Toward an orthodox king of Britain

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

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

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

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

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

The Jacobites no longer exist

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

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

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

Sample Size Compensation

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

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

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

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

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

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

The myconid conquest

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

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

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

When Christ nearly died

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/29

Charlie Kirk's Quaker nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/28

Cretaceous Park

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

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

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

Gliese 251

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

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

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

Ayy lmao!

Sabine left this open for comment: Palomar transient events.

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

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

The dumbest Habsburg

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/22

The plagues under Akhenaten

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/24

The Way of Horus

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

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

BACKDATE 10/24

Pleistocene lead exposure

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

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

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

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

The first Australian tektites

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

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

Sedeprivated Canterbury

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

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

Unfortunately Nichols is not delivering results, either.

Collision detection just got fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Ali Ibn al-Madini

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/27

55 Cancri grows again

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/19 ht Kyplanet

Zernaki Tepe

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/24, yeah we're behind.

Battle of Ascaran

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/27

Martian ozone, past and future

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/19

Constraining Prox B

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/21

For hate's sake

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

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

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

Planet Y

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

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

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

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

Karnak

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

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

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

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

The Global South in the premodern age

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

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

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

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

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

Boron salts for rocketry

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/6

The other Mubtada'

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 10/6

Trajectory

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Identity is not Christian Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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