Perovskite update, III

Checking in on the perovskite beat: vacuum-based production, perovskite-silicon tandem cells. Theoretical efficiency is 43% so, that's their target; the Chinese think they've broken the 33% barrier already. The local degree-mill has arguably the best sum-up, if you ignore their "carbon!" nonsense.

Which is causing Erkan Aydin on the tandem side to ask: why we're not seeing them yet. It seems that manufacturers are not updating their factories to use the same technique which has offered such wonderful marvelous results in the laboratories, nor vice-versa. Labs use solution-based deposition; factories still use vapour. The labs aren't researching the vapour-based techniques (which cost a lot, because it's built for scale), and also aren't scaling up their solution-based option.

The research-path to sorting these out appears to be vapour, like the factories do, so fixing the labs.

The Fatimids as liberators

Somehow I missed Jeremy Johns' excellent article on the Palermo Koran, as I was (perfunctorily) researching the Maliki takeover of Spain. The same madhhab - actually a cult, out West - took over Sicily. It happens both Spain and Sicily were taken from the same place, North Africa; and back "home", the locals might not have been so quick to shift.

Hallmarks of the Malikiya were the Warsh Qurân of the Madina... and the dogma that this be ghayr makhlûq / laysa bi-makhlûqin. The Qurân if Divinely-created is a Thing; suras 6 and 13 hail God as creator of everything. If this text is not Created, then the Qurân is inextricable from Him.

This MS's ghayr rejects a "heresy" as assuredly as the Dome rejected shirk, there and then the local Melkite Christianity. That 'Abbâsî-era heresy had been the Mutazila of caliphs Ma'mun and Vathek. Johns teaches us that when al-Mutawakkil overturned this policy, the Aghlâbid vicegerency out West kept it on. Their mosques did not include ghayr makhlûq.

But the (Warsh) codices of the Malikiya, like the Palermo MS, injected it. It also appears that, as in Spain, some amirs bowed to them.

The locals - looking at Berbers especially, who still had some Haruris out in the bush, but also leftover Christians - interpreted the Malikiya as totalitarian tyranny, which it was. But in Islam exists a third option. Where Sunnis like the Aghlâbids are suasible to Sunni arguments, the Shî'a are not. Some Africans rallied around one such sect, led by a selfproclaimed descendate of Imam Ismail (not counted as Imam by most Shî'a today). These "Fatimids" (Ibn Khaldûn considered them frauds) attacked the North African cities and, er, won. Then they took Egypt.

The Shî'a regime couldn't take Spain (which simply raised their Umayyads back into the caliphate) and it seems they didn't have Sicily either.

Why the Emperor prostrated himself

James Bogle brought to OnePeterFive a Catholic take against dropping those two bombs on Japan, on Nagasaki in particular as it was something of a holy city for us. The argument is lazy, at best.

One annoying critique, or canard, concerns the terms of surrender, which we've already handled. There is however a challenge not yet addressed on this blog: whether bombs even were worth it. It occurs to me that this is the necessary background into what induced Japan to soften its terms.

Bogle points out that bombing costs money. It cost a lot more in the early 1940s, because most bombs... missed. If they didn't miss the chemistry posed limits on how much damage they did and on how far they were effective.

For various reasons, both sides figured that they could make it up in volume. First Schiklgruber ordered the shift of the Battle of Britain to the Blitz - against bombing RAF and toward bombing Coventry. This did not make that side of mine ancestry any more inclined to swap out the blue for black. Then upperclass twits like Lord Cherwell figured that since they'd started it, we should do the same for Dresden. Dresden did have some military value - but mostly outside where the people were living. So that bombing didn't work either. (Cherwell was born a "Lindemann", so maybe felt he had something to prove.)

We are in agreement that carpet bombing was an expensive mistake. But what if it could be made cheaper?

The true constraint on bomb damage, as Bogle knows, isn't chemistry. It's physics: it's mc². Assemble enough nonchemical ordnance, and that frees up bombers to do conventional work. Like guarding those convoys, or knocking out carriers and the Yamato. Blasting civilian concentrations remains a mistake, but a less expensive mistake.

We could also cite Malcolm Gladwell's probable-best book, The Bomber Mafia. Precision bombing - "smart bombing" - was meanwhile lowering the cost of hitting those military targets.

Now we're ready for the actual argument. On to why Fogle even poasted what he poasted. (I mean, besides that he doesn't read here, and, yeah, I'd understand why trads might not love every poast I poast...)

I actually don't think that Fogle holds any brief for the Axis (as some "trads" held at the time), especially not its Shinto side; any more than the Pope at the time did. Likewise it's risible that Fogle has been secretly rooting for the eventual victor of the war to gobble up Hokkaido too, which he would have (make the Mosir, Ainu again?).

I can only conclude that Fogle's was an exercise in pandering. He's singing The Very Sorry Song. He's making his (lame) argument to show the Japanese establishment he's one of the good 'uns. Then maybe-just-maybe Japan will be more inclined to set up Nagasaki as a Catholic site.

I grant to the Nihonjin more credit to their IQ.

Our haftorah by the tomb

I was pondering Sheol, this week of all weeks, and stumbled upon a synagogue over at wiki and in Holešov, with a Biblical passage. But it wasn't from the Torah. It was יְהוָ֖ה מֵמִ֣ית וּמְחַיֶּ֑ה מוֹרִ֥יד שְׁא֖וֹל וַיָּֽעַל׃ (not Czech) 1 Samuel 2:6; an extract from the Song of Hannah vv. 1-10 which their Tanakh calls a "prayer". Was it always in Samuel's book?

In this Jewish year, apart from inscriptions, Hannah's song will be cantillated in haftarah / haftorah - rather, was. It may not be half the Torah; but it is at least half the Chumash, worthy of regular recital alongside Torah. Various Jews tell interested parties it features on the first day of their year. It may as well be half the Torah!

How long has this been going on? The incantation bowl "Moriah Bowl II" features 1 Samuel 2:2 / Psalm 86:17. I suppose that is Cyrus Gordon, "Magic Bowls in the Moriah Collection", Orientalia 53 (1984), 220-41 although JSTOR isn't letting me in there.

Around here Emanuel Tov reported that vv. 2 and 6 both differ in the Old Greek "Reigns" (including Lucian - so, maybe Old Latin, and/or Sahidic). Syriac, like Targum-Jonathan before and Vulgate on the side, is a new translation from our MT. Dr Tov discussed these versions, but mostly looking around these two verses, to vv. 1, 8-10; he punted v. 2 and didn't comment on v. 6 (Κύριος θανατοῖ καὶ ζωογονεῖ / DMS mortificat et vivificat and that usual translation of Sheol to "in [Hades'] Inferno", I wouldn't even count as variant). As it happens the song's versions aren't in the same context. In this the infamous 4QSam^a presents a hybrid of preLXX and preMT; which clearly did not catch the attention of either tradition, any more than Moriah II did. Meanwhile our Church Fathers included it in Odes 3.

INTERJECT 3/31 Then there's the Song's internal content, preElohistic, even in its LXX Vorlage hence Κύριος [<*YHW/H].

This tells us that Hannah's Song was important to the Jews from a preBiblical age. Overall it is a song against enemies: nobody has contested v. 4. That bowl even attached it to bellicose Psalm 86. You could say that the Song started out as a haftorah... perhaps on Psalm 86 for some, but ending up in the Book Of Samuel on account of v. 5. By the time protoSamuel joined the Reigns corpus in the Deuteronomic History, the practice of cantillating this song was firmly established. Passive-voice; on account the Christians were likely doing that too.

You would have crucified him too

Earlier today I dealt with a couple of lies - and by pre-dating those posts, technically I committed two of mine own (OPSEC and all) - so, tonight, I shall deliver the Truth. Andrew Torba comes close to it, announcing for tabsheer that old redundancy that Christ is King.

Where my brother in Christ sets feet slightly off-track is where he concentrates on the Jews as Christ's killers. He veers into abject haeresis when he says you cannot pick and choose which parts of God’s Word you want to defend and believe in. Self-contradiction in fact: Torba has picked 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15 in preference to Saint Mark. That's not God's Word; it's probably not even Paul's.

The core of truth behind the hostility against Judaism is that when God looked upon this world, observing the civilisations upon it, He could have chosen to make His point in Egypt at the time of the Ramessides, or China under the Han, or Persia under Darius I. He did not. He chose Judaea, and not even that of the Hasmonaeans but the subject province under the scheming overlordship of Sejanus.

We're not even here to answer, why then and there. We are here to ask ourselves, if Christ had appeared under Torba's possible ancestors, the Turks, preaching His message - would the great khagan have treated Him any better? how about Slavs?

How about the Cherusci under Arminius? Were the Germans at the time any better than the Jews? (Are they now?) What would shah Darius have made of a pretender to the House of Babylon? We don't even need ask him; he told us all an earful at Behistun.

No: God chose the Jews, at least to set the stage for His passion-play. For that, we get to bear Christians' blame (and Muslims').

If we are to pray for the salvation of the Jews, I agree it will come through Christ; but it will not come through Torba.

Rennin

Rennet is used by cheesemakers (blessed be they) to curdle milk. Vox Day and other members of that side of the 'Web have noticed that most rennet is now a GMO. By Pfizer. BOOO

Er, except that this has been going on since 1990. Paul Shapiro recalls the 1980s movement toward less-cruelty against domestic animals, which forced food-producers to find alternatives. Once we got those alternatives, like fermentation-produced chymosin / rennin, nobody cared that this was GMO except Pfizer-haters, on the far fringe of Big Granola. Then came the 2019 lableak. Note that this leak wasn't even from Pfizer's lab; all Pfizer did was create a safe and effective vaccine against it.

What smarter nonleftists used to say in the 1990s, to the extent it was even on the radar (it wasn't on mine) was that synthetic rennet was a huge win for vegetarians (like me this month). We now didn't have to worry about animals being harmed for the product. At least - not as much; we take victories against cruelty where we can find them.

Not that Theodore Beale ever cared about cruelty, or basic honesty.

Having scotched one talking-point, I now have to ask if Pfizer still holds the "90%" chymosin monopoly we're being quoted. Shapiro lists some competitors here: some of them powerful (like Dupont) some smaller ("organic"?); some not even using chymosin. At least animal rennet is no longer the monopolist.

Yes, hash-Shem was in the Old Testament

Vox Popoli has been laundering a load of disinformatsiya lately, so tonight this blog will address some of that. For now: The YHWH word did not appear in any Old Testament text until the Masoretic Text of 1000AD!. Quite a take.

This take is false.

It should have been debunked in 2005 when R.H. at "remnantradio" posted it. I suppose we must do that here - so, Vridar: Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh. (Godfrey posted that all of two days ago.) Before AD 1000 we could look to "Jehovah" in Saint Jerome's text, hardly a name mah boi would make up for himself; that doesn't really dispute R.H.'s point but it does show that the MT is no product of AD 1000. For the Tetragrammaton being treated as a nomen sacrum: that pesher on Habbakuk 1-2 called "1QpHab" used the Canaani "palaeoHebrew" script for the Name in the main text, with circumlocutions in the tafsîr.

At least 1QpHab was published in AD 1951; R.H. is aware of such Dead Sea scrolls. R.H. is further aware that the northwestern Semitic kingdoms in the times of Judah and Israel were rife with theophoronyms, like "Hazael" among the Canaanites and Aramaeans. Israel had names ending -yw where Judah, speaking almost the same language, had -yhw. This is, like, Biblical Archaeology 101 so it's good that R.H. knows it. R.H. also knows that the Jews' sacralisation of the name came later.

R.H.'s rambling shouty 2005 mess implies - I cannot say "argues" - that the Septuagint came first and that the M.T. (and S.T.!) were translations therefrom. I don't know that even such Gmirkinites as at Vridar claim that. To that point: early Greek manuscripts of the Prophets and Job bear the Four Letters, in Canaani.

As for Christ - that our Lord avoided some Helleno-Aramaic vocalisation of "YHWH" puts him alongside that commentator upon Habbakuk. The Gospels had Jesus say "kyrie" which just translates adon[ai]. Jesus (or, if you're Godfrey or Carrier, Jesu's inventor) assuredly had the Bible in Hebrew and in its (Aramaic) targums. That Jesus used "Father" also is notable; but not unknown to Jewish prophets such as Jeremiah, Malachi, and trito-Isaiah.

It is difficult to tease out what R.H. was arguing, or if he even holds any of those positions today. Overall I catch the scent of an essay which was much more sure of itself back when it was, er, wrong; and later, as facts trickled in, it got revised... and revised again. R.H. could either admit he was on the wrong trail and delete the thing, or he could puke what he had onto remnantradio's badly-formatted website with le IT JUST IS, OKAY wojack-face.

American Christians, amirite. Sigh.