Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.

A song for Noah without Enoch

I've lately learnt about a genre of ancient Jewish poetry: the piyyuṭim. These are cantillated historical poems, like certain memrë in Syriac, and so haQallir and Yanni would compose for contemporary Byzantine-/Sasanian-era Jews. One subset of piyyuṭim, Jews have designated for the High Holy Days. Last week I fell in the deep waters, Vered Noam arguing for its deepest layer: these behave as a Levitic Heilsgeschichte better fit for their family-owned Temple than for the Moses-centred synagogue or even for the Hasmonaean temple.

To this Levitic basement-stratum, Noam went on that the figure of Enoch himself must belong. In my opinion this proposal is one that Noam needs to argue.

Noam already knows Ethiopic "1 Enoch" is a composite, so is only entertaining chapters 1-36 the "Watchers". "Watchers" might be composite even at the Qumran level. I think most scholars today, for 1E 1-16, allow - deeper - for an ancient Genesis 6 / 1E 6-11 reading as did without even Enoch. The only hero you need here is Noah, who lives to tell it.

Such scholars must admit if the piyyuṭ poems started early enough, some might never have noted Enoch in the first place. They would have vied with Ben Sira and 5Q13 in the Kippur rituals. On the other extreme we have Enoch as redeemer...

Suppose Judges was late

A few weeks ago I noted that the book of Judges remained subject to interpolation into the LXX / Qumran period. Yesterday morn, scrolling through the University of Arizona's "The Bible and Interpretation" blog, I ran across Niels Lemche.

Lemche is, I reckon, the thinking-man's Gmirkin. The Baghistan has had more interest in Yonatan Adler. We'll take some time to evaluate Lemche, today.

Lemche has marshalled parallels between the Abimelech and Jephthah stories, and events in Greek history and myth (respectively). Myth of course has no copyright, as witness the vast Etruscan and then Roman takings from those Greeks. But myth can be written, and when it is written it takes on a standard.

Take Jephthah. There were many stories of the reluctant sacrifice of the king's own child. For Greeks, the story with the most pathos was that of Iphigenia which they're still telling. Lemche points out that Jephthah is not such a telling; Judges here tracks closer, instead, the Cretan story of Idomeneus (except that here the sacrifice was his son).

Lemche further thinks Samson is simply Heracles, like Milton thought. The killstroke in Lemche's eyes is that Abimelech ended his career in a streetfight just like Pyrrhus was killed, brained by some woman hurling tiles from a rooftop. (Even if Pyrrhus was wearing a helmet, by then he was very old, so this might have been one concussion too many.)

Lemche's approach is similar to the approach other scholars take toward "Judith". "Judith" seems versed in Seleucid military concepts, its heroine follows Hasmonaean-era halakha (and political-theory), and the narrative may even track Eupolemus. Given that "Judith" doesn't know Thing One about Rome and that the Greek Additions to Esther borrow from Greek Judith, "Judith" in its original (now lost) Hebrew is unanimously dated ~100 BC.

In favour of Lemche's thesis, Judges does not much get cited in later stories. Judges famously concentrates on the northern tribes, in between introducing that cypher Othniel and generally trashing Benjamin in its latter movements. So let's look north: Jezebel knows enough of her adopted people to throw the case of Zimri at usurping Jehu. The prophets and CBH-to-LBH psalms are always referring to patriarchs Ephraim and Jacob, and sometimes villains Sihon or Og. I don't see where opponents to the various kings - we'll start with northern prophets Amos and Hosea - refer to the Bible's most cromulent example of a Man Who Would Be King. Judges doesn't even get cited much in the Samaritan Chronicle which has much lore on Joshua then Eli, but little in between. If the piyyuṭ genre be early, this seems not to have got around to Judges' heroes until ha-Qallir and Yanni in late-antiquity.

Against Lemche: the dialect of the prosaic portions of Judges, which the Samaritans (and Noth) would extend to 1 Reigns/Samuel 12, is CBH. Even some of the glosses therein look like they might better match Zionist use of Psalm 78, or precede it. By "Zionist" I mean the Joachim court's reaction to Jeremiah. Further, if Judith can be an observant Jew, and if 1 Maccabees and Esther (neither terribly religious) can talk about ancestral laws; how come none of the several villains of Judges are messing with the laws of Israel? The Hellenistic era was full of this ferment. It doesn't happen before the Persians, which - for most of us - points to a prePersian milieu for Judges. (Less-so Joshua perhaps.)

Lemche might counter that Joachim's court should have cited the Judges stories but did not. But then we don't really have this court's own words, like we have Nahum's own words and Isaiah 1-33 around Hezeqiah's court. In Jeremiah's book, we just have what scribe Baruch deigned tell us about that last independent court.

AI movie roundup

Over 2024 we got some competent AI-generated music. In 2025 we got hype, promises, and teasers done in various AI - we hear of "Sora" - for fullblown movies. I thought the trailer for the Narn i Hin Húrin was a standout, although in need of better editing. We are now in middle 2026.

Last Saturday I caught Oneiric, by Malik at Higgsfield. Up to then I suspect most of us were writing him off as a peddler of... hype, promises, and teasers. Oneiric, I concede, was advertised under a "goonbait" thumbnail; in 2016 we'd call it "malegaze". The actual video turns out to be legit. Watch it.

Interastrae is another author whose earlier stuff looked gooney. And his Alaran starts with the trope of the interstellar rogue crashlanding onto a jungle planet (jungle part of the planet anyway) with an athletic alien wench. Here too: it gets better. The second episode gets excellent.

Dark Fables is running Book of Shadows. We may or may not get to keep this one; it is set in Faerûn, like the Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years ago. Unlike Alaran, these episodes run shorter. But there are a lot of them by now.

My main suggestion is for improvements in the dialog, which can then be voiced by human actors. AI actors don't always rise to the occasion.

Apart from that, I get turned off of watching a scene when the characters blink from place to place on a set. Or, if the AI is smart enough not to do that: the camera doesn't need to be blinking around that set, because when it does it makes the audience think the characters aren't in continuity. A game author would say that this breaks mimesis. The videos I've linked keep that to a minimum.

Shadowing the poles

Among orbital nerdery ToughSF directs to Marco Bassetto and Alessandro Quarta, Solar Sail-Based Mars-Synchronous Displaced Orbits for Remote Sensing Applications. The notion is to orbit the Sun to shadow a planet, on the unstable positions of always-over-the-pole. Which means orthogonal to the ecliptic and all five its Lagrange points: "displaced nonKeplerian".

This is accomplished by solar-sails. The authors believe that Mars' 1/10 Earth mass and 1/3 surface-gravity allow a reasonably low-altitude as can map the poles. Of course Mars also gets less than half the Solar irradiance but space is cheap out there. Just unfurl twice the sail bro. If I read figures 11b and 13b correctly, they'd float about 0.01 AU above or below the Martian ecliptic plane which is 1.5 million-kilometers or, probably better, gigameters.

This would constrain a Mars mission not by propellant but by battery life and/or solar panel degradation. Like docking Deimos.

Injection into that orbit, from a base in high Earth orbit, is also handled here. There's a boost of 1 km/s deltaV to kick off to intercept the Martian DNKO. The sail takes it from there to bring the craft to where it needs to be. Minimum 949 days if the sail is mid-performance, 498 if high-performance.

These are functions of the "lightness number" β, the higher the... betta'. The paper knows of 2021-designed sails all β shy of 0.01. Bassetto & Quarta believe these rookie numbers can be improved. Lower perf does get you closer to Mars however.

There seems no plan to park these over Venus' poles. Six years ago I mooted a network of balloons perhaps angled against the vortex, per pole. From data-relays to polar mapping to weather observation, this does everything a gigameter-off sail could do.

Not your panther

A few Februaries ago I posted a couplet of comments about a genre of antiRabbinic satire which the Christian gospels might have ascribed to their hero. The narrative-gospels can use only those stories as serve the narrative, which culminates at the Cross. I found interesting that Rabbinic literature dares name some of these antiRabbinic "trolls": some are in fact "Jesus", some are associated with the "Jesus" name in commentary.

What I hadn't yet done on this blog, and perhaps should have done, was discuss Bar Pantera / Bar Panθera. Peter Schäfer made his name discussing possible references in, especially, the (Babylonian) Talmud. Schäfer figured that the 'Iraq/Χάραξ being ruled by nonAbrahamics would allow complete rein to anyone wanting to get some licks in at the Christians, especially after the whole Roman East became Christian.

That does not show where Jews took up that ?happy task however. Christopher Zeichmann, who seems like no Jew, last June posted the lack of evidence for any of that. Of all the trolls whose names later rabbis could possibly associate with the Gospel Jesus, none of these names - in the basis stories - seem to be doing anything as has Gospel parallel. Not even with the vignettes in "Thomas", whose living Jesus doesn't pass through the Cross.

If I can say that the Gospel Jesus incorporates a pastiche of antiRabbinic controversy, Zeichmann can say that the Talmudic Jesus-es are also pastiche. Some might be Bar Panthera. Some might be Bar Stada. None of them have to be of the Tiberius / Sejanus / Pilate imperium. Sure, some Jews may have made some connexion. But that seems to be later. It might even be more Celsus - pagan - than any Abrahamic who'd jammed these stories into the Gospel, most.

Lead BVDs

Tom Lehrer's old joke is now reality: the radiation shield bikini. Except it's polyethylene, which at high density marshals more hydrogen than a thin water or ice shield might.

NASA limits lifetime-total exposure to 0.6 sieverts. That was based on 1950s assumptions that sieverts to the big toe mattered as much as sieverts to the groin, which even Lehrer wasn't fool enough to believe. The body parts that need the shielding best, in practice, indeed cluster the pelvis. The head doesn't need it as bad, either; this might even be an ancient evolutionary hack.

Geometry is "hexagonal rods", I guess the 9-60mm of that rod being on the Z-axis. So the (unmanned) first Artemis mission successfully tested a 26kg version of this, just by blasting through our Van Allens. Although the results did not make the deadline for the Artemis II followup that just ran.

The plastic /rinkle/ is still, I think, not a solution for a trip to Mars which is further than Tampa. They admit that cosmic rays, as blast through Earth's own magshield, still got through. In a straight shot to our Moon an astronaut can laugh this off. Not in a months-long trip however (and then most want to come home). In our LEO sats we're all tired of running to the shielded part whenever a storm hits.

What this does give to long-term astronauts in orbiting ti[tanio]n cans is the ability to move around an unshielded station under solarflare conditions. Or - better - passing over the south-Pacific anomaly - or in permanent MEO between Van Allens, where I think the belts might shift. Or wandering those prefab corridors although there a magnetic solution could work as well.

Meanwhile they're targeting 16kg.

The Avodah piyyuṭim as Levitic survivals

Vered Noam lately discussed the rabbinic abandonment of the Second Temple mindset. It is not reserved to TEH TALMUD!: the Palaestinian "Yerushalmi" Talmud and the Midrashim share in this (where they sometimes dispute Talmud elsewhere). I understand that Flavius Josephus wasn't much a fan of that Temple neither.

Noam gears up to this with (what I read as) the implicit lament that the rabbis' sourcing isn't what it could be. The rabbinate had imposed a rule to use orality for anything not in Tanakh. Daniel and Esther survive of course but they present themselves as Diaspora-lit. Ben Sira hung around the fringe. Otherwise very little is written. Jews had to beg the Christians for readings of Josephus, until writing their own "Yosippon"; the same holds for the book of Judith. 1 Maccabees was famously rejected until the recent Zionism. Ginsberg's "Legends of the Jews" records stories clearly not written until the Middle Ages (including a Judith). This may incidentally explain why Jewish records of the early Islamic era are so poor by comparison with Syriac-literate Christians.

I'll here raise an aside on one contemporary source: Judith. MS Copilot is telling me that Judith had been composed in Hebrew by the style of the Chronicler (with the DtrH behind him, especially Judges). It was translated into Greek using the וַיְהִי > kai egeneto trope, sometimes treating this as a conjunction which וַיְהִי is not. Copilot is raising several arguments for Judith's subsequent exclusion in any language.

Those two digressions done wit', Noam would add that Judith's book assumes Second Temple halakha. Maybe not as egregious as the Aramaic Levi / Tobit cluster on account Judith was, in fact, in Hebrew suggesting more alignment with Jubilees than with 1Q20 the Genesis Apocryphon. I'd say theologically Judith would side more with the latter given how sectarian is the former (we're not here to argue those two).

On topic of Aramaic, we've seen hints that Yom Kippur might have started as a mere preparation for the older holiday Sukkot. That was done under the Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, providing the month Nisan and its akītu. The Levides deemed Yom Kippur worthy of Aramaic. Second Temple veneration of Enoch, Noah, and Levi couldn't be retained to Aramaic, as we'll note from Jubilees' existence, and Ben Sira will literally sing their paean.

Where the rabbis dismissed the late figures Judith and Tobit, they didn't so alone. Noam notes they went as far as to wave off Levi, Enoch - even Noah (contrast R. Singer here). This goes to explain Ben Sira's eventual failure within Judaism as well.

Noam sees this as a deliberate repudiation of the entire Second Temple apparatus (Ezekiel should be proud). Esther, as a national novel bypassing overt piety, survived pious threshing. As perhaps-byproduct, this threshing undercuts the basis of Christianity which stems from a rival miqveh (Isaiah's translation > Mark+Matthew) and/or from Mary being a Levide (> Luke).

With a vital exception. On the High HolyDays the liturgy exalts these men. Most of them...

Noam notes these same figures had featured in the Qumran liturgi(es) for these Holy Days. He cites Menahem Kister that the 5Q13 fragments 1-2 present a draught of the (now-rabbinic) Avodah piyyuṭim, in which all Creation exists for the Yom Kippur. Ben Sira 42:15-50:24 is similar (NB. Ben Sira is also found in Qumran); 1Q20 in which Noah atones for the world should belong here as well.

If we are talking an era before Torah, or at least before its standard text, I can imagine the "Historical Psalms" as the first piyyuṭim. Those would be 105-6 and 135-6. Perhaps for Pesach, by then coalescing into what we know as "Passover". These wouldn't be for Levi alone however. The Temple needed something for their own holiday, which was Yom Kippur.

This Levitic poetic tradition - say Kister and Noam - has subsequently gotten spliced into a summary of Mishneh Yoma. Unlike the Second Temple, the Mishnaists to their piyyuṭ didn't bring Enoch, and further tried to freeze out the Enoch-associated Nephilim of Senîr. The latter effort didn't wholly succeed.

Another point in the piyyuṭim is how they don't bring anyone to replace Enoch... like, oh, Moses. This reminds of the Haggadah, as opposed to standard rabbinic veneration of Moses The Exagog and Lawgiver which is shared even with gentiles like Trogus. The Qahat / Amram works exist in the Aramaic Levi tradition precisely to bridge this gap; Ben Sira also praises Moses (and glides over anything Nephilish).

To me this supports Noam on extreme antiquity to the piyyuṭ-genre core. PreHasmonaean.

CLEANUP 8/18-19: This was a long one, due to me, uh, only just learning about all this stuff. I'm not much Jewish. Anyway: a followup.

Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool; think Binface, or the Yes Men. Maybe call this one... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.

A chud rebuttal

Been a (checks) halfyear since I last checked in on Bulwark contributor and midwit extraordinaire Bret Devereaux. Last month he owned the chuds. He said the only history that we, who aren't signing up as Kristol's cabin-boys, know is Caesar and Alexander. Latter whom, Devereaux pompously styles as Alexander III.

Leave aside the truth of any of this chudbash; for Aurelian, especially, I suspect you could get a fair hearing on /pol/. Let's talk how come nobody is talking Seleucus I Nicator.

Well, yeah. Not everyone knows the full Seleucid story. (This blog has put in a good word for his calendar.) But... do they need to? The Seleucids after the eponymous founder started falling off. Antiochus III was a contender but not a permanent one. If we look further afield, we could drop several more names. But whom are we trying to impress by floating Suppiluliumas I, Trajan, Nabuchadrezzar II, Ashurbanipal, Tuthmosis III... these men although great didn't really leave much behind them.

Personally I wouldn't mind floating some of the beta people. Porcius Cato the Elder, Empress Livia or (maybe more so) Julia Domna, Agrippa, or freakin' queen-mother Olympia. Belisarius and Narses? Theodora? ...anyone?

It's not that the "chuds" can't drop names they got from skimming Wikipedia or Grok. It's that it's a waste of their/our time. We're trying to spread historical knowledge, however onesided as Devereaux might think it be. Devereaux is doing little more than dropping names and waving wingwang.

Which is a very Lincoln Project thing to do. Kinda gay tho'.

How the Internet became AOL

If you own an ancient DVD you may have seen reference, in movie teasers, to "AOL Keyword" in lieu of a website URL. This was Steve Case's bid to create his own private Internet based off his telephone-switchboard in Virginia. 16k bandwidth if you could get through. (Went up to the 50s by 1999 if you bought the bespoke phone modem but by that point, the Dot.Bomb was about to hit err'body. We now measure bandwidth in G.)

So Arctotherium's history dropped a few days back. Outgoing President Obama and his allies, in late 2016, chained the Internet. This made it close to AOL-by-cartel. The first excuse given was Russia. So we had to become Soviet. If people had any further questions they were directed to the Safe Edgy Store of "breadtube".

Arctotherium is an antivaxxer and they cannot help themselves from outing themselves as such. And he runs up against the same problem as other "free speech advocates": he has to allow for the likes of Jack Kerwick (laundered through JJ Sefton). We are now Askin'-Qwesschins about The Virus Assumption. And for 1980s-era televangelism.

There exist some gullible people and these are prone to scams. Scams will become only more profitable as more internet people get up in age, bringing their wealth with them. I am tempted to suggest that these people deserve it, especially boomers given their vast sense of entitlement. Except that wealth - and power - would shift to the scammers who, I dare say, don't deserve to profit. Privatised theft isn't better than government theft.

Given the fury being fanned by these personalities, who by the way have no problem shutting out anyone pushing back upon them, I fear for Anthony Fauci's life.

Middle Hunter Gatherers

A few days back we primitive European hunter-gatherers got some notes that, alongside the famed Spanish and Italian refugia, we should take seriously the Balkans 'fugium as well. Maybe foremost.

"Cro-Mags" got into Europe in the latter 40sKBC, for good this time, forever ending the Neanders. But then the Others returned and pushed everyone there into those refugia. These papers are talking about what happened when the ice melted.

The Balkan peoples went west, to mix with the Magdalenians in Italy and Spain. That's the Epigravettian replacement noted here. Likewise that Italy proved a poor refuge although some Italian DNA persisted. Here are your WHG, gentlemen.

Bacho Kiro remains none-of-the-above. They're IUP East Eurasians in Europe. They had perhaps brought a little (male?) DNA to the Magdalenians, earlier. Not on this scale.

This Balkan group further spread east, along the steppe. That branch might be the source of the EHG.

Cofnas' most questionable take

Everyone hates Nathan Cofnas. The far Right can't stand that Cofnas read Kevin MacDonald and engaged with his work. High academia calls Nate-Dogg a "racist". Here, perhaps, is the biggest hit on him: he's no biologist, rather a philosopher, so prone to just so stories.

There is an "iron constant" in sociology, involving standard-deviations, usually one-sigma. Suffice that when prior generations wanted, basically, any African American presence in a skilled profession, they set a quota. (Alternatively you can skim the cream from Africa or the Caribbean; but the Caribbean - being an island chain - swiftly runs out of cream. There also exist those Rachel Dolezal types who play off the one-drop rule but these tend not to be the cream of any race.)

Cofnas was impolite-enough to state that this wasn't a mistake; you must do this. John Derbyshire said similar. You're not supposed to say this. You're just supposed to act on this, and babble excuses maybe sometimes citing Jared Diamond. During Obama's second term, Equity started to kick in and everyone had to act on this but turbo.

Cofnas continued, though: that West Africans are jungle / savannah tribes who can't into Neolithic. Uh.

Going back to @Evolving_Moloch and Alexander Gusev, they point out that although jungles and their tribals do exist in West Africa (e.g. that Liberian coast ain't great for permanent structures), such tribals weren't the Africans targeted for the various slave-trades. It was found in the Americas that when a hunter-gatherer was nabbed, he proved a poor worker in the fields, as in the crop-fields. It was found along the western Indian Ocean that sugar needed a force who could swing a machete. The phenomenon may well have been noted in Carthage before them all; Hanno seemed unclear on any differences between a chimp, a "gorilla", and a pygmy. A plantation, in short, needs farmers - Iron-Age farmers at that.

The Zanj was eastern Africa; we've handled that elsewhere. On our side and in our more-recent times: along the Atlantic, the Bantus... Expanded. Farmers, all. In fact a lot of the problems in Africa today are problems between herders, who usually adopted herding after their vast experience in hunting; and farmers, overwhelmingly Bantu or at least generally Niger-Congo. The "Black" peoples now in the Americas are generally Niger-Congo; I suspect Brasil being further south and hooked into likewise-Portuguese Angola, as Bantu-skewed.

Farming happens in the savannah as well because the upper-Niger part of that duo allows for irrigation, like the Nile. These more fed the Saharan trade than the Atlantic. As Gusev notes: that side of Cofnas' argument is simply irrelevant. The Atlantic trade wasn't taking the savannah's herders. If anything the savannah's herders were taking the savannah's farmers and shifting the latter, northward.

Interestingly Jared Diamond himself pondered if hunter-gatherers like he'd seen in New Guinea might be of intelligence superior over ... whites, like him, also the product of farms. But hey.

Personally I think Gusev is at least as big of a prick, to use Gregory Cochran's term; since Gusev sideswipes Cofnas as a sland'rer, where that "slander" is about David Reich's lab blowing off Davide Piffer and generally dabbing on other rivals (like Watson) for specious "racism" despite repro'ing all their results. Reich was a social-climber in 2018 and he remains a social-climber today. Reich doesn't want to suffer Cofnas' career. Cofnas, by contrast, doesn't want to be Reich, with all his ethical compromises. I doubt Cofnas wants to be Gusev, that pick-me, either. Anymore than Cochran wants to associate with anysuch "pricks".

None of this is to confirm or deny the existence of the Iron Constant. Nobody seems brave enough to confront Cofnas on this. (Or Gregory Cochran. Or Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade or...)

I will say Gusev is right on this much: if Cofnas wants to step onto palaeo-sociologic turf, he needs to learn the history of that turf.

The abortion jab (or not)

The COVID-19 jab was an abortion jab, say Ron Johnson and Katie Pavlich. Now Ace of Spades, whose motto may as well be "True If Big".

'Cause it ain't true. It was debunked last year.

The whole reason the Senators are bringing this up now is to distract voters from seeing all the work they're not doing for the SAVE Act, although there's plenty of votes for illegal-amnesties in "farm bills" and for Middle Eastern wars.

MUTANTS 8/11: Cool story, ace. Sport. Champ.

On skipping Phobos

A decade ago Hoppy Price, John Baker, and Firouz Naderi wrote "A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars", doi 10.1089/space.2015.0018. On the assumption of SLS, four launches of those could get sufficient cargo to hop to inner (6000 km) moon Phobos. This would - they said - allow for the main prize some years later which is the Martian surface. Some have of-late proposed additionally supplying Phobos from the Belt; supplying Mars from the Belt, too. This blog doesn't endorse Martian surface missions exactly, preferring outer moon Deimos, but we can allow for supplying either moon from outside.

In 2021 Drake, Rucker, and Cianciolo henceforth DRC evaluated the earlier trio (pdf). Deimos - I think - has its own merits, which aren't Martian merits. Phobos on the other hand - they think - is still looking for purpose. Inasmuch as it's being sold as a waystation to Mars, DRC say it's a cuckshed.

DRC nod to Deimos as having similar issues as the inner moon. They don't really consider it however. Perhaps because indeed it is not really a Martian waypoint (I say an interplanetary waypoint).

The issues had in both, which are not shared with Mars, include gravity 3 mm/s² (twice that for Phobos), and yes that is in millimeters. Also they are entirely airless where Mars' atmo may be compressed for CO₂, nitrogen, and argon. On Mars water may, further, be drilled and now you have most of your requirements for feeding plants and housing us animals. More: on these moons regolith cannot be shaken off gloves as it can on Mars or our Moon. So you are going to have to send over two different kinds of life-support: one for whatever moon, and one for Mars' surface. Three if we count the craft getting everything over there (one assumes, a cycler).

The 2015 architecture was proposing just to land humans on that moon and then "teleöperate" robots on the Martian surface. In that case, life-support on Mars is to be built on Mars, by those bots. The 2021 DRC review denies the point of this. Just land everything on Mars all at once, they say. Maybe get into some lavatube tunnel, aerate the place and teleöperate thence.

It is further difficult to catch Phobos from the surface, and likely harder still to catch a tether dangling thence. Here Deimos has the advantage because it's almost in areosync (martistationary at that, it's equatorial).

Overall I must agree that Phobos is the also-ran in the Mars-or-Deimos competition. I still think Deimos deserves consideration as our first port-of-call however. Although here we'll have to be serious. We'll have to build a whole city from that rock.

Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Tales of Canterbury and it got copied - early. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson have a URL of that name.

These two believe that their predecessors had overcomplicated the manuscript tradition. Hengwrt and Ellesmere are good MSS, they agree. To these they'd add Christ Church 152 and Bodleian 686... to pretty-much ignore the others. Because they're all dependent on the four noted (or maybe on CC152's original, but CC152 itself is good-enough here).

The title "book of the tales of Canterbury" seems almost to roll off the tongue. Was it "Cantérbury" in Chaucer's time? A few centuries before him it was "Cantwareburh" or "Cair Ceint". I can't see the accent falling on the second syllable of the former... unless we allow for some lost Latinism. But in 13th-century Latin the Normans were using variations of "Dorobern" based off a tradition of Roman "Durovernum Cantiacorum". Chaucer was self-consciously English and no Norman. I think he'd rather say Cánterbury like we say; the "book of -" preface is tacked on, by scribes, because these Tales are poems which people declaimed from memory for sport.

As to the epigones: "Canterbury Tales" is a fair reduction in my opinion, but it remains a reduction. Also some Tales got memorised to the expense of others, which may explain how later editions might be wild compared to the originals. But - say Bordalejo and Robinson - we have good-enough originals. One might compare Homer, whose two main works seem deliberately-composed such that later copies don't deviate as far as, uh, sura 11 from sura 7.

That's a spicy meatball

Lucas Beveridge is talking about something he and Sam Piper did for Atomos Nuclear and Space. Suppose we only shipped one reactor to a HEO. That reactor hands over neutrons to some neutral metal... which then becomes radioactive, including in the gamma spectrum - one per mission. This transfers "enthalpy": energy to tungsten plates. The plate then delivers those joules over time, in kilowatts. I hear beryllium too.

Here's how it was tested; here's what was tested.

At HEO - as in, GEO or higher - is way too high up for Earthlings to care. You can fuel up a lot of space tuggery. Take Tory Bruno's Blue Ring, which needs one tonne of xenon for four of payload. That reactor looks like it would in fact deliver the 5.5 kW needed to propel to Gateway's lunar NRHO. To get a mission rolling "for weeks or months", Beveridge prescribes Scandium-46 with its low 84-hour halflife. Maybe tugs; maybe Venus injection. Sc-46 is allowed to deorbit after three years.

The test used Manganese-56 which decays in 2.6 hours. This can deorbit rather sooner. Maybe use the Mn-56 for high-thrust tugs between HEOs and be done with it. Like if you just want to hit the Spaceline cable at the 80 Mm this blog has promised.

Various enthalphy-rockets have been recommended for station-keeping. Further: with this much power in a small package, we could go up to Martian landers. Solar flybys with Oberth?

For longer missions, he's talking Cobalt-60 at its 5.27 year halflife. We might not want this in Earth orbit... ever. Beveridge is suggesting this for a Uranus orbiter, or series of orbiters. First it has to get there but we can probably do that with a Starship. And/or with a fusion-driven ship launching off Deimos. This one burning constantly might also do without radiators, since this whole setup is the radiator.

The asteroid/Martian economy

Mark Thompson last April relayed a Swiss(?) study by EPFL on how to deliver materiel to Mars (to its well, anyway).

Serena Suriano, Shamil Biktimirov, Dmitry Pritykin, Anton Ivanov seem to be picking up where Zubrin left off; they're not stopping at Deimos (like I'd stop). Except, Zubrin wanted Martians to mine the 'stroids and these three Russians (and one Sicilian) are asking the Belters to do it themselves and sell to the Martians.

To read the article, they want to deliver the goods to a Low Mars Orbit 500 km. Phobos, for reference, is at 6000 km. Why not just send it all to Phobos? Gravity there is higher than Deimos' and this place should be able to dangle a tether to 500 km. Our authors are already aware of the doi-10.1089/space.2015.0018 mission architecture which targets, exactly, Phobos.

On the Earth side, all this assumes a depot at STL2. That's "ST", not "TL". Somehow they have to stationkeep that.

The 'stroids they want are metallic, like 332 Siri. Guess they want the tungsten... or Beryllium. That one sails out 2.7 AU where Mars is, what, 1.6 and Vesta 2.36.

But... isn't Mars literally littered with meteorites of all sorts? If it's volatiles you want, just drill for the ice. And if we're staying at Deimos (or Phobos), it's probably mafic such that there should be a few iron and siderophiles right there. Or anyway sicila fit for anhydrous glass fibre.

NASA's new tungsten mine

There is, today-announced, a vast tungsten reserve in Nevada. Tungsten as you know comes with other essential elements like boron and lithium. Some of the land however overlaps with 17 square miles of NASA. NASA say they need the land.

My suggestion is for NASA to earmark a tax on the land they've inherited. Materials from that part of the land go to NASA as first-choice customer, for NASA's own use.

Meanwhile I guess NASA should calibrate its satellites elsewhere; the Feds can scout around for other parts of its enormous Southwestern lands for anything likely. Southern Cali? Utah?

BAqDAyT 8/7 from Stephen "Vodka" Green.

What was wrong with the Sack of Troy?

One of those prefaces to The Odyssey is The Sack of Troy, summarised here. In antiquity, most agreed that Homer didn't write it. It tended to be attributed to fellow Milesian, Arctinus. Aristotle wasn't complaining about this one particularly when his Poetics lambasted the likes of Cypria for being Just A Bunch Of Stuff That Happened unlike Iliad, which promised a theme and, he thought, held to that theme, this-or-that chapter aside.

But even if Arctinus wasn't Homer (some today doubt Odyssey was Homer)... Hesiod wasn't Homer either. And what Proclus and others claim of The Sack of Troy is that it is in fact restricted to a single episode, after the Horse. So Aristotle shouldn't have minded... right?

Giampiero (or, Jean-Pierre) Scafoglio has an essay, "Two Ways of the Epic Genre in Late Antiquity" discussing the Homer / Aristotle reception in works such as Triphiodorus' epic about the "Capture". This epic, you can read today. And this, wikipedia is saying a lot of authors did read. Latinists of course are aware of Virgil in Aeneid Book II covering the same episode, but self-consciously a preface to the epic of Rome to come.

Triphiodorus clearly didn't think Arctinus got the job done or he'd not have bothered. I do not see where Triphiodorus chose to rewrite a "Wrath of Achilles" or "Tragedy of Hector" (there's talk he redid an Odyssey however). Our man may have been right, given that I cannot link to a full Arctinus. As of this decade the 2020s, it looks like the Sack was no longer even in the late-antique libraries (pdf)... which puts Proclus under suspicion as well.

What we can do, perhaps must do, is to compare Triphiodorus to his peers and middlemen.

Against Virgil, our man chooses Cassandra over the other prophet Laocoön. For the great tragedians, that's Aeschylus over Sophocles. As a narrative choice in a postAristotelian epic, Laocoön doesn't work here and he's also not in the two Homerics. Arctinus did note that the gods chose now to knock him out, but this episode serves mainly to get Aeneas out of the city before all the fun starts.

Triphiodorus and Virgil do seem to agree on Sinon. Also Triphiodorus agrees that Aeneas was at the sack so tacitly sides with Virgil against Arctinus here.

Ultimately, Triphiodorus feels like a writing-exercise. He seems to be showing that he can write a "Sack of Troy" as might meet Aristotle's rules, if not his approval - because personally I doubt that Aristotle liked writing-exercises, of which a lot of those elder-epics smell. Virgil on the other hand wants to bring us into the Trojan side as to see the full iniquity of the Greeks' crimes. Like Nolan this year, Virgil has a point.

Going back to Arctinus: if I was doing a writing-exercise in years B.C., I'd play up the glorious deeds of the Achaeans sacking this city. I'd tick the boxes of the Homeric heroes in Troy meeting their own ends and/or causing appropriate ends to other heroes. As to, why; because Miletus was precariously maintaining its autonomy against the Anatolian barbarians in Lycia, Caria and especially Lydia and, before that, Phrygia.

Yeah, Virgil probably wore it better.

BACKDATE 8/6

SDI's plasma-core rocket

In lieu of Cassenti's microfission-catalysis for fusion rocketry, for interplanetary missions Omira and Mourad suggest "plasma core". Interstellar is another matter (heh). So let's look at plasma-core. This is an idea from 1985 to power NERVA/NΘP.

The core is Uranium Hexafluoride, either U-235 or -233. In theory a Curium-247 hexafluoride also can be made. Anyway, UF₆ is a solid at reasonably-warm temps (<56.5°C). As a plasma the fluorine ions are likely more problematic but we're hoping to make a nuclear blast out of it so noöne cares.

In 1985 they were trying to contain a sphere of this plasma, swimming in a mutually-immiscible noble gas; and why not, in microgravity. They picked argon, probably-obviously. They measured 50km/s exhaust. We divide that latter by Earth 9.8 to make of that a ratio independent of SI or Freedom units, called Specific Impulse; 5.1 kiloseconds. (Although now it seems dependent on Earth being that frame-of-reference.)

They got it running for about two minutes. After that, they lost enough uranium that the critical-mass went subcritical. Also there won't be microgravity during the thrust phase. Before anyone could figure out how to make this practical for a space trip, after January 1986 the launch costs per kilogram hit the Challenger wall.

Spacenerd life is better now. But the middle-1980s flights of fancy have been forgotten... mostly.

Hence such fission pulse engines as in Howe two years ago, which promised 5ks specific-impulse which would have compared nicely with 1985. Or last year centrifugal NERVA... 1.8ks. They'd make it up in thrust though; so if they just wanted to push loads to Deimos or Venus rather than all the way to Jupiter, it might work.

Gerald Marsh seems unhappy with Howe and, more so, with that lumbering 1.8ks solution.

Marsh proposes to revive Ronnie Raygun's tech: with magnetic confinement, in a spheromak. Marsh seems an expert in magnets, working on them in 1996. Marsh must however conclude that one (not he) must also find a way to generate the plasma with the field configuration chosen, maintain thermal stability, and find a way to turn the rocket engine off; opining these are non-trivial engineering problems.

I counter that turning the rocket off is the least of this rocket's problems. What you do here is to calculate the cooloff of the rocket and let the spacecraft reduce its acceleration naturally. It all gets tested in the field like SpaceX tests its Starship. If you're asking after an abort sequence then whatever, just separate your craft from the engine and push the still-running engine to the side as it makes its own merry way to the outer AU fringe.

BACKDATE 8/5

A proposal for the House of Representatives

Cambridge University is, presently, a disgrace and one excellent reason for its disgrace is politics. So, sigh, let's listen to Cambridge on politics.

Britain (not part of the EU) runs on the DSA system. It has a Parliament. The majority of Parliament votes for a Prime Minister, even if the people didn't want it. Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. To her, is attributed the comment "we have an elected dictatorship". However you think of Thatcher or, if you're DSA, Burnham: I don't think Thatcher ever cracked 50% of the popular vote and we jolly know Burnham hasn't.

Similar has happened to Denmark. Frederik Ravn Klausen, who sounds like a Scandinavian, nonetheless works out of Cambridge (he should leave); he has teamed with Sebastian Tim Holdum in Copenhagen. They propose instead "geographically ranked guaranteed proportionality". Buroughs / ridings / precincts / parishes still exist. But the election winners are chosen by popular vote. So if your Albertan ridings (screw it, let's be Canadian) voted for the Tory, and everyone north and east of the Lakes voted for the Grit; the Grit votes override most of you. Some of your Tories will get through however. From the truest-blue ridings.

As they note, regionality is here sacrificed. It rather has to be, because someone Federal (or Royal) is going to have to guard the ballots wherever the score stands to be run-up. Historically the cities.

An expressly-regional second chamber would counter this. Americans have such a body: the Senate, wired into State boundaries and once-upon-a-time appointed by State legislatures. This is why Americans deserve to take Klausen-Holdum seriously where, frankly, I would never recommend the above system for any unicameral state. Fer cryin'-out-loud, Denmark is made of islands (and a peninsula).

Drawing up the constituencies is still up to the States I guess. On the plus side, if their constituencies might get overridden by their neighbo(u)rs anyway, gerrymandering might not be as hot an issue.

The issue wot I see as hot is if these States' voters are overridden by other States' voters. They already have to suck it up when Senators from Delaware and North Dakota dab on 'em.

Pekah, Shalish of Israel

Pulu wrested the throne of Ashur in 745 BC, from a "Shalmaneser V" whom Pulu's family then disavowed. Perhaps similar breaks of memory were had in Israel at the time. So: Carl Lederer, and now youtuber "Dig."

The eretz-Israel had been a united land under Jeroboam II, but as all men do he died. His heir Zechariah was ousted in a coup and that coup - under Shallum - collapsed. Menahem and Pekah picked up the pieces. The Bible says Menahem ruled for ten years and Pekah for twenty.

The maths don't add up under scrutiny from Assyria however. Menahem gave tribute to "Pul"; that emperor claimed he'd had it from Pekah as well. Luckily, we have a local report: from Hosea the northern prophet. His sermons made a point of the twin iniquities of his land. Hosea didn't consider Judah in this calculus, despite that it was starting to matter again; Hosea's twinland was Ephraim-and-Israel.

According to Lederer's reading, Pekah had a base in Gilead and simply slipped over there, keeping that base. The face-saving fiction was that Pekah would hold the title "Shalish" and not "king of Israel". In practice, yeah, Pekah was sulṭan across the water, as it were.

I must inject here that per Rendsburg (pdf), Amos especially Amos 6 is also writ in a nonJehudi Hebrew to be considered northern. Amos didn't preach about Israel/Ephraim's twinship for the simple reason he preached under Jeroboam II when that kingdom was one. His kingdom likely included Judah then; maybe then Edom (so I'm not getting into which "Tekoa" here). So for Amos, Jeroboam's court was the court which mattered.

Pekah would eventually switch to being an ally of Damascus and make a bid to take Judah. Ahaz squealed to Assyria who then attacked and got all of it. Israel, from Samaria, would end up a rump and tributary Assyrian vassal, under Hoshea.