I’m pretty sure stars then were pinpricks in the firmament in the sky, so a huge lightbox.

While we have archeological data suggesting that the Hellenics and the Egyptians had strong models of the planets (they were both big into astrology, so there was a drive to develop enough math to predict where the planets would be next week or next year), there’s also a difference between what the intelligentsia knew about nature and what the laity believed. Socrates’ death sentence was for impiety, that is, challenging the temples. (See also Galileo)

But Egyptian history is deep, and I don’t know how Egyptian cosmology intersects with Hebrew cosmology on the timeline. Nor Hellenic cosmology, for that matter. Also, depending on the time, esoteric knowledge might be disseminated or kept secret. Astrologists were far less likely to be burned for witchcraft if the high lords couldn’t easily replace them. Sometimes the sun was a big orb that guided the motions of the planets, and sometimes it was a chariot driven by Helios or Apollo across the heavenly firmament resting on the shoulders of Atlas (or Hercules, for a day).

Curiously, circa 14th and 15th centuries, as the Islamic Golden Age was dusking, there was a surge of religious prosecutions and astronomers and algebraists were accused and executed for sorcery in Araby and Persia. (This golden age is why a lot of our night-sky stars have Arabic names, like Aldebaran, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Mizar, and Rigel – List on Wikipedia ).

It tells us while our best cosmological model might have improved with time, the common notions of the size and shape of the universe fluctuated with social movements, sometimes looking more like Carl Sagan’s model, and sometimes looking like a toddler’s imagining of the night sky.

As a kid, when reading Fellowship I got slogged down after the incident in Weathertop, and the journey through to Rivendell was just miserable and I couldn’t get through it.

I tried again and read the whole series after the movies came out. That bit was still miserable and a slog but I got to Rivendell, and no part of the rest of the books were as bad as Frodo being dragged through Mirkwood while wraithing out.

So, in Towers in the movie, there’s a notorious seen where the orcs are hungry and the uruks solve the problem by killing the complainer. It looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys! Which implies that orks and uruks have fine dining, but also are content to chew on a raw corpse. It’s one of the more referenced scenes in the Peter Jackson movie series.

Contrast the same (approximate) scene in the book: The company is on the move and one of the orcs hands Pippin and Merry a big piece of dried meat. Merry (I think) is skeptical and asks what it is, fearing it might be someone that walks on two legs. The orc tells him to check his privilege and mutters in black speech.

So…I would totally not be surprised if I’m only getting two-fifths of the story.

Here in the states, even the most progressive Democrats are right of center compared to the industrialized world, and so those who are centrist are leftist by comparison, and those who are left wing are seen as radical, even when we talk about how the justice system, between its false conviction rate, law enforcement brutality or propensity for cruel (if usual) punishments, needs to be either massively overhauld, or disassembled and redesigned from the beginning.

But any state or society that decides it needs to cull the population for any reason has failed as a community, and therefore has failed as a state or a society.

Also centrists, like their conservative brethren, fail to recognize that the misery experienced by the bottom rung strata is extreme and heinous, and the neglect by institutions to act on it as if it were a crisis is heinous itself (and might compare to crimes against humanity). And this is what fuels radical direct action (even terrorism) from the left.

(Curiously, Osama Bin Laden said as much was what drove his own terror campaign, including the 9/11 attacks, though he was also pissed at George H. W. Bush’s gulf war, what he thought he could resolve with his mujahideen army. But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.)

(And yes, left-wing violence gets into tankie territory, what is a paradox of wanting to create a functional, peaceful public-serving society that isn’t exploited from the top, and being unable to compute how to get there without breaking one’s own principles. We radical leftists are not good at this yet.)

Loss is the new triforce

and…?

Dan McClellen actually released a video today regarding this specific matter. ( on YouTube )

Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.

I’m in my fifties, still dealing with major depression and suicidality on a daily basis. I get it. I, too, am not a danger to myself or others, although I’ve sometimes held on only by a thread.

According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn’t give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)

Monkey Paw!

I was looking forward to someday having some nice Cannon or Panasonic or Fujifilm hi-res eyes to replace mine but my insurance won’t even land me decent glasses.

I miss being able to read six-point font or see more than ten meters in front of me.

Relevant XKCD

What’s frightening to me is our semi-autonomous drones and robots, including police attack bots.

And this is why the longshoremen have to strike when it hurts everyone.

Yeah. My parents, teachers, ministers, police officers, etc were glad to blame Dungeons and Dragons for my major depression and suicidality in the 1980s, because none of them wanted to look at systemic social problems that are even worse today.

So if those kids are genuinely suicidal, that means the home is not a place where they feel safe. That implies parental dysfunction.

Remember we also were quick to blame vaccines for ASD because it was too hard on parents to suggest childhood upbringing factors.

Astrology was so important to the Greeks, they figured out the elliptical orbits of the planets (up to Jupiter) and how to compute them without calculus.

In my case, my fractional hip-to-waist ratio.

Also my mole-ridden skin. No one wants to see that.

A lubricant separates moving parts.

However, every Mormon family I’ve know were experienced, skilled family-game sharks.

Well, yeah, but I wouldn’t trust NYT news as trustworty without confirmation from other sources. I’d say the integrity of the rag has been compromised, but I don’t actually know if it ever was integral even in the Raymond and Jones days.

As a general policy I reject FOX News spin.