemen Christian Ethiopians migrated too.

One can imagine Ethiopians and Syrians both being standouts in old Najran. The Himyar, we are told also-immigrant but at least Arabians speaking something like Arabic, arose in a reaction. The Eunomians assure us they had been Christian; but now, they formally converted to Judaism. On Philoxenus' death, the Himyar descended upon Najran and murdered all the Christians they could find. If I were an Ethiopian there, my ratline would be northwest to follow the Syrians.

Syrians like Jews were well at home in Arabia's north. Such exiles from northern Yemen could go anywhere. Ethiopians stranded in the peninsula had more trouble, especially if they had not been in the Ge'ez elite - I am of course thinking of slaves. Problem: Byzantine Syria wasn't really a slave-state, past Jericho. Just trade 'em off at a Red Sea port, for safe passage. Some, perhaps, ended up at Gidda-Kentos: Turpin has that "Habashis" formed an underclass in Mecca. Who can forget Bilal in The Message.

In 525/836 Caleb of Axsum would flat invade Yemen, depose the Jews, and rule the place. The king did not ransom all the Ethiopians by-now scattered around the Near East. If any had been sold to the Zanj, Down River as it were, those would have been difficult to extract. The luckier ones worked their way up to mawla clientage - or beyond: Antar became a famous poet. Arabia was now their home.

So there's our medium for Ethiopic: disaffected mostly-Cushitic castoffs of Christian Semitic runaways, with that Semitic as their mother tongue. To the extent they were subservient to Arab masters or patrons, they wouldn't blame the Arabs for their station. It is difficult for me, as a Christian, to blame these people for choosing Islam, in turn.

Ties of unfreedom

Robert Hoyland has read Graebar (if not Hudson) and is applying the findings to the Hadith. The Roman legal maxim that "the free have no price", in spirit, is echoed in the opinions of Zubayrid-era Meccan jurist 'Atâ as transmitted to the famed Ibn Jurayj, as Motzkian "Meccan jurisprudence".

Islam came out of a late-antiquity as disliked that a man could sell his children, or himself, into bondage. Islam found itself in Judaism's position, so has reacted as did the Torah, putting restrictions on ta'bîd. We can hope for similar restrictions on usury today, law kariha X-liberals like Razib Khan and Richard Hanania.

Hoyland doesn't continue to the epilog: Islam would run full-thrust on chattel slavery of outsiders. The same happened in Christendom as the Portuguese and then Spain found themselves masters of a new, maritime, and vast empire over less-developed peoples. Between them, to their own shande, the Jews mediated, as their traders (as, once, the Vikings). Before them all I've argued that the Sasanians, with their explicitly racial "Aryan" ideology, and like Schwarzenegger never really caring about that "freedom" thing, ran plantations in bulk far later than they should have done.

To that: I suggest that the clear presence of a slave caste, especially if an alien caste, serves to make more egregious the debt-peons at home. A large-scale economy/oecumene informs all involved within it. This pits free labour, even indentured labour, against slave labour. As Larry Gonick observed around Delos in earlier Hellenistic times: "we're supposed to have slaves, not be 'em". As slavery and dhimmitude hardened as core to Islamic values, debt-peonage of now-Muslims got squeezed out of Islam.

Christianity meanwhile came to dislike that the concept of "slave" should exist... at all. It helped that we are not textual fundamentalists.

4Q185

4Q185 as its enumeration suggests is an early, Allegro publication of the Judaean Desert series from Qumran (v. 4). Some publications have reviewed it, such as Matthew Goff, Discerning Wisdom (Brill, 2007) ch. 4 (concluded, pdf). If you have $125 lying around Isabell Christine Hoppe is revisiting it, also Brill.

I don't have $125 for this and find Brill unreasonable to expect this of you, dear reader. So this post defaults to Goff.

According to Goff, 4Q185 is a non-Yahad work aligning with Ben Sira - and with Psalm 1. The Dead Sea Scroll uses the Psalter and the "covenant" to propose the Bible as the fount of Wisdom. Wisdom is female, as in the later layers of the Psalter and Proverbs; but 4Q185 won't reify "her" as hard as some postJewish near-pagan feminists have done, nor even as Ben Sira or (say) Baruch.

Goff notes that 4Q185-as-4Q185 relies further on Isaiah 40. This is where Hoppe seems to depart. Hoppe is arguing that this is a redaction. In this case, the base-text behind 4Q185 might not, in fact, rely upon the Isaiah Scroll as we have it.

Although that does not mean that the "Vorlage" precedes shah Cyrus II. I am still seeing Hellenism in this impulse. When does the Hagia-Sophia first arise in the Semitic Near East?

The early Triassic dead zone

This week we've got a few glimpses at the aftermath to the Great Dying. Frogs survived, as did conifers. This is all before the great rain, when the air was bad.

And it was hot. It got hotter in the "Late Smithian Thermal Maximum", lasting 700ky; this killed the tropical conifers.

Amphibians, it seems, can manage without air, if the water is decent; also, some bugs can burrow around in low-O₂ conditions. Some land animals could sleep it off, seasonally. But the tropics don't really have hot/cold seasons. This equatorial band was the deadzone - except for amphibians.

Eventually the Triassic got the "Smithian-Spathian Event", cooling off the planet enough for seed-ferns (that staple of the Mesozoic, pre-deciduous era). Conifers clearly survived but, it appears, as marginally as today, up in high mountains and around the poles.

How large planets form

It was early noted that a lot of the larger exoplanets, which were detected first, have eccentric orbits. This week come two articles about them: when they form, and how they end up.

Can I just say that Ji Wang looks like Oriental Elon Musk or am I going to get this blog demonetised for that... oh yeah! This is a hobby. MUAHAHAH

Anyway 王吉 is talking ⪆10 AU which is further-out than Jupiter, even than Saturn. Those are the ones we can see separate from the star specifically: 51 Eri b, β Pic b, HIP 65426 b, HR 8799c and e, AF Lep b, and YSES 1 c. These formed over an early stage (⪅2 Myr) when large amounts of solids are available in young massive protoplanetary disks. UPDATE 3/17 51 Eri b and HR 8799 can be seen.

Ji Wang is aware of the "Grand Tack" theory of our ice and gas giants. He agrees: these four all formed further out, to migrate to where they run now. This suggests that other large exoplanets, which we perceive mainly from radial-velocity measurements, might also have formed early before their own inward migrations. Which brings us to Gregory Gilbert, Erik Petigura, and (undergrad) Paige Entrican; Entrican apparently writing the code. It seems that after "runaway" accretion from superearth to Neptunian, the planets get large enough to mess around with each other. Then they get eccentric where the usual superearth simply doesn't have the power to nudge, say, a nearby Venerian.

Over billions of years, though, I suspect that inner planets of these superplanets get pulled into eccentricity anyway. We really do need to train 'scope on 82 Eridani.

Noricum falls

There exists a famous anecdote from saint Severinus' vita. Severinus lived in old Noricum, older Helvetia. Here a Roman camp was supplied until the middle 400s. The camp sent envoys across the Alps to Rome... wherever that was, probably Ravenna. They never got paid; often the envoys would get ripped by bandits. Here's the sequel: Historic Genomes Uncover Demographic Shifts and Kinship Structures in Post-Roman Central Europe.

Under the Empire, Romans afield would be... Romans. Some married locally or at least retired to a local colonia like, um, Cologne or LinColn. But most just wanted home to their native town in southern Gaul or wherever. And I guess some slipped into monasteries, like Severinus. But the monkish life ain't for everyone.

This genetic study notes where soldiers quit hoping to go back. It seems the locals weren't really offering a lot of likely maidens. The men, here, took wives from further north; deutscher wives. Everyone likes tall muscular blondes Nah - they just worried about inbreeding. They didn't even do levirate marriages, in accord with the Catholic ban. Severinus taught them well.

Iron Age Armageddon

Lately is found evidence for the first Armageddon - Josiah's battle at Megiddo. They found, at this Levantine site (which was still spinning pots in Semitic), a lot of "imported" Egyptian ware. It was cheap ware... like what might serve a host of Egyptian soldiers, rather than of rich Egyptian traders. These pots served Lydians and Greeks, too.

We're still unsure what brought Josiah to show up and get killed. That murder (or execution?) was the beginning of the end for the Judahite Kingdom, which - many believe - formed the template for the Jewish Kingdom of the Maccabees.

Inasmuch as that later kingdom could never live up to Josiah's promises, Armageddon became a byword for the Last Battle, mostly in Christianity although I suspect the Jews had preceded him.

Note here that it's Israel Finkelstein who's raised this to attention. Finkelstein is considered a revisionist. It would appear "Biblical Archaeology" trends better in later years, as is also the case for Lakhm Archaeology. I take it that every halfway-decent king commissions a Royal History beyond the bare king-list (which, for Assyrians, was a proper chronology). Some kings might incorporate earlier kings to associate the better predecessors. The books of Reigns associates Josiah's reforms with Hezeqiah's reign.

This finding validates the factual accounts of Josiah's reign, in particular a possible bent against Egypt. AntiEgyptian propaganda can be associated with this reign, like the Exodus.

Duck soup

Five years ago I gave to Unz's posters more credit than I give to them now. One topic over there was the French Revolution in its later phases. I bought and (eventually) read Schama Citizens, which I liked. Unz himself is back, to discuss the Revolution's early phase. Specifically: the Duck of Orleans' part in it (RIP Gene).

Credit where due: the Duck did own a large part in the King's ouster, larger than Schama in 1989 allowed. As late as 1968, no less an historian as Durant admitted as much. Schama downplayed this - but without refuting this. It was just a "Conspiracy Theory", floated by the likes of Nesta Webster. This has aroused Unz's suspicion.

Let's pretend for now that Webster was nuts and that Durant was credulous. Say we ignore the Masons, the Templars, the Zionists and the Lizardfolk. We are - still - left with an ambitious prince. Might it not be of historical interest, of Mirror For Princes interest; that we know when a prince aims to be King? Might historians at least consider that an attempted palace coup ran away from the plotters as to become a Revolution?

Congratulations to Firefly

Yesterday Firefly successfully got its Blue Ghost lander onto the Moon in this its Earth-facing early dawn. Firefly is a corporation, not a nationstate; Intuitive had landed an earlier vessel, but onto a slope it couldn't handle (I didn't bother blogging this). Blue Ghost by contrast is a full success.

Firefly launched the Ghost on 15 January. A craft being unmanned means it can take longer hauling its way across gravity-wells. I assume Intuitive got enough data it can produce slope-tolerant landers in future... or at least to find better slopes, because its Athena is aiming for the lunar antarctic in the 80s°.

Ultimately we want mass production of cheap landers to get cargo up there for cheap.

Tomorrow Wednesday, the Starship launch 8 will, hopefully, not explode Starship 34. UPDATE 3/6: welp, so much for that...

The self-cleaning NIH

Francis Collins, having presided over the politicisation of the NIH, is now to enjoy the newly-solvent Medicare and Social Security to which his generation is entitled. He had the opportunity to endorse the Overhead cuts which DOGE has forced on him - he certainly didn't implement any useful reform in office - but nah, he's whining about "respect". How much respect did his NIH grant to flyover Americans?

in the meantime the middle-management of NIH is taking puppies hostage. Where administrators fear their rice bowls, administrative chaos ensues. Not our fault, it's the fault of "the Cuts"!

The new generation should, if interested in improvement rather than on dunking on Team Red as this 'ere poast hath dunked on Team Blue, consider taking up review reform. This would at least use the newly-constrained overhead costs more effectively.

In search of the Minoan Bronze Age

Christopher Pare cannot find tin bronzes in Minoan, pre-Santorini Crete. The alloy was minted first in southern Britain ~2000 BC as we can expect from the tin in Cornwall and maybe south Wales. Dan Davis has a map of Pare's findings.

Pare has it that bronze may have come to the Mycenaeans first.

Davis' comments point out that all these European-Continental sites owned bronze artifacts long before the LBA. To read Davis, standard equipment was still copper or arsenical-bronze. Tin bronze was a sort of magic, "the smith and the devil"; iron in those days was Divine, rained from heaven. Archaeology has a bias to grave-goods which are precious - as is clear from the vast looting they endured in antiquity.

Overall I found Pare at first difficult to believe. Not that tin bronze was Cornish first - that seems obvious - but that it took so many centuries to reach Sicily and the Aegean. I admit the "EBA" Maghreb down the Atlantic used stone but they were a sideline until, what, the Almoravids. UPDATE 3/11 In Blažek 2014 [pdf], nhs is a loanword into this family, from Punic.

Perhaps we should ponder Tartessos including the Mediterranean Maghreb. We're looking for El Argar, which from 2200-1550 BC mined the copper. So: Murillo-Barroso - it's open, and it's in English. Not much tin (Sn) is found in the deliberate alloys (which don't have arsenic) and where tin is blended, it is blended further with lead. The paper instead notes much more "arsenical copper" which they don't count as a bronze. That implies that tin was known but, I guess, too expensive, unless you were queen.

I'd elsewise expected more Orichalc: not with tin, but with nickel and/or zinc. But no, Zn was only a trace element in El Argar.

The post-Beaker Celts

Recently up is a piece about the Celts, by Hugh McColl et al.

One coauthor Jean-Paul Demoule is active on X in his belief that the AfD - the patriot party in Germany - is "extreme right". JPD further holds that currently-mainstream conservatives must beware of any alliance with this extreme (because Hitler); in the US, that anyone right of Bernie Saunders is problematic. A French patriot flags JPD as a fraud. It may be fair to question how fair he'd be to any "extremist" in his classroom. However:

For our purpose the most-serious charge must be that Demoule's entire career has been dedicated to deny the very existence of Indo-European people or langage (sic). To translate this ESL from Angry Twitter Bro, it may be that Demoule would introduce some Nuance against classic Aryan Invasion theories, which Gimbutas upgraded to Kurgan Invasion theories, and posthumously Bell Beaker theories. The Bell Beakers are indeed associated with vast male replacement in west Europe (if R1b; Aryan would be R1a). These regions are, in Roman times, found to be Celtic or at least IberoCeltic. But we have some loose-ends. Lusitanian appears to be paraCeltic. Italy hosts, south of the Cisalpine Gaul (and northwest of Messapic and Greek), the Italic languages. They're paraCeltic too. And somewhere in north Britain we have Picts.

The Discussion of the paper associates the Celts/Gauls with Urnfield alias Knovíz. It proposes the Tollense bustup with a Celt defeat in the north; this will be Vendic in postRoman "Migration" times. Late-Bronze Celts did a lot better south and west. For geneticists one problem with Urnfield is, er, the urns - cremated remains don't leave much DNA. Anyway even if somewhat eastern, Celts were not east enough to be majority Aryan/R1a; Celtic invasions did bring some R1a, but remained R1b-dominant.

Given that, I'd suggest one reason Celtic tongues did so well displacing the old Bell Beaker tongues is that they weren't all that different then. Lusitanian if preCeltic looks much like Celtic. A similar pattern will hold as Latin displaces Gaulish - and, perhaps, as Gaulish had displaced the languages in north Italy, which may have been Faliscan in character.

As for Demoule, I propose we don't dismiss his like (or ilk) just because they are antipatriots and bullies. We flag them where they are being antipatriotic bullies. For scholarship it doesn't help in reaction to be a patriotic bully.