Stray voltage

James O'Keefe who heads up Project Veritas has released a statement in response to Merrick Garland's home invasions. To that, Cernovich asks a question: does that mean the diary is real? i.e. authentic Ashley Biden. I believe I can ask some better questions.

I do not like the Just Sayin' / Just Askin' gamma style; I am not Vox Day. Cerno isn't playing this game either - his question is valid. I suspect its answer is "no" but - the question is valid, as this post will show later on.

My question, then: why the FBI is (now) focusing on the diary, which everybody had forgotten about, within weeks of the last year's November. And which diary Veritas hadn't seen fit to run at the time. The key allegations occur at 3:35m where the Southern District of New York claims the diary was "stolen". Not forged, note - stolen.

Which means SDNY itself - not Veritas - is implying that the diary is real. Now: my readers must all be warned, that claim still does not mean SDNY believe it is real.

Stray voltage, Obama's team called it. Leave some crumbs out for the stupid side of the American Right to pick up on. Watch them shriek WHERE IS THE NIRTH CERTIFIKIT, waving their AR-15s in their yellow snake shirts. Sit back and laugh, as the Left media shines a light on those weird proles. And pass your bills through the one-party Congress.

And then there's Pfizer's QA department. Project Veritas was verified about that, recently; and that verification is bubbling Leftward, such that it hit me this very morning. Well - this Watergate-tier burglary of Veritas' apartments ain't gonna stop that, I'll tell y'all, right here right now.

The sins of Pfizer

Project Veritas whistleblew Pfizer's vaccine trials a few weeks ago. Another whistle shrieked into BMJ, which got a similar amount of attention. Now it's echoed through Pale Primate into HBDchick's feed. And now Merrick Garland has sicced the FBI on Veritas for "unrelated" reasons.

Pfizer is the vax I took, as I reported April and May. This blog is consistent that we have no "don't get vax or CoVID" option, and that if we don't want to live in a bubble forever we should get the vax - so that, when (not if) we catch the CoVID we don't break out into full SARS-2. Yes, even with the side-effects. In fact, we must get it: this blog has been pro-mandate. That all assumed that Pfizer wasn't lying. Certainly the FBI taking vengeance on Pfizer's enemies bodes ill.

Can we trust Pfizer's new CoVID drug? Can we trust that the side-effects aren't being downplayed? Can we trust that their vax works in the first place? I like to think I can, but I'm compromised - in that I took their badly-tested vax already. And lucked out with the side-effects.

In the meantime, it is very difficult to argue against the Front Range "haha, you gotta mask up anyway" demands under this cloud of a vaccine that was so mishandled.

UPDATE 6 PM MST: Why now?

Merlin Stone is back, baby

Wengrow and Graeber have a book out. Joining the ranks of Murray and Herrnstein, and of Cochran and Harpending, and of Koren and Nevo... only half that team will be available to take future questions. Anyway NYT has run a summary but it's paywalled, so let's go with Steve Sailer's adaptation.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity pretends to be a deep history of the urban Balkans before (Egyptian / Sumerian) literacy, so, you know - catnip for me. The era is Cucuteni: 4100-3300 Based Count. Sailer thinks the authors are on the Left but, if they use Based Count, they're not wholly antiChrist. They also prefer lower government to higher.

Sailer calls shenanigans that these citizens were Marija Gimbutas' Old Europe with "Merlin Stone"'s female God; they had walls, which means they protected themselves from raiders, and maybe even from professional warriors. I do recall some vicious city-on-city wars up on the Rhine before that key 4100 BC century. Also one might bring genetics that these guys were polygynous. Although by 4100 BC they might have cut down on that, because of the obvious "homozygosity" that practice must entail.

Sailer brings up the horse as what ended this civilisation, but - that's also where genetics come in: the real horse invasion was an Aryan-driven monster from the West Eurasian steppe. Third millennium. These cities were over a thousand years gone, and forgotten. The people who'd replaced those cities had been wiped out, and forgotten. For the Balkan urban collapse, Davidski implicated a 3400 BC yersinia. That's spread by rats and fleas - the mouse, at least, was there already by 4500 BC. A plague of squalor moves by refugees on foot, not by chevaliers.

Interesting that the 4100 BC startpoint is a century after the introduction of the Nubian cat north of the Dardanelles . . .

I agree with the book some forms of wealth, in the Chalcolithic, were not yet possible. But other forms, namely land especially grazing land, had been at a premium for centuries already by 4100 BC. The farmers by then were even calling in the old hunter-gatherers they'd ejected, because the Flintstones knew animals better. If the mouse population was being suppressed, whatever Hanta Virus aside, it leaves more calories for humans. I propose, further, that bronze - especially tin bronze - was a gatekeeper. Copper has never been cheap compared to (industrial) iron.

So far this book looks like this generation's "Merlin Stone": bad pop-hist for the usual suburban midwits. Wengrow, like Koren (and unlike Cochran and Murray) has done his late co-author a disservice, by not overhauling a terrible thesis.

Steve Sailer is doing better, but I'll nitpick his sources on what these cities looked like. Some of them have bald spots in their centre, where there are no structures. As we know from Hisarlik, if the city is on a hill - even a tel - the middle spot is the top spot, and it tends to erode first and/or to be leveled first for new structures, an Aeolic-age temple of Zeus in Hisarlik's case. This means we're not looking at some massive field in the city; we're looking at what the excavators could find. Which would account for the lack of palaces and temples; they're not missing, they're lost, maybe even deliberately dismantled.

Exomantles

Zimmerman (yesterday) points to the Keck observatory. Which has been pointing to polluted white-dwarf stars within 650 lightyears. These 23 dead stars have heavy elements that cannot have come from the star alone when it was main-sequence hydrogen, so must have dragged in rock from its erstwhile planets.

That would be mantle rock, the crust (presumably) being a thin rind like here on Earth so undetectable. [UPDATE 2/2/24: should be of interest to students of Theia within us.]

One of the twenty-three dwarfs, WD1145 + 017, had Olivine Websterite, a match for Earth. Which ex-star had made the news six years ago because it is still consuming its planet . . . [UPDTE 1/16/22 as some do.]

The other 22 planets' mantles do not look like ours. Nor like each others', nor like Mars or Venus. Looking around, the authors Keith D. Putirka and Siyi Xu seem to have been poasting about this since March, and Siyi Xu has a full dissertation before that (pdf); but we're only hearing about this now.

Which leads us to extrapolate to the other systems with exoplanets within 650 LY. We're one or two in 23-24 for this spiral-arm. But maybe not:

As noted, these 23 stars are dead and their planets wholly destroyed. But: in principle the clock can be rewound, to see what the star used to look like. None will be in the red-orange range; those li'l guys are all, like, still with us, like our own dear G 1-M_☉ Sun. (See it yourself: T = M^-2.5, where T is in E+10 years.) Honestly G stars are pushing it because if they're that old, they got formed when the heavy elements were scarce - too scarce I think for these planets. On the other side we all know when you get too hot, 8+ M_☉, the star goes neutron at the end. So I'd look to A and F (UPDATE 12/2 or at least something that started A or F). Like WD1145 + 017 used to be.

I am unsurprised that alien suns, in the searing A and F range, warm alien planets. To what level does a planet that lasts 550 million years even have time to differentiate a core from a mantle? (And forget about life. The K class is supposed to be the (auburn-)goldilocks class, slightly smaller than our Sun.)

Do keep in mind also that some of these dwarfs likely consumed Hot Neptunes or even Hot Jupiters. Hot Neptune simmers to itself for 550 Mya; star goes red giant (and how!), blasting its outer layers. Then star retracts. No wonder quartz makes up so much of so many of these ex-planets.

But on the off chance that a normal planet can exist with these sort of mantle, and survive four billion years - here's where we speculate. Some mantles might produce thicker crusts. Others might trap more water than our mantle has.

I'd like to know about metallicity though. Do certain compositions of A-F star produce certain types of planet? We had hype about 55 Cancri's brood, once upon a time; last I looked, we still had trouble constraining 55 e.

The Atacama comet

In more comet news, something hit northern Chile about 10kBC: cubanite, troilite and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions. They say it looks like the stuff the Stardust mission brought back... from comet Wild 2.

This'll be a different comet of course. Although... the timing does match the astronomy of Göbekli and other Tepeler.

Northern Chile is a horrible place to live today. The error-bars (which we get in the paper) allow sometime in 12.3-11.5 "BP" which means 10300-9500 BC. That span coincides with the Younger Dryas era... north del ecuador. South of Peru, the paper notes a glacial return and the extinction of several species: Hippidion and Equus (horses), and Glossotherium and Mylodon (sloths). Although, its impact doesn't seem mighty enough to be causal. I still blame Laacher See for that.

George Syncellus' chronology, vindicated

If you read Theophanes you'll see that he used an Anno Mundi calendar - a sort of Long Count from the Creation. But he does not count as Archbishop Ussher would count, from 4004 BC. Theophanes reaches back earlier. This from the Greek translation of Torah, called "Septuagint".

The Young Earth Creationists are on the case, here Henry B. Smith Jr (pdf). Smith documents how non-Greeks, including Pseudo-Philo and Josephus, despite using (mostly) proto-Masoretic Bibles, still assumed that longer chronology. Smith concludes that the rabbinate after the Temple (and after Josephus) imposed a shorter chronology. Their motive: by pulling the world's birth later, they also pulled the millennia later, such that the Christ could not have appeared in 4 BC. Clearly they hadn't counted on the good Archbishop . . .

Smith has convinced me on the LXX's superiority, I must admit. Although it forces some dates: the Flood is 3298 BC, on assumption Abraham be born 2166 BC (this seems to be everyone's assumption). So Isaac is, what, still mid 2000s? That puts Jacob not long after 2000 BC. The Banu Israel will have been born far too early to be the Asiatics who followed the XV Dynasty Hyksos' train, usually set in the middle 1600s. Although maybe "Khendjer" (cf. Arabic khinzir) can bridge this.

I don't know that the rabbis had messianism in mind when they compressed the dates. The effort is futile - as Ussher proves, a motivated Christian can play numerology all day long. Maybe they just got it wrong?

As to the fourth-millennium Flood... ur. (As it wur.) Eridu had a flood... 2800 BC. There were some famous Ice-Age floodmelts north of Ararat but those were more like 5600 BC. Dor was eighth-millennium.

I'd say we should await discovery of the Torah's own sources before we decide upon their historicity.

OTHERS 4/24/22: The Syriac world noticed. The Peshitta had accepted the MT, famously; I now learn, infamously in this particular instance, incorporating the Jewish chrono. This adds fodder to claims that the Edessene Pentateuch was, in origin, a Torah; to which we may add the Psalter including some Qumran pluses. As the Syrians acquired more Greek lore the Melkites, in particular, cried foul: Agapius of Manbij / Mabbug being one and Abu Qurra Theodore Edessene being another.

The other Josephus

Whilst we're evaluating Josephus' self-redaction, Étienne Nodet in 2011 would alert us to the Slavonic version of The Jewish War. Nodet argues it is a version, and not a translation of the Greek text we got. The Aramaic version has been lost (or nonexistent - but Nodet thinks Mara bar Serapion had it) and the Syriac is a mere transfer of the mainline Greek.

A cynic might flag some intertextuality in Nodet's own work. This narrowly-focused piece precedes a longer argument delivered in 2014 but, it seems, edited from a symposium back in 2007. This lecture-summary was not, unfortunately, edited very well. I consider the 2011 article to be authoritative and the 2007 / 2014 summary to be speculative. (I credit Vridar for pointing us to 2007 / 2014; this inspired me to go looking for better work.) For the mainline opinion: Footnotes 49-50.

The Slavonic version has much more to say about John and Jesus than Antiquities will - rather, about two characters whom Josephus doesn't name. It also has data on their disciples.

As to what the Slavonic says of Bar Anan[ias] we have Leeming and Osinkina, Josephus' Jewish War and Its Slavonic Version (2003):

A certain Jesus, son of Anan, of the simple folk, unlettered, 4 years before the war, while the city was still peaceful and prosperous, had come for the feast-day, when they all celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles according to custom, standing in the temple suddenly began to cry out...

But some of the eminent were angry with him on account of his malediction and, seizing him, they punished him with many blows. But he thought not of his wounds, nor did he plead for himself, nor did he answer to those torturing him...

This is very like the version we have in Greek. It does not look like something that would be cobbled from Jesus' life if our author already knew Jesus' life and was willing to tell it on its own terms, more-or-less; as we have in the Slavonic.