Khalid the Hasanist

For the Shiites and moderate skeptics in my audience, Torsten Hylén of Uppsala has now published The Karbala Story and Early Shi'ite Identity through Norse colony Edinburgh. I somewhat wish I'd had it earlier because I have Editorial Comments. My largest nit may as well get a picking, here.

Hylén's book deals with Karbala and then with the Tawwab "penitents". I am no expert on either. My research in that 60s/680s decade went more into what Muslims consider their aftermath, the Zubayrid Fitna which I handled a decade ago in House of War. That entailed some disentanglement... which (I think) Hylén is leaving entangled.

Hylén for Karbala sees three basic strands, which entered Tabarî thence Mas'ûdî (without crediting Tabarî, as Hylén complains). Tabarî's main source was Ibn al-Kalbî < Abû Mikhnaf Lot, which he supplemented by "imam Bâqir" (I'll get to him) and one other guy who wasn't Shiite. Hylén argues for their mutual independence.

I think that's a tough call. If the imamate - often a shadow caliphate - had a Story, Abû Mikhnaf and Ibn al-Kalbî between them should have ferreted it out, like Tabarî will. Also I'd think the Shi'a should have transmitted Bâqir's account through, say, his son Ja'far and even Reza. Where's that? Tabarî doesn't bother; he relates from some Khâlid who'd claimed Duhnî (d. AD 750). Mas'ûdî aside this can be crosschecked, for which Hylén brings Abû'l-Faraj Isfahânî.

Per Hylén page 72: In summary, I would place the origin of the version ascribed to al-Bāqir in Medina at the turn of the second/the first decades of the eighth century. That is, that al-Bâqir really said all this. Let's investigate.

Duhnî would have seen the deaths of Bâqir 735 and then of his brother and supposed successor Zayd 740, followed by the 'Abbâsî takeover of the Iraq 747. I don't read these tropes in what Tabarî gives us. I see other tropes, though. Those are interesting - because they're not Shi'a.

In Khâlid's account, Husayn took refuge in Mecca from the devil Yazîd. This actually has a contemporary historical valence: but it was the Zubayrids who'd claimed that sanctuary. Abû Mikhnaf couldn't avoid this and, to his credit, did not; he says that Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr did this together. ... Really?

Couple of points, here. First: Abû Mikhnaf knew Bâqir's tradition, as Khâlid taught it. Second: Khâlid has taken the Zubayrid tropes to apply to a Shi'ite figure. You know who else did this? Muhammad the Hasani called Nafs al-Zakiya. He rebelled AH 145/AD 762, after Duhnî was long gone. There's a whole scholarly literature on how his propagandists appropriated the Zubayrid biography. (Independent of Mehdy Shaddel: House of War has an appendix.)

Those apocalypse(s) which forced the Hasani upon the Zubayrid template annoyed the wider Shi'a, who by now could recall what Mus'ab had done to the Mukhtâr in al-Kufa; and the mainline Shi'a far-as-I-know didn't transmit the Zubayrid apocalypses. I propose that Khâlid transmitted such a Karbala account as would make of Husayn Martyr that Hasani prefigure, without Zubayr. Not ~110/730; more like 140/760.

Stac Fada

Stac Fada is a formation from some impact punctuating our Boring-Billion. Curtin U has redated its zirconia: 990 Mya. Some, the impact had morphed into "reidites" - a word I hadn't seen. Sounds more Norn than Scotch. Anyway - as they put it - the impact reset their internal atomic-clocks.

They haven't found the crater itself. They seem confident it's close-enough the Scottish Highlands, maybe offshore, that it hasn't been buried and/or gobbled by the last 990 My of geology.

The new(er) date would, they say, abut the arrival of eukaryotes to freshwater. Although the article implies these were the ancestors to all eukaryotes - which means, for one, chloroplasts weren't had yet. Maybe chloroplasts are being redated too?

The machine stops

The Hispania is relearning the value of warehousing power. Ed Conway is pointing us back to his 2023 thread on (rotational) Inertia; we can also read this 2021 warning (pdf). A few years ago the ridiculous fakers running Texas had switched to wind and when their blades didn't spin, their power went out. Apparently they don't speak Mexican in Spain. The accent I suppose.

To their credit, some of the Just-Stop-Oil guys have been aware that a muh-renewables grid is an Agile, J-I-T grid. Hence Casey Handmer's insistence on batteries of capacitors and power-cells. The old steampunk way was just to store this in big heavy spinning things - like turbines, which is kinda how coal works. Nuclear is also, infamously, a power source you have to keep running once you start or else. The spin can't go below 49.5 Hz in Europe or most of Japan, or - Nightfall.

What I didn't know, and Conway teaches, is that some grids even have turbines as run as a strategic-reserve. Top up energy from time to time; extract if there's a Problem.

The Emperor protects

Last year, Nathan Israel Smolin wrote Christ the Emperor. It's been reviewed at Bryn Mawr and it looks like some outfit called "The European Conservative" reviewed it too. The latter review is the easier read.

This concerns the Eunomian turn in the Constantinian Empire, which Smolin starts at "Oration to the Saints" AD 327 - very soon after Nicaea. On the deaths of the autocrat and then of one of his sons as he didn't murder, namely Constantine II d. 340, the empire was divided. In 350 Constantius II inherited the pieces and then put down a revolt.

Smolin probably doesn't read here but agrees with my thesis that theology is cover for the struggle between Power and Truth. As Michel Foucault teaches, these are interconnected; although neither can defeat Math. Bayes counts as Math.

Constantine already had to put down clerics as didn't agree with his Patriarchy, like Donatus; this book notes Marcellus closer home in Ancyra, deposed AD 336. The dynasty had little trouble finding allies like Philostorgius and the Eusebii, and Eustathius somehow survived unpurged. Constantius II's problems were Hilary of Poitiers and a man of Cagliari called, uh, Lucifer [JEROME 5/20: if para-Donatist]. In the council of Milan AD 355, the emperor had both exiled. Hilary is famous; Lucifer is not, anymore, which Smolin hopes to rectify.

Poland's Brian Boru

The Archaeology.org roundup points to the Piast. The archaeology simply confirms historical accounts of AD 930-1000 Poland: the Poles tried to form a central state, it failed.

The Piast nobles came from the Warta watershed and moved upon the Oder. By AD 960 they'd conquered a path to the Vistula also. As of AD 1000 they had a pretty large Poland, as far as Bohemia up the Elbe. This attracted resentment; Bretislav of the also-Slavic Czech tribe called shenanigans on this new empire and, AD 1030, ended it.

The conclusion is, as too-often, Bayes': "Last In, First Out". This land although supportive of a large-ish kingdom owned no tradition of kingship. The Piasts tried to create one. The Piasts hoped for a divine-right theory in the Church. In the middle of the Middle Ages this seems reasonable-enough: to unite everyone against Vikings and Prussians, and to allow for some neutral party in disputes with Saxons and embryonic Russians, maybe Bulgars.

The Catholics weren't ready and the Byzantine Empire, impressive on paper, was at its high water mark. This far north, it appears that some locals remained too truculent in their native superstitions to think much of these new priests. Famously Lithuania never accepted Polish Christianity, which led to Teutons sending their Knights over there. The Piasts didn't dare raising such an order of which I am aware. As to the Czechs, although I am pretty sure Bretislav was Christian: his demesne traded with the Elbe, so didn't see much point in shifting moneys to the Oder.

But the decline preceded Bretislav. The Piasts' failure reminds me of Brian's failure except over three generations rather than, in Ireland, three years.

David's steward

Today I spent in another town, needing a library and set to attend a performance by a Brother In Christ. A mutual Brother dropped some knowledge on me: Asher ‘al ha-Bayit. This is a thing in Catholic apologetic.

As Machiavelli noted, kings like to delegate, if nothing else than to take the heat when the king must move against an already-disloyal constituency. (Hence why nobody likes Musk anymore; they should be disliking Navarro, but anyway.) The Bible names this palace steward (na‘ar), the "man over the house"; major-domo seems a fair translation, although superior-domo might be more Vulgar. The asher ‘al term seems to exist in archaeology.

For Rome - although I'd add Alexandria and Antioch - we hold to the Gospel of Matthew. Here, Christ (Who is King) appointed Shim‘on Kepha with reference to Isaiah 22:19-23. Peter is, thereby, Christ's major-domo and steward. Over the three Churches founded on Simon's rock, that office passed to Clement, Mark, and Ignatius (respectively).

Anyway presently we're short a Steward too. Pray we find a good one.

The Neolithic Mesopotamia

Starting 6200 BC, Arabia dried out. Meanwhile, the Asians domesticated carp. Today we have a report from the 6200 BC Near East.

Amos Frumkin et al. report a lot of lightning struck the forests around the Galilee and Jordan. This burned the tinder, already dry as this blog has noted from Arabia - and Frumkin sees in the Dead Sea. What rains as did still come, flooded ash-laded soils from the hills (eroding them) into the vales. People moved down into the vales which, if not as rainy, at least could be irrigated.

I don't know if irrigation around the Dead Sea could have intercepted some of the rainwater before it got to the Plain. I guess Frumkin doesn't see major cities in Jericho or Tall Hammam or wherever else at this time.

Amos Frumkin claims that this is the start of the Neolithic Revolution. He may be extrapolating to the wider Levant including Assyria. I suspect that's more than fair around Khuzestan.

Better editing through Anglish

I heard about "Anglish" maybe a decade ago; before that I'd read some of Rhineland, a conscious effort to use Germanic words to eschew, especially, Latin. Anyway there's a Fandom wiki in this Romantic Restoration. I'd been alerted from some X poast which raised the name "Everwich". That city'd be Yorwick the DANED; Anglish pretends that didn't happen either.

We call it now "York", following the woostah pattern so common in the past millennium. Maybe in the alt-hist where Saxons got to keep the place longer after Stamford, it'd be "Erritch" or "Verch" depending on where their forebears stuck the accent. But anyways.

The conversion of English to Anglish in that article, to me, reads as a mix of "oh yeah this actually sounds better" and "cringe". I don't mind "rivers" to "streams", and maybe we can keep "rithmeet" (confluence) and "meanth" (municipality). For unfamiliar words like the latter, we could hunt for other Germanic cognates if we dislike the taste how these choices trip off the tongue.

Take "Middle Times". "Time" itself is Latinate (tempus). Why shift from one Latin to another Latin? Start over and make up a compound, like "Noonyears". Or just admit, like the Germans admit, that you've taken a Continental anticlerical or Protestant reading of history and own the Latin.

Overall I get the sense of Mad Libs.

Where Anglish shines is in flagging where Latin - or some jargon anyway - makes the best sense, after all. If we are talking about Roman times, we can't have "Lower Briten": we need to keep Britannia Inferior; which extends to our Church, which is a Mediterranean Church surviving from the Romans.

Anglish elsewhere flags where the underlying prose might be 90-proof humbug: The stead offers a wealth of sheedly drawings, of which Everwich Rede is the most forestanding, and a kind of kithship and sporting ongoings making it a folkly sightseer coming for twisands. Whoever wrote the original was clustering jargon: historic, attractions, events, variety, cultural. How about: "for hundredyears the stead has drawn hither friend and homefolk alike for its great buildings, forestanding Everwich Minster [not "Rede"!]; and for gatherings like sport". I'm not saying my prose is perfect, or even good; but it's a frame. Adjectives can be supplied in place of the "-ing"s; and if Latin be fed back as done for the 'Minster, it can be fed back with Diligence Due.

Moral values

The squirrel monkey forebrain has 1.34 billion neurons. Housecats got 249.83 mil. Humans are at 16 billion. Scott Alexander six years ago proposed neural-value as moral-value: cats are 1.6% of a human, lower than pigs (I recall Garfield noting this). The squirrel-monkey would be about 8% so don't eat 'em. If we're still letting Scott Alexander use proxies, I'll take the squirrel-monkey for proxy of other platyrrhines.

Lately we have other equations. Douglas Jones has mammalian brain mass = x^.75 where x is body mass. But neural count is usually y^.67 where y is brain "size" (volume); so just because it's a blue whale doesn't mean it's a genius. So: primates. Here neurons grow linearly with size. For primates, more brains mean more smarts.

Worldbuilders should take note when designing sentient species. Dwarf species won't be spacefaring. Beware the giants.

A scar of evolution

Over last week, "Darwinist" X floated some commentary on the Pelvic Floor, which women sometimes nickname "The Undercarriage". Being bipedal offers some advantages, for bears anyway: a higher periscope, freeing the hands to fight or pick fruit, and looking larger to scare off scavengers. Last year Marcos García-Diez, Philip Van Kerrebroeck, and Javier C. Angulo taught us that obligate bipedalism - such as kangaroos, theropods, and we humies enjoy - has tradeoffs.

Consider this a follow-up to Elaine Morgan's work. I recall haemorrhoids flaring in Scars of Evolution.

We got tight strong buttocks, and that's bad for birthing babies. Going the full Mix-A-Lot removes the advantages which help us men maximise our runs and jumps. I suppose keeping births to single babies or twins might have helped.

The paper points out that the squirrel-monkey has taken a parallel path.

LGF 2

JihadWatch continues its run at Respectable Opinion by hosting Ari Mordechai... which they bumped on Holy Saturday. At least it's not laundering the SPLC this time... just the ADL, through its cutout against "white supremacy".

I'd thought we'd lost the "Angry White Men" meme with the 1994 election. Apparently not!

If the AWM blog won't, JW should address this spectre of "white supremacy". What are "whites" and where are they "supreme"? Where exists a country of Poles, is remaining Poland a "Polish supremacy"?

I reckon a line exists between citing a Wrong site, even agreeing with it in part... and deferring to its premises. Over the past few months Mordechai and Spencer have drifted over that line.

That drift is a temptation. JW in particular has a Past; Spencer back in 2008ish played footsie with Euronationalist movements especially problematic in the Continent. Little Green Footballs shared a similar Past until that year 2008. Where LGF took a turn, JW - then - wanted to keep us watching the ball which ball is Jihad. Too many Euronationalists think that ball is Ashkenazi Jewry.

But equally, too many proJewish movements think that ball is European Europe.

The Butlerian Exodus

Once, a famous journalist and satirist mused of a human rebellion after which they destroyed their own sentiescent machines; which he incorporated into a far-future satire of trends he'd observed in his own day. This man was... Samuel Butler. (Heh heh heh.) Isaac Asimov, more a Franken-bro, preferred we keep the 'bots.

I don't think we're getting Skynet. Omar Shams at Palladium (where Casey Handmer also poasts) is talking- rather- pollution costs, ending in thermodynamics. Add also the thermodynamic effect of methanol-generators like Handmer's Terraform.

AI pollution, says Señor Solar, is our macguffinite toward a serious Lunar colony. The Moon can construct silicon wafers ... and raise them over the surface a bit so that moonquake doesn't shift dust over 'em. The caves then get supercomputers. The supercomputers, like Deep Thought, do our AI stuff for us.

My thought is that to hit us, before global warming let alone Skynet, is direct energy cost, like for air-conditioning. Governments, to protect us civilians, will limit what percentage of energy AI can buy off the grid; or, will tax the energy AiCorp makes for its AI to divert to said grid. They'll certainly throttle incoming requests - some procedural generation and Q&A could be deferred to home computers or that "blockchain" thereof. That's what I'd do. Probably what I'd vote for.

The Moon would also be a decent place to stick datawarehousing for corporate reports, archival Internet, bitcoin "mining", NP problems like "n-Body" yadda yadda. And to beam microwaves to orbital stations.

If we're really keen on bumping cheap energy, my 13:10:8 Venus-Earth Laplace or, warmer, George Smith's Venus Equilateral would work great. Bit more latency tho'.

REPOST: I'd written the core of this last Friday, I did not mean to slot it in for last week. Deerrrp. I guess it gets to be the first thing you read on Easter. Christ is Risen.

Lucky Starr, space warlock

I found Paul French's Pirates of the Asteroids (1953) and figured - hey, vintage asteroid fiction, let's see how he picks up where George O Smith left off.

I don't believe I am spoiling anything when I point out that "French" is a pseudonym... for Isaac Asimov. Asimov, as of the 1950s, was (still) the authoritarian technocrat who did the Foundation series. Not for him, Belter independence. The Men Of The Asteroids are perceived as pirates, they host some actual pirates, and their secretive leader truckles to the sinister Sirius adversaries. Our hero David Starr (named for Isaac's son, of whom we'll speak no more) never questions his loyalty to the Council Of Science.

French-Asimov's sociology leads to some headscratching moments like when Starr says to the MotA's, I want to join the pirates. In Internet circles I understand they call this "fedposting". The MotA's gently inform Starr that they don't like the word. Why they don't just immediately tattoo a big "FED" sign on his buttocks and ship him back - I suppose the reader is to wait and find out.

As the science goes, we have a tension between Newtonian physics and, I'm sorry, straight-up magick. Does the plot need artificial gravity generators? Does it need FtL communication? - or are these just devices so the lazy author doesn't have to think too hard about, say, the Coriolis effects in spingrav?

I might also quibble about the nature of some of these "rocks" (as the pirates call them). French's Vesta is a fuel station; they mine beryllium on Pallas and Ceres. In our real system, differentiated subplanet Vesta is no site to scout for volatiles. In addition he got Juno in the top four by size, an early-19th-century way of thinking where a 1950s author should have known it for #13 in size. (The fourth down French's list should be Igea Borbonica, the tenth discovered.) And I don't know how Starr sees these small rocks from the cockpit; the point of that ship is to be a near-decoy which shouldn't have state-of-art telescoping (the plot revolves around its plumbing). I'd even suggest that Juno were best-employed in the conclusion, as an example of high-albedo flagging a small-sized body past its importance.

One point I'll spot for French against the review: yes, we're good at asteroidal orbit-modelling. However, in a Solar System where everyone is out mining rocks and pushing them around, in a restive Belt not keen on logging flight-plans, especially if they get magic gravity shifters: those computer maps of ours are going to be useless in a hot minute. I also noticed a mention of Mercury's twilight zone, which in 1953 meant the ribbon of a tidally-locked planet; but we can spot our author this as well since these days we're musing perma-shaded water depots on the Mercurial poles. French should be more concerned with the delta-V even to get there.

The most egregious magick is the shield which Starr has from Smith's ancient Martians allowing his ship to skate the Solar corona. Sigh.

The saint of Antioch

Anxious Bench is taking time off its "He Gets Us" pontifications to discuss Saint Eustathius' role in First Nicaea (not the historian). Our saint did not like Arius, true. Why he didn't like Arius, is at issue. Adam Renberg moots that Eustathius told us why.

Eustathius first mooted his concerns, as Patriarch, at the AD 325 synod of Antioch. This became his proving-ground for what he'd bring to Nicaea a few months later. Renberg points out that before Constantinople had really taken off as Rome II, the great Petrene sees were Antioch and Alexandria at least as much as moribund Rome I. Eustathius could claim to be heir to no less than Saint Ignatius. His see also owned that Biblical text which the critics will call "Byzantine" and KJV-bros, textus receptus.

Eustathius insisted on a human nature in Christ. Looking in on Nicaea today, you'd think that was... kind of the point of Arius and his Eunomian followers including the Emperor. It may however be that, at the time, Arius and Eusebius of Caesarea were arguing for Christ as a created parahuman. As Marian veneration might exist to sidestep having to utter theotokos; hailing Christ's superhumanity might avoid ghayr makhluq (so to speak). Also it would become important to Dyotheletism that some humanity might exist in the Godhead to ground at least the Church. Renberg sees the true heir to Eustathius' foil not in Eunomianism but in Apollinarius.

As to Eustathius' heirs, I can draw this line to John Chrysostom and the Oriental Church; thence to, uh, Nestorius. It would be at Chalcedon that Saint Eustathius, finally, won.

NSDAP apologists are not friends of the Church

Recently, I stumbled onto a Catholic-consecrated Priest, one Msgr. Mawdsley (no relation to the Mosleys), who has decided that literal NSDAP sites like the White Rabbit are "based" and "Red Pilled". This on the heels of Theo Howard at OnePeterFive touting the likes of Richard Williamson (and of E. Michael Jones, in that capacity).

It is, I think, fair to pray for Jerusalem's Patriarchate; that it serve a Canaanite Rite of the Church, like we have Byzantine Rite for the Orthodox including a Syriac rite for Euphratean Semites. When Catholics like those in OnePeterFive request this, I have no problem. It may or may not work; one can argue if it does any good, but either way: you tried. You showed you cared.

But running cover for those who first took European Jewry as hostage and then did their best to wipe us out, whether we had embraced Christianity or no, does no good.

The innards of a warm miniNeptune

The third planet TESS witnessed to transit the 1.94%-luminosity L 231-32 system 72 light years away, so TOI-270 d, is now modeled: metal-rich, miscible-envelope sub-Neptune. "Metal" here is in the stellametric sense, lithium on up. We get this from San Antonio: Christopher R. Glein, Xinting Yu (余馨婷), Cindy N. Luu.

Planet d here is about 4.2 Earth masses. From the cloud-(or haze-)deck: 2.133 R_🜨. I don't find a mutual planetary resonance as Trappist-1; the TOIs-270 are however non-eccentric such that tidal locking is certain. I assume d at least migrated rather than coalescing in situ.

The excitement in d is in its atmosphere above said deck, detected at the 400 K layer. The haze temperature below that should be 900-1100 K, heavy in carbon-dioxide and methane. I wonder if from the outside it looks dark green.

Detected gas does not include much hydrogen - so, not "Hycean". Also lacking: carbon-monoxide (so no water-mediated "runaway") - and nitrogen. Below the clouds, temperature will of course exceed 1000 K, actually in the 4000s K. On that surface should be low oxygen (and CO) "fugacity" pressure. Fugacity would determine the relative size of its metallic core, the geochemistry of its mantle and crust, the composition of its atmosphere, and the forces responsible for mountain building.

Glein, Luu, and 余馨婷 think an ocean - of silicate lava.

Although this planet and, probably, system is no object of colonisation; the trio hold it out as a "Rosetta Stone" for miniNeptunes like it. Of which many exist.

Having made the free market impossible

... the Administrative State is demanding Hands Off "their" Loan Programs Office. The reason we "needed" a LPO in the first place, is because we'd lawyered-off any private "industrial banks" as might underwrite nuclear plants like Palisades (MI) and Vogtle (GA), or lithium mines like Thacker Pass (NV). In fact the inability of the market to underwrite such projects is, exactly, a Concern of the Concerned Scientists against nuclear at all (as if it weren't artificial).

Nick Denton has mooted last weekend that the Trump Administration, after 81 days, has been Lettuced: as happened to PM Truss over in Blighty. After 81 days the bond-market forced Trump off his tariffs; and, further, he's allowed the hotel and agribusiness sectors not to look too hard at the Documents of their workforce. DOGE has scaled back its ambitions. Elon Musk's love for Indian labour is as famous as is Vivek's.

Next up: NASA, what with Mars Sample Return, the Wfirst / Grace-Roman telescope, and the Venus probe. Personally I'd keep that 'scope and add more in Hawaii; the MSR, yea, needs to go. But I'm concerned that we are setting ourselves up to include all of these big budget items, what with Isaacman being mooted to helm that Agency. And we're not even talking about the Artemis / Gateway silliness. It's only money!

The way the Constitution works, any Executive naturally weakens as the 2026 elections loom. The leeches are returning.

A Christian brief for a new colonialism

@TheHarrisSultan has little time for Islamic colonialists. For base facts, this was an Arab adventure to grab Egypt's resources for the Levant, mostly for the Damascene Levant at that. There were whole civil wars in the next generations revolving around who got the pension and how the pelf was to be distributed. These resources, from Christian and Iranian nations, were not surrendered out of charity.

European colonialists are - oddly - meanwhile arguing the case for Christian colonialism. Where Islam enlighted Egypt and Iran with their shari'a and (checks notes) endogamy and nine-year-old Consent and industrial slavery; Christian missionaries tried to ban slavery. Also, in India and China, they stopped human sacrifice and foot binding (as, earlier, Mesoamerica; although the Teotihuanacos ended earlier). So says Katy Faust. But - she's not in it to defend Christianity nor even to nuance how Christians got their policies enacted. That's just the foundation.

Faust proposes that Christians get into a new Crusade: now, against surrogacy, IVF, and eugenics. Sometimes "pedophiles" - she means gays - get into surrogacy, so that's good enough cause to stamp it all out. Eugenics was done by Bad People so gene-tweaking shouldn't be done today even if race is taken out of the equation. And IVF means embryo-destruction so it's best not to create those embryoes in the first place.

As Christians meddled from a position of power in the old days, Faust would have Christians meddle today. I assume one model might be the US occupation of Afghanistan which brought paederasty and the Rainbow, in the local politicking against the Taliban. Or how we didn't quite save the Christians of Iraq and Syria. Maybe "soft" power of economic sanctions should work to convince Europe and China not to reproduce in ways Faust doesn't like.

Or maybe Faust should consider what Christianity should be, perhaps even praying to God for that guidance. Before she shackles the whole Christian community with this imperialistic version thereof, which I doubt will work.

Proxima b L2

We now know of several nearby systems around red dwarfs. None are habitable - but maybe we can put space-stations over there. Let's consider L1 and L2. I've proposed Venus L2 already; today we're on to the neighbour system.

For Hill spheres: orbitsimulator still exists with warning that it's not really SSL-secure yet. Or, vcalc.

On to Prox, 0.1221 Solar mass. Hill sphere: 149.8/Math.Pow(sini,1/3) megameters. sini=1 when i is edge-on so transiting... which its known planet b is not. Hill from "M2"'s 1.12 Earth mass is 152 megameters.

On assumption that this b planet is tidally-locked, which given its low eccentricity is certain, L1 and L2 serve as the planet's GEO. For reference, our GEO is 42.164 Mm semimajor. L1/L2 are halo-orbits, not towers.

If d turns out real, 0.3 Earth mass means Hill distance 58.2593 Mm. NB: here we are losing constraints, of which eccentricity is relevant.

Israel needs a better lobby

Maybe @martyrmade and @comicdavesmith aren't for you. At least the former isn't for me either. But the proIsrael and generally-counterJihad side, for their own part, has been getting dangerously authoritarian, as can be seen last month, when Robert Spencer's crew just up and doxxed a guy. Skrbina and "Dalton" lately deny they doxxed the right guy. Although the Skrbina statement is too oblique for my taste and is, itself, antiSemitic.

Doxxing is the sort of game SPLC and antifa play between their selves, and indeed the Ikhwan/CAIR and Hamas between their selves. As to whether anyone was even doxxed as intended: crickets from anyone involved, as of now. Silent leges, enim; truth and lies don't matter in war.

Caught up in this war are those who proclaim that Jesus is Lord, or "Christ is King" specifically, which is - for those in the know - a tautology. Those proclaimers would include me. They actually don't include Muslims; much as silly people like Sneako and outright grifters like Andrew Tate might refer to the saying. In Islam, the Christ was king and will be, bi-shâ'llâhi; but is not, today. That JW has sided against Christ should be a warning to Christians.

People like Cernovich are pondering if those two should just be left to have-at each other like Putin and Zelensky.

Meanwhile rejoice, as the Christ is come.

Weighing Proxima b

Proxima Centauri b is 1.07/sini Earth mass, 0.04856 AU. i, inclination, is not edge-on 90°; its planets do not transit. But we may have ways around that.

The star is presently rotating 107.6° inclination to us, not too badly off 90°. This will change as our systems approach and Prox orbits its binary.

Now, that i is not the b planet's inclination... but in most systems, like ours, the ecliptic isn't far off. Astronomers suspect an inner planet "d". If so, that b (and maybe outer c) didn't suffer a lot of perturbation for instance when getting captured by the big binary. That d could still be Mercurial, with a wonky orbit. But it further could soak up the hardest impacts, leaving b relatively un-pushed. Also: the worst-case outer planet is c which itself probably does not exist. To sum: with d and no c, I don't expect wild tilts of Kozai von Zeipel on b neither. Planetary-orbit inclination should be about inline with the star's rotation.

In the future, I expect planetary transit will happen. As to when: we would need a solution for the Prox orbit, over that 550ky year around the Alpha Centauri barycentre. MS Copilot isn't giving me a good ellipse.

Failing that, I find reasonable for b sini=0.9551. 1.12 Earth mass.

The consolidation of the Cretan underworld

Over its "Bronze Age", Crete consolidated her arithmetic and instituted a religious scriptorium, in the north-by-centre. Crete, like Cuba, is a long island longitudinally, with hills. Forests too in those hills; I don't know they had the goat. How was the island before Minos? What was Kreta before Minos?

On 7 April Sylviane Déderix, Aurore Schmitt, and Ilaria Caloi have floated some Suggestions.

Turns out - h/t hbdchick - this island looked much different in Middle Minoan I. And the difference, a surprise to me, isn't east-west so much as south-north in the centre. (Hardly anyone bothered with the rugged west. Which might not be even Minoan.) The central southern coast, on that spur, was something of a land of the dead. They were big on circular tombs. The north had tombs too but they were rectangular and not as common. They extend to the eastern third of the island.

However they handled them, all Cretans cared for their ancestors. The tombs were collective. As far as I know they enjoyed genetic continuity since their west-Anatolian with 10-15% Zagros origins. More Anatolian out east, as we'd expect. (That "Armenoi" sample in the west, fascinatingly, looks like Thessalonica, beyond Mycenae.) At least St. Charalamb in the east was endogamous, to the point of first-cousins. We are, then, dealing with clans.

Now for the timestamping. Following 2200 BC was an infamous breakdown of Near East society, which included Egypt and mainland Greece (we're not saying how, here). Middle Minoan starts with the Middle Bronze: they usually say 2050 BC, although Avellino blew up slightly over five decades later (and let's not discuss what "bronze" means here). From 1900 BC the architecture achieves "protopalatial" status. In Anatolia this should be about the time of the early Luwians, relatives to us IndoEuropeans and ancestors to the seafaring Lycians and Car(c)ians. They were not, yet, masters of this sea.

The Middle Minoan south, as a culture, was instead Egypt-facing. This is certainly how come they adopted a linear script: they could get papyrus. Maybe the Alasiotes could use Ugaritic clay; not southern Crete. The circular tomb-plan spread north, crowding the squares to the coast and the Anatolian-facing east. The old pictographic script would, then, have spread north too; also, I moot, Linear A its syllabic "demotic" form.

This week's archaeology is one of the squares, that north coastal site near Sissi. This is east of ancient Malia. In MM IIB, late 1700s BC, the locals dismantled the tomb; there, they depo'ed a mighty Pottery Deposit, of 13000+ shards. This looks like... quite the party. What human remains survive, come from tombs as had collapsed naturally beforehand. (The Med is quite the sea of tectonics.)

St. Charalamb looks like the ossuary where the previous tombs' occupants got re-interred, over a thousand of them. That reburial happened, concurrently, MM IIB; Déderix, Schmitt, and Caloi think that circular tombs also were emptied at this time. At St. Charalamb was held the grandest feast, for the occasion.

At the start of MM IIIA 1700 BC, I am told of destructions from Knossos to Malia - looks like earthquake. After that we get the Neopalatial Period, including a "court" at Sissi and the rebuilding of Malia. Now, however, Knossos was queen of the island.

I see a revolution, in the eastern two-thirds of Crete: both in the central plain including the southern spur, and the central northern coast plus east. Here is Minos' uniting of the two lands - by uniting their ancestors. The new Crete was no longer to tolerate cousin-bumping clans. It was, further, to face north, toward Thera and the Cyclades. And the western third? Just another Cythera.

Anreppen

An archaeological association for Westphalia-Lippe is arguing for Romans in the Rhineland. That wouldn't be news except... the subwatershed would be the Lippe. The "Anreppen" site is Delbrück just downstream of Paderborn. This isn't just on the wrong side of the limes but far on that side.

And it's not from Varus' tenure, when the Anreppen camp proper; nor even Germanicus'. They're going with the AD second to third centuries: Antonines through Severans (I doubt much past them). The locals would have been Chatti by then, German-speaking. Later, Allemani and Cenni.

An important event around this time would be the Marcomannic War, further southeast along the Danube; the Chatti came along for that ride. In AD 170, the Chatti opened a new front through their own river, on their own. The Chatti lost that one, and maybe even lost their existence. After a generation or two, in AD 213 we next hear from the Allemani in this area - when they asked for Roman help. Caracalla provided that "help", first slaughtering insufficiently-enthusiastic Allemani before attacking the Cenni. This campaign went better, overall, for the locals, as Caracalla paid off the survivors to leave Rome alone. Next up was Severus Alexander who died miserably in a mutiny, followed by Maximinus Thrax; one of these two fought and beat some specie of Alleman at the Harzhorn even further-east.

As for Anreppen II: excavated so far are a well, farms, and cottage-industries like weaving. The Roman imports include a gemstone of Mercury - they think it's a signet - and an iron knife in the Roman style. Mercury is here in his capacity as merchant.

At this time the Romans took interest in the Lippe, which included a financial interest. This merchant compound/village might just have been a "friendly". But it may be that, at times, the Romans went as far as to fortify an embassy; as they did at Drumanagh in Ireland, and in the Yemen.

Chicxulub roundup

The dinosaurs' decline 75-66 Mya may be overstated. The geology is good-enough to mark that, yes, there's an iridium layer. It seems, in North America anyway, dinos were foraging in high-vegetation regions as are still lush today. We've been digging in central Texas, not so lush now and swampy then.

Recall that after 75 Mya the basic northern hemisphere continents look much like they do now. For major differences: Tethys was still open to the Indian Ocean, India proper was southern-hemisphere, and Atlantic was a narrow sea - but none of these much affect this continent here.

The Texans are also meanwhile checking out the Yucatan; they find that the asteroid scoured out a geothermal hotspot. So the fish and shrimp and molluscs, at least, came back. (Not the ammonites tho'.)

This seems to agree with other findings that the dustcloud covered the Amazon and gave it more nutrients. To answer those who might ask "if erosion is a problem in the Amazon now why wasn't it a problem before", the Amazon had quite the headstart.

The language of Qatar, II

Several years back I floated Mario Kozah's Qaṭrâyîth here, a language of greater-Qatar reported by Syriac-writing Nestorians. The main message I garnered from Kozah is that Qaṭrâyîth's forty-word lexicon was highly Semitic but that the language overall was not Aramaic. But I didn't buy his book or even read it. I pondered some holdover from Hasaitic because, whatever, blog: I can just say stuff here. The indefatiguable Ahmad al-Jallad has read that book for me.

Meanwhile for Arabic-proper in this region, al-Jallad endorses Holes 2018 doi 10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0005 over whatever Chaim Rabin did in 1951. 'Abd-Qaysan, our 'Abd al-Qays, had moved thither by AD 500, along with others. Kozah, so al-Jallad reports, thought Qaṭrâyîth was one of these. Al-Jallad observes that these words are simply not baseline Arabic. The Aramaeans, having lived with Arabic as long as they have, were certainly able to tell as much at the time.

That 12% 5/40 "unknown" is not Sumerian; al-Jallad knows Akkadian well-enough to tell Sumerian, and finds only two words of Akkadian. Al-Jallad footnotes various Semitic and Iranian etymologies whence to start. For my part I wonder where we should involve Khuzi / Elamite, and if so at what stage.

BACKDATE 4/10

Where to hire the feds

I hear people claim Bessent said that the furloughed Feds are going to learn to thread screws and hammer rivets. I am calling FAKE NEWS. Bessent's actual words: labor that we need for the new manufacturing.

Professionals, as they say, talk logistics. A Federal office guy can slide into an office role in a manufacturing company - they do have offices, close to the factory-floor. In fact a lot of the complaints from our warehouse men is that they've been warehousing cheap sh...stuff from the Third World (and from Chinese prisons), and are acksing what to ship now. I imagine some of the Feds have an idea as to their supply-chains. Supposedly we're going to be linking new chains. Maybe some of these Feds can help with that.

I am not saying it is easy work; this isn't my area of expertise. But it is assuredly paying work, and there are those clearly looking to hire that work - which they need to start paying for. And as a matter of principle and, indeed, self-interest I am not up for telling people to starve on the street just for supporting the wrong politics.

As far as, oh, Burge goes: keep in mind he didn't vote for any of this, should you find yourself in his dumb xeets.

The two Old Testaments

End of February, aleteia posted about the "Hebrew Bible" versus "Old Testament".

Hebrew Bible is T-N-K, torah-nabis-kitabs. Pronounced tanakh because of the Aramaising of their language. It's in a few Hebrew dialects, including that last, Aramaising one; plus Imperial Aramaic itself. Overall the text is Masoretic with a smattering of qere/katib swaps to glide over errors. Nabis includes the earlier Deuteronomic books; then goes on to the prophets themselves, counting the Deuteronomic History as "former prophets". The rest include Jonah but not Daniel, starting with the Isaiahs / Jeremiah / Ezekiel. Kitabs are just what Josephus considered "Other Writings", starting with the Psalter and ending at Chronicles. Daniel fits in there.

Christian "Old Testament" is roughly the same: Torah first, then the histories (not counted as Prophetic) before getting into the Psalter, the kitabs, finally the Prophets but here promoting Daniel to the fourth of the big three.

I tipped my hand by calling both assortments, old-testaments. The Jews end with the Temple. But they have no Temple. So they're looking forward to a Second Coming of that. We Christians end with Malachi's prediction of the day of the Lord. Which also hasn't happened; we just got Christ. So we're looking forward to that Second Coming. And our canons don't quite end with a fat unreadable codex. Each of us recognise that Tradition gave us the codex. The same Tradition carries forward: Jews start with Mishnah, Christians after our NT (should) start with 1 Clement and Ignatius.

There's some crossover. In the West, we further end the New Testament with John's Revelation, that most Jewish of our books. Guess what - the New Temple features. If the Christians have chosen not to end with Chronicles, a good part of that may be because John presented an alternative - at least for those of us accepting John, mostly Copts and Catholics. For minority-report: Vaticanus in Greek (not Latin nor Coptic) ended with "Hebrews", as far as we know, with its Revelation penciled-in later. "Hebrews" claims Christ as the Priest of this Temple Out Of Time.

The "better arrangement" is, therefore, a mulligan between our Traditions. Doing an ultra-Luther to Hebraise our Old Testament would simply slant our Christianity into Hebrews and the Revelation which we Catholics... already do. As for the rest of it: on the one hand the Masoretic Text is flawed (especially Jeremiah); on the other, Daniel really shouldn't be considered a Prophet. But then neither should Jonah so *blows-raspberry*.

BACKDATE 4/9

Interdimensional pollution

Like CS Lewis, I am Christian and I don't rule out The Multiverse. I do wonder, though, why Lewis has brought to his allegories this particular vision of The Multiverse.

The Magician's Nephew has an End and a Beginning: Charn and Narnia. The one is a sheol, the next a gan-'eden. They do not exist together. The Space Trilogy also presents mortal Malacandra, then foetal Perelandra. 'Tis possible that, for Lewis - them's the rules.

TMN's Wood is like that Trilogy's interplanetary æther. The viewpoint characters are interlopers into these worlds, not - as in mainline Narnia - guests. Digory and Polly could have gone anywhere. If not to a Dantean hell: never mind that these books are for kids, Lewis at base doesn't believe in hell, just in Charn, per Great Divorce.

In this genre, all we can expect from interdimensional commerce is damage, the sort of damage Digory inflicts from Charn upon Narnia. At best we get cautionary tales. Digory and Polly are no better than Jadis herself.

Lewis by TMN wrote a fan-fiction in his own universe. Moreover, Charn's sorry end opened up if that must be the Eschaton for all worlds, including Narnia. This forced the writing of The Last Battle.

Irredeemable Charn

The great question of Charn lies in Who is missing. In Lewis' Multiverse, Narnia has Aslan and Earth has Jesus. The third world has nothing but Jadis and her sorcery - and ruin. Charn feels like an Old Testament empire, as we kick the gray dust along the dead canals of Tanis or Ashur or Larsa. Once Charn had temples, home to Powers. Here, listening to the beat of drums, their servants offered sacrifice. No Power here offered any alternative as the people would accept. Did any try?

The Worldmender series would answer that Aslan simply doesn't exist. Kressel's "Gehinnom" (a name on the same theme, note) exists because it is a shard of Creation. Therefore, incidentally, this series can't use the Wood Between Worlds.

For Lewis, Aslan exists and so does the Wood. That opens up other questions... like, why isn't Aslan here. Lev Grossman got you covered in Magicians, with its Neitherlands for the Wood. Every pool enters into its own world/universe, each of which might or might not host a pantheon. You like Narnia? Quentin Coldwater likes Fillory... whatever pleases you, mon cheri. Maybe you'd like Syrena's Charn.

Leaving aside if Lewis' Charn needs any attachment to the Wood, or even if Lewis needed the device of the Wood at all: by not even introducing Aslan to Charn, one is left asking - with Kressel - if Charn needs an Aslan. Maybe it's enough that it get a helpful Jew to mend the world. Or just to lead the righteous out of it, from the sheol into the land of milk and honey.

Lewis prefers that gods come first, who Create. Charn's Creators are those who wielded the Words of Power for that purpose, attaching their world to the Wood. Syrena suggests - further - these evolved to become the kings. The onus would then be upon the pharaohs, to relinquish their power. This permits what Lewis wants: a world of reason, with a path to intercession before Judgement. Which didn't happen.

Now we can evaluate Syrena's vision. Like our pharaohs, Charn's last kings are mortal, like in Tolkien's Númenor. Charn is nothing if not a land of entropy. Also like our pharaoh, the kings sponsored their own religion. They knelt to Powers of their own, or at least directed so to their people. Syrena's vision however interesting does not belong to Lewis nor to Tolkien.

For Lewis, then: Charn's mortal kings enslaved or expelled their kinder and Creative gods. If anyone here wanted better, it wasn't enough; the people ultimately didn't want an Aslan, so didn't get one. On that - what would Tolkien say?

Once the periodic table of elements is discovered, is this what drives gods to give up as to build new worlds?

Words of Charn

I want to expend a few posts upon CS Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, Narnia's prequel. I'll get to my final thoughts later; for now, I concede that here Lewis wrote some of the series' best scenes. It happens they aren't in Narnia - they're in that first world visited, Charn.

Lewis developed Charn's name from a possible archaic past-participle of a verb. This world is scorchen, by world-ending magic. As Lewis' home world was created by a Word, so shall Charn end.

When a fan confronted Lewis about Susan in seventh story The Last Battle, whose family backbit her so harshly, Lewis meekly admitted he couldn't write that eighth story, which must be an adult story. Lewis opened that project for fans. (Neil Gaiman - sigh - accepted that challenge.) Some fans have pondered to what level Charn too deserved its fate, if everyone in it likewise deserved what Jadis' family - through Lewis' pen - did therein. Archive Of Our Own does not disappoint: "Child of Charn" for instance, which has - like Kressel has - dissidence.

Expect, however, contradictions, as not everyone agrees on detail. Like on the name of Jadis' sister: Jadis, knowing well the power of names, never uttered this one.

In here we read several visions of the Last Word. So far Syrena Of The Lake's "In Word and Deed" proposes Words rooted in Faith, a rather atheistic / Pratchettian vision, to be explored nextpost. "Deplorable" has the Word as a curseword by the reified Fates, encapsulated in a tale for girls, keeping a little more distance from the base text.

Turquoise methane

Gary Abernathy has noted that natural gas is greener than oil, as carbon-to-output ratio goes. Abernathy may sound like a Reagan-era "catsup is a vegetable" pubbican, to some.

Where methane competes with biodiesel, methane isn't Renewable. But what if it is?

Since we're going to have landfills, why not take methane thence. Terraform exists, also, to convert CO₂ into CH₄. As for purely "green" fuels like hydrogen and ammonia: it is cheaper to extract these from methane than from (say) water, and anyway I don't like to lose water.

These technologies have made natural gas, if not fully Green^TM, at least a link in the chain to "grey" even "blue".

Jannat 'Eden

Arabia benefits from the great Indian Ocean monsoons. The Sahara doesn't really have one now - but it used to. Less well known, the southern Hijaz also has seasonal downpours they call the Kharif. At the same time as the Sahara monsoons, the Earth was warm enough to rain more monsoon for Arabia, perhaps such that the Kharif could qualify as well. The blasted landscape of Rub' al-Khali then had a lake: so, Abdallah S. Zaki et al.

This ended around 3500 BC. Sumerians start reporting paraSemitic Akkadian a few centuries later, before they and the Eblaites write on their own. We read true Semitic maybe a millennium after that.

This lakebed cannot be the Urheimat of the whole Afro-Asiatic family, if it is a family. For one, Egyptian is already firmly lower-Nilotic. Also Berber could stem from the preSemitic language of the old "Natufian" Levant, maybe Chadic also. I wonder, rather, if this region be the Cushitic homeland, or if not then the core of EthioSemitic and Mehri before pushing Cushitic off the Arabia-Felix.

Takarkori, before R1b

Today, Nada Salam et al. brings "Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara -" [and Hyper Chad]. Which title goes on to its own conclusion.

From Takarkori in southwestern Libya, are - rather, in 5000 BC, were - two females. Salam posts their DNA, 60000 years before that: branched in a third group alongside us Out-Of-Africa. Meanwhile during the great Epipaleolithic ice-age backwash into Morocco and the Horn, they got some of our Neander genes. But not nearly as many. So, where and when did my R1b-cousins "V88" get here?

Takarkori was already firing ceramics and herding herds, although not the camel. Green Sahara was nice enough I can assume some relationship with sorghum as well. This was mediated by those postEuropeans from the north. Chad was, it seems, too hot for most of us.

As for Takarkori's main ancestors: a substantial branch supplied 40% of the ancestry to Taforalt in Morocco 13000 BC. The other 60% is "Natufian" that is, Levantine preSemitic. Elsewhither, Takarkorians visited Ghana.

All this is telling me these ladies of Takarkori were not Tuaregs nor any other sort of Berber, as might be found in Morocco's hills today. Women don't have Y chromosomes (as Kindergarten Cop teaches) so, we wouldn't see direct evidence here. But back then, a R1b daddy should have bourne some stark differences from such an anciently-divergent population, with him. So these two were not Cushites nor even, really, Chadites.

Ancestresses to Nilo-Saharan, best represented today by Nubians, would be my first guess.

Nuclear war scenarios

Various antiwar Influencers, not least Michael Cernovich, have been touting Ann(i)e Jacobsen. As one who lived through the red-giant phase of the Cold War, I got the feeling that somebody who knows what they are talking about should handle this one. Maybe Jacobsen knows what she's talking about, too.

First up: Reddit doesn't like her book. We also have Matthew Petti and (on that "hair trigger" meme) Peter Huessy. It looks as if Jacobsen, in fact, is less-versed on the topic than was... Stanley Kubrick. At least Jacobsen isn't telling us to abandon the space programme like some idiots.

I think one issue we have in the 2020s, or really in the 1980s, besides the same damn Ministry songs is the prospect of an efficient and small warhead. It would inflict about the fifteen metric-kilotons of a Hiroshima but without wasting so much munition. That is: it would be more-easily fireable and would also not spill so much fallout. We can assume this 2022 paper still holds up.

Limited nuclear war might become more of an invasion-repellent application than an intercontinental ballistic opportunity. Would we train ICBMs on Russia if it delivered 15 kT unto some Azov-Battalion base... in internationally-recognised Russian territory? I wonder.

More likely, it breaks the taboo. Extension to civil wars become possible; then, to border wars... like Pakistan/Taliban. As that happens, think: For All Time.

On the plus side, America could launch those Orions from Greenland; we're already polar-orbiting on chemicals.