The god walking among us

Chesterton, followed by Bloom, pointed out that Mark presents Jesus not as a mere man, but as a god walking among us. Contrast, say, Last Temptation. What other gods be like that?

Vridar a while back noted that where the Jews had "El" this just means "God". ("Baal" isn't so different.) The actual god would be Hadad the sky god. When in Genesis "God calls fire from God in Heaven", this means a god on Earth was calling for Hadad.

Gods walking on Earth in human implies something more like a demigod. That wouldn't be Hadad.

Jesus would be more like Dionysius - oft-cited in the scholarship. Another possibility is Heracles. The Gauls had Ogmios; although the Celts envisioned him as an older man, Greek visitors worked to harmonise Ogmios' legendarium with the Twelve Labours. The Greeks figured that Ogmios is how Heracles behaved later in life.

Ochre Pottery on wheels

Uttar Pradesh has yielded some impressive news: Late Bronze chariots. Contemporaneous with the Mitanni.

I'd thought Mitanni-like Aryans - "sintashta" if you don't like that word - didn't get across the Indus until the civilisation over there (who near-certainly did not speak Indic) had collapsed.

As to what the culture had, besides Ochre Pottery and QuicKarts - they also had symbolic burials, of animals. Like dogs and birds. Not horses? Among the human ("primary") burials is one decorated with double-horned helmets and sacred fig leaves. (LOLvikings.) Apparently that fig remains important in Hindu culture today.

'Tis possible that the chariot was such a killer-app that paraMitanni took over northern India without changing the language... yet. With the fall of the already-weak IVC, the locals may have been so impoverished they had no choice but to accept now-Vedic overlords. See also Hungary.

Third time lucky

Barnard's Star! - I can hear the groans from here. No seriously, Barnard's; or Presently-Proxima Ophiuchi which Gliese catalogued 699. The ESPRESSO "VLT" 'scope found this one.

As a radial nontransit this reading has a minimum mass: 0.37 M_⊕ sin i. If it were a transit it would sit three times Mars' mass and half Venus'.

The orbit is 3.1533 ±0.0006 days so 0.023 AU. Zero eccentricity and no moon at this distance, so we should all safely assume no rotation. This late in the system's age we can disregard tectonics.

They are talking other signals beside that 3.15 day one: 4.12, 2.34, and 6.74 days. The furthest would be 0.17 AU, the closest - which skates very close to the confirmed planet - 0.019 AU. The outer one would get incident-flux 2.4 S_⊕ and the inner, 10.1, all more than Venus gets. I'd rather they'd calculated the irradiance of the planet they tell us they'd confirmed, before asserting a "temperature". Overall flux looks upward of Mercury's 6.674.

Add all this up: Barnard b has no air. They're guessing a sunfacing albedo of rock, 0.3; for 400 K. Back of the place should retain some ice tho'.

CONFIRMED 3/11/25: MAROON-X. For colonials the bad news is, that nothing over 57% Earth mass sails 10-42 days. As resonances go, they look like - 4:3, 4:3, 5:3. These should I think librate, such that we don't get Keplerian eccentricities. But also I much doubt they are mutually disinclined.

Abiotic natural gas!

... in Mars, h/t Reynolds. That'd be pretty awesome for colonists if they had oxygen, which will still need breaking down from concentrated CO₂ and water.

Still: nice that it doesn't need to be drained from oxygen and water - and hydrocarbons - which colonists will jealously need. Just dig it out!

Assembling planet 2.5

Unlike Hollister David's permashuttles, the 13:10:8 station doesn't skim a major planet. How do we build it?

A station needs: protection from radiation, air to breathe, and water to drink. This being nowhere at first, we import metallic canisters full of volatiles, and keep the canisters. The canisters should possibly be designed to be easily split lengthwise.

Just to fire the engines and let them cool down, will require radiators; and the station itself needs to reflect and otherwise-handle 1.35 flux. The station can import radiators too.

One bit of good news is that also had here, is hydrogen. It'll be rushing past with much energy. This could be used to reduce oxygen off of imported rocks, and of rusts as happen inside the station. This industry should happen on the sun-facing shield protecting the livable parts of the station; the water drains toward the station which catches the water.

The solar-wind will push us outside this orbital position. To mitigate that, we chose this position for its resonance. Maybe (somehow) we can shift angles, not to get pushed out, when Venus sails into place to pull us back in. And as a rule we should prefer to radiate heat away from the Sun and not toward it.

How do we slow an incoming craft? I don't know that we want to be losing volatiles - or even tungsten. Consider: an Orion as doesn't eject a tungsten plate, but ejects ceramic plates. They handle the heat better than any metal; besides, metals are heat-conductors which we'll want for the radiators.

The postHezb Levant

"Vox Day" Beale thinks that the Lebanese parastate Hizb-Allâhi, which has as many Latin spellings as the Devil has names, can outlast the present festivities. He argues leadership doesn't matter when the people are united. Richard Hanania points out meanwhile that expertise and interpersonal connexions are difficult to replace; especially if your paymasters don't natively speak a Semitic language.

The glory of being a parastate is that you are Resistance. You can claim to be fighting the zionist occupation even if you are not yourself being occupied, as Gaza was not occupied until last October. Hezb were rather the gaolers of Lebanon, and the bullies of Syria and Iraq.

One issue with the presence of a parastate is that they cow the legal state to keep a lighter hand - as in Mexico today. Not entirely unwelcome.

Overall, though; Levantine Sunnis seem not entirely unhappy with the present lack of Shi'a leadership.

A few months back Redmayne-Titley splurted "Hizbullah is Lebanon!". I believe this thesis can be tested. It's more likely that Hezb was just Iran as seen by the fireworks last night.

Beale was more fact-based yesterday on what Israel's next step is. It makes sense that Israel might set up a buffer in the south to push the Hezb remnant back, leaving the more-intact Lebanese army to reassert its lost sovereignty. But today Beale got stupid again.

Banned books week

The annual American Library Association's lovefest is on, to celebrate the new Seleucid year of 2336 I guess.

The public library is run by the same postmenopausal Presbyterians as run the public school. The neglectful and/or Munchausen parents who dump their failed abortions on the school don't care enough to keep them from the (similarly-run) library. "Banned" from the school means endorsed for the library. It is a shell game.

If "public" means anything it means "alternative to corporate".

Therefore any public library has a conflict-of-interest when it comes to books that are banned from schools.

If the public library was honest, it should showcase books banned from Amazon. Books like Jared Taylor's White Identity. Books like Ibn Warraq's The Islam in Islamic Terrorism.