Honduras is not your playpen

X hosted a fairly good, if slanted, take on what's happening to that ancap utopia on one of those Mosquito Coasts: @GarrisonLovely re Próspera. Someone been readin' the Bard of Avon.

Back in 2009 Honduras had a Leftist President, Zelaya, who was consolidating power to himself in violation against some Forever-Clauses in Honduras' own Constitution. The Honduran Supreme Court and Army - without any help from the American government which itself was one-party Left at the time - threw out Zelaya.

Aside: this is where I quit paying attention to an important Latin American country. I allow this as an oversight on my part. I take solace in how @GarrisonLovely has - also mistakenly, one hopes - omitted any of that.

The new government, Constitutional in origin if not much supported by Hondurans, then did some extraConstitutional activities of its own. Namely, they gave up some territory to "Próspera", headed by Andreessen Horowitz among others. (Razib Khan's X is telling me that Andreessen Horowitz recently took another L at Miami; they're closing that two-year-old office.) We're talking potentially a third of the land. Honduras' new President Xiomara Castro, who is Leftist but pretends not to be Zelaya, wants this land back.

I say "pretends" because X.C. is using blood-and-soil demagoguery... like a Chavez or Maduro. This is clearly an emotive appeal to populism. On the other hand... Texans might not like an "ancap" colony at, oh, Freeport which just-so-happened to be entirely led by Chinese nationals. Certainly one could "ask a Mexican" about how it works when thousands of yanquis move in and take over the economy; they had a whole revolución about it.

Próspera is suing for 2/3 of Honduras' budget. The court is obviously not Honduran; a takeback would be post facto but you know how LatAm courts are. Nah; this is going to the CAFTA-DR treaty court and, we hear, on trade issues the Biden Administration sits to the Obama Administration's Right (and - credit is due - to Trump's Right). In this court, Próspera might win - the judgement would bankrupt Honduras. Why might they win? I suspect because they've sunk a lot of money in infrastructure, and also because X.C.'s rhetoric is annoying the courts. Zelaya had done that at home and look what happened to him.

Much as I distrust X.C., I cannot affirm any more trust in this Próspera adventure. Marc Andreessen and his boys should take the L at Honduras as they have at Miami, and bug out. Honduras is not your lab for "effective altruism" experiments. Improving Honduras has to be done by Hondurans, like El Salvador is best-improved by a Salvadorean.

Durak

David Sacks has X'ed a tantrum; Mike Cernovich has relayed this to his followers, such as we are. Overall it appears that Gizmodo's hit has hit the target. TENET Media is Russian-funded, as Sacks has conceded.

I am not a TENET subscriber; but one can hardly avoid Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, neither violets being precisely shrinking.

TENET is not a Trump outlet; but yes, it is Russian, and it is appealing to an audience as might be Trump-inclined. Overall, Sacks' take is that the Russians don't want the audience to vote Trump. One strategy, perhaps an effective strategy, has been to amplify extreme anti-abortion voices like Lauren Chen's. Mike Pence is out there too as is the Catholic University of America, donors to Pence and to Harris too. (Please do not contribute to CUA's second-collections after Mass.)

Gizmodo avers: The indictment made clear that Pool, Rubin, Johnson, and the rest didn’t know that they were being sponsored by the Russians. And so they say for themselves: they're just durak. Still: their commentary has attracted the Russians. Gizmodo could not keep itself from reviewing Benny Johnson's commentary against the Harris ticket: a "low-effort rant". If the money ain't in it, your heart ain't in it.

Jack Posobiec is defending Pool (and Johnson, whoever he is). Other X's are whaddaboudding China and Qatar. Elsewhere we might inquire into the motives - and funding - of Tucker Carlson and @martyrmade.

To disclose, this here blog the Baghestan is funded by nobody but its proprietor... and by Google/Alphabet, inasmuch as they run Blogspot now. Alphabet is #neverTrump. Alphabet might want to consider if they want to stay on the Russians' side.

Overall I'm going with Sacks as an admission-against-interest. And I tend to agree that China's investment, being that it's going to (effectively) the Shadow Vice President, is more dangerous than Russia's, being that that's going ... also toward that Sh.V.P.'s interests. But we're going to hear only "Russia!" and "Trump's audience!", meaning: yet another impeachment in 2027 after the Swamp scuppers Congress again. With Putin's gleeful endorsement.

The Internet Archive does not deserve support

Recently-published books as are not in public-domain used to be available on the Internet Archive. The publisher Hachette - whose name I'd first heard, in a tiff with Amazon - has taken 500k of these books off this platform.

You can read the Archive's case, on the petition they want us to sign. I'm interested in #2; my underlines:

Equity and Accessibility: The Internet Archive democratizes access to knowledge. By restricting access to these books, you have made it harder for the most vulnerable people in our society to read and learn. Not everyone has a local library, can afford to travel to one, feels safe accessing the information they need in public, or can ignore the potentially life-altering repercussions when tech platforms collect data on their reading habits. Your removal of more than 500,000 books from public access is a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others.

It is a "tell" that this petition is on change.org; which has an editorial bias of its own. Would it host a petition on Hachette's side?

I suspect that "tech platforms" will, exactly, be "collecting data" anyway - where in service to Equity, in alliance with the Internet Archive. If you trust the Internet Archive otherwise, good luck to you. One might observe that the Internet Archive's position is to facilitate the next Audrey Hales. That way, such atomised souls lacking supervision would be finding this stuff on their 'phones.

Since change.org and Internet Archive won't tell you, I will: Hachette would say it is protecting publishers and authors. As well as, you know... kids.

In sum, I won't join this latest change.org SIGN NOW OR YOU'RE WEIRD! bandwagon. Furthermore, this blog and any other online content associated had not, up to now, taken a side on Hachette's disputes; now I have to assume Hachette are the Good Guys, unless and until I'm shown otherwise.

Ganymede, stricken

The Galileian moon Ganymede got hit, barely 500 My after forming. This rolled it around and changed its spin; said spin has since changed to tidal lock, like most moons.

The grand-tacking of Jupiter would indeed have brought its system in contact with the outer asteroids. They say the impactor was twenty times Chicxulub although I know not how they're calculating its velocity. If the 300 km diameter holds up, that's larger than 3 Juno (admittedly small for its time of discovery).

The Europa Clipper won't be visiting this one, and if it owns a 'scope to see Ganymede that'll only be his Jove-face. The Juno orbiter is more an Amalthea visitant. (My proposal of some 4:3:2 Laplacian would also only ever see the Jove-face.) The JUICE is the one that's supposed to be looking at Ganymede all over.

Sintashta eclipse?

Here I am breaking mine own rule about affixing questionmarks to a title. But: Rig Veda Samahita mentions some eclipses, which are now taken semiseriously. One reference describes the vernal equinox as occurring in Orion, and another has it occurring in the Pleiades. That's 4500 BC and 2230 BC respectively.

The eclipse in the vernal age of Orion is that exciting these astrohistorians. The eclipse occurred three days before the autumnal equinox; the compiler, it seems, marked the year from the vernal.

The ex silentio is evoked inasmuch as the eclipses are not related to such Vedic-era Indian mythology as Rahu and Ketu. So this mythology is either preHindu or paraHindu. Historically Hindu nationalists tend to consider the Indus as the home of the Vedas (which it is; excepting Samahita), and they don't place mythical river Sarasvati at Arachosia as they should. Thus also, the dissimilarity principle.

Given the language and recent genetics, the most-likely origin of outside influence would be Central Asia. The paper makes the maths work out there 22 October 4202 BC and 19 October 3811 BC.

This is made possible I think by recent acceptance of indigenous lore in Australia, the Pacific Northwest, and Crater Lake.

I am unsure what we do with this lore, if it be lore.

The origins and fate of the Tang

h/t turtle: an ethnography of the Tang as seen through its diehards out in Dunhuang (pdf).

The Tang are about my favourite of the regimes ruling the Middle Kingdom. Many such rulers have been foreign: the Yuan of course (Mongol) and Qiang (Manchu). I'd thought the Tang were indigenous. Sanping Chen here is looking into Dunhuang's history after that An Loshan / An Shi mess.

As "An Lushan", this rebel attracted a bit of attention a decade back when John Derbyshire, whose wife is Han, transmitted Pinker's musings that he was the worst rebel in human history. In recent years it seems the bodycount was revised downward. It was still a mess for the Tang: the Tibetans rallied the Tangs' enemies, which included the Qiang interestingly and also the Tanggut, to encircle and extort Dunhuang, Comanche-style. Then they simply took it.

"Simply" rather oversimplifies the matter given that a pro-Tang revolt broke out, throwing off the Tibetan yoke. Sanping Chen notes that the faction proudly proclaimed the Tang lineage as "Tuoba" - even Tabγač. That is a Turkic name. This would be like an inner-mongolian outpost of Chinese waving a Manchu flag. I mean, at least they're not Mongols, right?

I find an irony in that the Tang are most famed, for Central-Asian / Iranian historians, for smashing, in fact, the Turks. This is what opened the (northern) Silk Road and led to Dunhuang's seventh-century prosperity. Admittedly making it a plum target for Tangguts and Tibetans later.

BACKDATE 9/4

Jeru/Zalem

Alita, which was not a bad movie, is based off an anime. I hadn't looked at the worldbuilding. Apparently there is some.

What this place offers is an orbital ring, which can use the high-tensile compound of your choice; in Paul Birch's day that was just kevlar. We've been talking about that here for years. Nah: the fun part is how to get from the ring into space. Because the ring orbits. It is a moving platform.

So here on 4chan (sorry) is a hopefully-fair-use screencap (jpg). Tiphares is 3 km above... the equator, I assume; so hop on over from the Andes bro. Keep in mind that Tiphares is hanging from the magnetic field generated from the ring, not attached to its orbiting components.

You then take the lift to the sky hook - that is, to the ring - for 600 km, a reasonable LEO without too much exosphere interference. 120 km/hour would take five hours which is a little boring but no problem for a Texan driver. Personally I'd ponder more that 600 km is thermopause; Skylab at 440ish km died because our atmo had an unscheduled bump out there. There's 2000 km to play with before the Van Allens start messing with the superconductors from the upper side.

Anyway Jeru seems to be on Tiphares. I'd be reluctant to host a full city there; tensile strength will be an engineering nightmare. And its mass will drag the orbital ring.

The fun really starts above the ring. Ketheres is out at, yes, 1200 km. Best I can tell Ketheres is not in its own orbit, but also hanging from the ring... aaaand here the diagram makes less sense. "Centrifugal force" is keeping Ketheres in its higher state: so, Ketheres is physically tethered, to the moving parts of the ring, therefore should not line up with the levitating lower cord... excepting when the orbit allows. The diagram must assume timetables so that anyone wanting a direct Tiphares-Ketheres trip can have one. That's fine with me. Less fine with me: shouldn't Ketheres be trailing diagonally...?

Ketheres further hosts the city Jeru. Wild. I wonder if this force is enough to keep a pseudogravity on the space-facing side. Again: tensile, and dragging the orbit of the ring.

I am despite-this liking that this spinning cable is not a GEO-to-Earth solution, with "nanocarbon" handwavium. Because those don't exist and probably never will.

All this will be much easier if above thermopause and using adequate radiators. In fact the temperature-differential between earth and space is a major source of energy for Tiphares. So not only would the ring be keeping sunlight off of Earth but what warmth is left on Earth is being radiated to space. Brrr!

Next question: we can't drop a cable from GEO right to Earth's atmo. But can we drop one just as far as Ketheres?