Gateway

Sorry I missed this when Doug Plata posted it; hence the lack of content last month's last day. Thanks Zimmerman for finding it for us.

As of July it's related to HALO so, this blog needs to deal with it.

Over the past week the Z has further noted that Firefly and Virgin Galactic are lagging SpaceX, with Dawn Aerospace far behind them all. Rocket Lab are okay for individual microsats. Forget the Senate Laundry System, that ain't happenin'. I do wonder about Gateway, though.

Looking up Gateway's dynamics, the period is such as to go around our Moon every six days. Kepler imposes a semimajor; NASA are thinking elliptic halo. 70000 km at the height, 1500 km at the lowest. Polar: so it's never occulted from Earth. I am sure NASA employs better dynamicists than Plata and I shall ever be, and I concede the NASA trajectory as clever but... Plata has to ask. Why?

Plata proposes that instead of a space-station, SpaceX can have two Starships transferring propellant to one another. Which they don't need to do in any Lunar orbit; they can do that at, to point out the obvious, Terra-Luna Libration 1. Which Point the two craft then abandon because of its metastability.

I do wonder if we can have Gatewaylikes in, say, the TLL4 and L5 pools. The Moon and the Earth can both supply such a station, and - on from that station - China's kilometer-long spaceship. That however might be a problem for when Luna has colonies of her own.

Re-reading Michael Scheuer

Michael Scheuer, who still has a website, was a CIA hand on the Bin Laden desk - over the late 1990s. As has been pointed out, he was unqualified for that position and his office overall was a failure.

Scheuer then latched onto the pro-Islam, anti-Israel side of the Deep State: Graham Fuller, Valerie Plame, other Giraldi-readers. After Bush was gone there wasn't any use for them.

At base, the Deep State wants the same wars and interventions but under a rainbow flag. David Frum, the MOAR WOAR faction's spokesman, found it in himself to denounce Scheuer early in the Trump Presidency. It seems Scheuer found his true party in the Ron Paul Forum, and then - where else - QAnon. Nowadays he's antivax.

Andrew Harrod is now reviewing Scheuer's early material. Harrod seems ... pleasantly surprised. The key work here is a study of Bin Laden's actual words, not always read by Frum's set. Contrary to popular opinion, and somewhat contrary to Arab popular opinion, Bin Laden didn't claim the mantle of Caliph and didn't even claim to be a trained scholar. (Contrast, Ibrahim Baghdadi.) He claimed to be a Muslim who could read Scripture and history, which he presented with rational arguments, not ever claiming himself as authority. (Again: contrast a self-identified caliph.)

I should interject here that Bin Laden's qaeda did on occasion defer to living authorities on Islam, starting with... the Taliban. I dimly recall the qaeda had hailed Mullah Omar as the amir al-mu'minîn. Mainly, though, Bin Laden hoped to appeal to Shi'ism as well, which Bin Laden could do as a layman. It was a neverending source of frustration to him that his fanclub, like Zarqawi's "Al Qaeda In Iraq", kept bombing Imami shrines and gatherings.

It is, I hazard, the very opposite of irony that Harrod is doing the same favour to Scheuer - judging the output, not the man - as Scheuer had done to Bin Laden.

Harrod reviewing Scheuer is mostly looking at early 2002, and here Scheuer seems solid. Looking back, we might also revisit Scheuer's Imperial Hubris in 2004, when he was calling the Afghanistan occupation an error. As for Iraq, well... that book Fiasco wasn't Scheuer's.

Which is not to say the books lack nits to pick. Frum is correct to flag this one in the second one: the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history. Late in 2001, Bin Laden did enjoy some popularity in the Islamic world; but even by year-end 2002, I got the whiff of Edgelord Troll among his loudest supporters. Like those in Finsbury Park - their poster A TOWERING DAY IN HISTORY was designed to inflame. As Bin Laden receded further into hiding (Abbottabad, we later learnt) it was questionable if this man had even survived Tora Bora. As Sunni-Shi'a relations cratered in Iraq and Syria, other spinoffs claimed more importance, like Zarqawi, and especially Baghdadi. My records show 14 March 2004 as where I'd laid my marker (from Lee Harris) that "Ladenism" was an attitude, not an organisation; and that Bin Laden himself was a symbol at most. Nowadays I doubt most Muslims respected Shaykh Stronghorse even as a symbol by the end of 2002 let alone 2004.

Scheuer's inability to see that just goes to illustrate, further, just how unqualified he was as a CIA agent. Shame, really. He arguably made the right enemies.

Rosh ha-Shana as the fascist Judaean holiday

Jeff Dunetz proposes the theocratic view of the High Holy Days. Which start tomorrow night.

In Flavius Josephus' Judaism, as he proposed Contra Apionem: "theocracy" is the direct rule of G-d. G-d already wrote the Law for all of us, and instituted an "oral-torah" of, basically, rabbis. The lower-courts are settled. (Islam is quite similar excepting that it allows for a more-direct role of the State; but that is what Josephus and Jeff will not abide.) If we live by G-d's Law, we live under G-d, where the righteous State cannot touch us.

Jeff goes on that this entails a personalised approach to Yom Kippur and the ten days leading up to it. He claims it as an anti-socialist argument. On that much I think some archaeologists would be unsure.

The Torah was, if not composed, at least edited in the context of a State, and then of the Second Temple under the Achaemenids' state. Given that, Yom Kippur was likely a set date for Jubilee. This is the annulment of debts owed to... look, we're talking Antiquity, okay? "The Bank Of Yahud" was the Jerusalem Temple.

I don't know what the Holy Days are like under the Samaritans, who (mostly) share the Torah. That'd be useful to triangulate the following conjecture.

In the later days of the Second Temple, I suspect those days were when the jubilands (if that's a word) presented themselves to the Temple - that is, to their creditors. They had ten days' grace to show up and to pay their dues, certainly practical in the not-very-large precincts of the Achaemenid province (Samaritans had Gerizim). If the debtors didn't pay up - well, either they were deadbeats or they were legitimately destitute.

Some of those debtors would be "forgiven" - meaning, cleansed of their debts. Some prophets taught that the debtors were entitled to be forgiven those debts.

Pace Dunetz, chet might not be the spirit of Torah as Torah intended. The "sins" weren't mistakes, missing the mark in archery. They were debts that were owed: chôb, in Ezekiel's Aramaicised Hebrew.

All this implies that a state with the authority to be socialist, even (or maybe especially) if it usually chooses not to be socialist, is the intent behind the Ten Days.

How oecumenism can happen across Orthodoxy

I finished Montefiore's colossal book Jerusalem (9/5: including epilogue). Never a dull moment although plenty of "WTF" moments where I had to set the tome aside for a bit. Moments like the incessant brawls at Our Lord's feet at the Sepulchre. We should all be able to agree that these brawls are an international laughingstock and need to end.

I was reading Runciman in the meantime about how they started up in the first place: the Schism. Not all the brawls are doctrinally-related; the Copts and Aethiopes are both Tawahedo, they're just... well, sorry, racists. So I am under no illusions that this base tribalism won't still be a thing if all our Churches are in mutual communion. But at least we can quit giving the tribes excuses in holiness and Belief.

Catholics are a little better off in that when Irish and Italians (say) run grubby little political games against one another, they do come together at Mass. Why not also the Russians and Greeks? As they say, it's a long story, and there's blame to share around. One place to start, from the Catholic side, might be to show some humility.

The Latin Church is ancient. We call ourselves the See of Saint Peter, himself. Runciman points out that the Antiochene Church also calls itself the See of Peter, or Mar Kepha if you're a Syrian. This proved a famous problem during the Crusade when a Norman prince - Bohemund, I think - took Antioch and wouldn't give it back to the Greeks or at least Syrians.

Adding to this mess is that Egypt claims itself from Mark, Peter's disciple and probable author of the first-surviving Gospel. But this may be our route out of the mess. To whit: as the Melkites in Alexandria do not call themselves The See of Peter, perhaps Roma should focus more on her descent from Clement. Antioch would then get Ignatius of course.

I am unaware that Clement, Mark, and Ignatius had any mutual problem with one another (as Evan Powell argued for Peter and John) so raising this triad as a Petrine unity would take away one source of argument.

Also, although Latin is a fine language with a long tradition in the West, and influence in the East; it shouldn't be the language of the Councils. That place goes to the Greeks. The Liturgy is fairly vernacular in most places anyway, and I have no real preference as to which language it's conducted in, beyond the preference of the congregations; although, in neutral ground - I am thinking mainly of Jerusalem - my vote would be for Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

I doubt I am the only layman or even priest to consider these options. I suspect one reason the Latin Church hasn't considered them is because arrogating the Petrine primacy got "us" a bargaining-chip. I hope that is not true because it is tawdry and reflects badly on the sincerity of the Latin Saints. Mind, I've had some harsh comments about certain Alexandrine Saints as well, so why should "my side" feel left out.

Whilst we're carryin' on carryin' on, I'd even suggest a separately-published New Testament in Latin and Greek, for the West, which included "1 Clement" immediately before the Revelation. Antiochenes get, in this space, the authentic letters of Ignatius. Of course both sons of Peter are fully allowed to read each other's notes: perhaps reciting Ignatius quotes in the Latin Eucharist and at Easter, and the Greeks get 1 Clement at ordinations and marriages. (Alexandria already has the Gospel of Mark.) I'd excise so-called "2 Peter" from the NT entirely, like the Nestorians do, but that's just me.

BACKDATE 9/5, finished the epilogue, wrote this.

The first, temporary oxygenations

Hannah Hickey reports on Joel Blum and Jana Meixnerová, concerning Earth's oxygenation 2.5 Bya. Apparently that's a round number.

The big carbon-crash and oxygen-dump, which threw us into a deep freeze, came 2.4 Bya. A hundred million years prior - Ariel Anbar et al. told us back in 2007 - came a false-dawn. Actually several. Blum and Meixnerová, and Roger Buick, and others, are here to explain these. It turns out there was... mercury, in those traces. Obviously not a signature for life.

A signature, rather, of volcanism. Blum's team says that animals without chlorophyll munched on the nitrates and phosphates that washed down from these new mountains, giving off oxygen as waste. Not a lot of it, and not sustainably - it takes energy to release oxygen from a molecule. But enough profusion of microbes, perhaps, came together that one microbe stumbled upon our inner solar system's greatest source of energy. Or several did.

I'm thinking the new green algae started along freshwater shallows, and that it took longer to colonise the briny deeps. I'm told that the first cyanobacteria tended to drown in their own oxygen, hardly a problem in the ocean, but certainly possible in a shallow puddle.

Heartbeat

The Supreme Court has acceded to Texas' bill limiting abortion to six weeks or less. This amounts to a Federal repeal of Roe v Wade, as it should be.

Now: the other side.

This bill selects for procrastinatrices giving birth - as Richard Spencer notes on his Twitter. Another good point, from another Dick On The Internet, is that we'll be seeing a lot more Downs babies in Texas and other red-states. Elsewhere and elsewhen, once would-be parents find out that their future babies are coming up with that extra chomosome, those babies are gone. The usual statistic is 80%.

This, because Downs testing typically gets done at ten weeks not six. Pace Cerno (as too often), the European-Catholic standard considered normative is to allow up to 90 days or 84 days (12 weeks). I much doubt that is by accident, so I expect a push to improve Downs testing so it can be done earlier.

By the way I'm outing Andorra, Monaco, and Liechtenstein as virtue-signalling hypocrites for their "bans". Their borders are walking-distance of France, a twelve-weeker and - from what I'm seeing - loose in practice even after that. San Marino, I'll allow, lies in the middle of Italy; Malta is an island. Back to Texas, famously that state is the size of France so a ban actually means something there.

I would expect Texans to get more serious about contraception than it has been, but more likely - because Texans ain't that bright - is a rise in "shotgun" marriages. And women doing this procedure out of state.

EUGENICS 9/3: The shoe fits, contra common misconceptions; although male Downs are sterile, females aren't. At least: not always. There are other congenital defects which do better, like dwarfism, which also get screened out in utero. Or like... being female.

Egg

In other equation news: meet the egg. Ernie the Genie caught it at last!

Valeriy G. Narushin and Michael N. Romanov were "visiting"; Darren K. Griffin works at the University of Kent - as a geneticist. Hence, I think, why Griffin directed the research but took third billing as mathematician. The trio published at - where else - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. So much for the Royal Society.

I had thought we'd had this equation already - what's that "ovoid", then? - but no, the actual ovum is something else.

Just looking at it, I'd say what you need to do is photograph it from the side, draw the x axis through Bigendia and Littleendia, and figure out the y = f(x) function. Rotating f(x) around the x axis is the last step which any moron can look up on DuckDuckGo. But again, they didn't do that; they just added another function to the ovoid equation. (Not to the pyriform.)

They say that different birds have slightly different f(x) so, I take it, they needed to get, er, cracking on whatever constants were feeding that function.

The Cantiacs note, obviously, that taking away processing-time means smarter storage and handling of eggs. But it also opens up, say, 3D-printing for whatever else you might need to schlep around in an egg form. Eggs are large enough to incubate a [payload], small enough to exit [a small aperture] in the most efficient way, not roll away once laid, structurally sound enough to bear weight. They think thin walled vessels as eggs should be stronger than spheres of the same shape. I am unsure about that in no-gravity, but I do wonder about an egg at the front of a rocket heading on up.

Which means this shape needs to be taught to geometry students, starting (I'd say) at A-Level / AP.