Mendel Beilis -- March 22 1911 Kyevlyanin article

Andrey's parents were not married when he was born. His last name is his mother's maiden name at that time. Her name changed upon her re-marriage but Andrey's did not. This is important for the investigation.

К убийству мальчика на Кирилловской ул. Вчера, 21 марта, место, где найден был труп убитого Андрея Ющинского, мальчика 13 лет, в усадьбе кырпышного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, посетило много народа. Осмотр местности, прилегающей к пещере, где лежал убитый, в поверхностный осмотр самого трупа не дали определенных указаний на обстоятельства, при которых совершенно было обнаруженное преступление. Возможно, что мальчика убили где-нибудь пососедству, а затем труп его оставили в пещере. С этой отдаленной от квартиры его матери и училища  окранной города  Андрей Ющинский был хорошо знаком, так как раньше его мать жила в этой местности и только после выхода вторично  замужъ переселилась в Никольскую слободку. Возможно, что убитый имел здесь знакомых сверстников, к которым иногда заходил и здесь около пещеры дети играли. В настоящее время чины полиции и следственной власти заинтерсованы семейным положением  убитого. пока в этом отношении выяснено, что он внебрачный сын солдата, погибшего в последнюю войну. Об этом Ющинский знал и иногда сетовал на свое тяжелое положение, особенно когда его мать вышла замуж. Её удалось разыскать только вчера утром и объявить о находке трупа сына, об исчезновании которого она заявила 12 марта в училище. На многих случайныйх свидетелей, толпившихся вчера около пещеры, Ющинская произвела странное впечатление. Она как-то безралично отнеслась к трупу бедного мальчика. Вчера труп доставлен в анатомический театр, где будет произведено судебномедицинское вскрытие; быть может, оно даст нужный материал для судебного следствия .

 

On the murder of a boy on Kirillovskaya Street. Yesterday, March 21, many people visited the place where the body of the murdered Andrei Yushchinsky, a boy of 13, was found in the estate of the Berner kurpyshny factory on Kirillovskaya Street. An inspection of the area adjacent to the cave where the murdered man lay, and a superficial examination of the body itself did not give any definite indication of the circumstances under which the crime was committed. It is possible that the boy was killed somewhere nearby, and then his body was left in the cave. Andrei Yushchinsky was well acquainted with this outlying area of ​​the city, far from his mother's apartment and school, since his mother had previously lived in this area and only after remarrying moved to Nikolskaya Slobodka. It is possible that the murdered boy had acquaintances of his age here, whom he sometimes visited, and that children played here near the cave. At present, the police and investigative authorities are interested in the family status of the murdered boy. So far, it has been established that he is the illegitimate son of a soldier who died in the last war. Yushchinsky knew this and sometimes complained about his difficult situation, especially when his mother got married. She was only found yesterday morning and had announced to her the discovery of her son's body, whose disappearance she had reported on March 12 at the school. Yushchinskaya made a strange impression on many of the random witnesses who crowded around the cave yesterday. She was somehow indifferent to the poor boy's body. Yesterday, the body was taken to the anatomical theater, where a forensic autopsy will be performed; perhaps it will provide the necessary material for the trial.

Mendel Beilis -- latest news

A few days ago I found on Internet Archive, three years of copies of the Kievlyanin newspaper, from 1911 to 1913 inclusive. 

I'm starting to explore this treasure chest, starting here.

https://archive.org/details/kievl1911/01/

File number 80 is for March 21, the first date to publish about Yushchinsky's death. 

It's a short squib on page 2, column 4, about the middle. 

It will take me a long time to go through all three years of newspapers, saving them off one by one. The ZIP download function won't do it.

Once a month I'll report on my progress. Be patient.

Here is the first article in transcription and translation. Please forgive the transcription errors; my active knowledge of Russian is a little rusty now but I'm sure it will improve. Also, the original is in the pre-Soviet orthography. Notice that the newspaper initially attributes the death to blunt-force trauma, likely an accident at play. The first autopsy was completed the day after this article appeared.

Вчера, 20 марта, около 1 часа дня, гимназист Борис Веломитский и Пётр эланский, играя в рощь , находящейся при усадьбе кирпичного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, в районе Плоского участка, случайно нашли в небольшой пещере труп мальчика, по виду 10-12 лет, около которого лежал кожаный ученический пояс, несколько тетрадок, фуражка, и куртка. Труп в одном нижнем бельё , в неестественном полусогнутом полусидячем положение, был прислонен к стенке пещеры. На голове увитого ясно видна рана, нанесенная, по-видимому, каким-то тупым предметом, возможно, что камнем. Руки скручены и связаны на спине. Пещера, в которой найден труп, имеет в диаметре более аршина. На глубине её около сажени, где был труп, она разделяется на два хода. Вчера же установлена личность убитого. Он оказался учеником Киево-Софийного духовного училища Андреем Ющинским, жившим при матери в одной из слободов за Днепром По словам матери, утром 12 марта сын её ушел в училищу и более домой не возвращался. Пока совершенно не выяснены обстоятельства, при которых Ющинский мог быть убить. Возможно, что он был смертельно ранен камнем во время какой-нибудь игры. По словам матери, на убитом было новое пальто и сапоги, которых пока не нашли.

yesterday, March 20, at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, high school student Boris Belomitsky and Pyotr Ehlansky, playing in the grove located at the estate of the Berner brick factory on Kirillovskaya Street, in the area of ​​the Plosky plot, accidentally found in a small cave the body of a boy, apparently 10-12 years old, near whom lay a leather student belt, several notebooks, a cap, and a jacket. The corpse, in only underwear, in an unnatural half-bent, half-sitting position, was leaning against the wall of the cave. On the head of the corpse, a wound is clearly visible, apparently inflicted by some blunt object, possibly a stone. The hands are twisted and tied behind the back. The cave in which the body was found is more than an arshin in diameter. At a depth of about a fathom, where the body was, it divides into two passages. Yesterday, the identity of the murdered man was established. He turned out to be a student of the Kiev-Sophia Theological School, Andrei Yushchinsky, who lived with his mother in one of the settlements beyond the Dnieper. According to the mother, on the morning of March 12, her son left for school and never returned home. The circumstances under which Yushchinsky could have been killed have not yet been completely clarified. It is possible that he was fatally wounded by a stone during some game. According to the mother, the murdered man was wearing a new coat and boots, which have not yet been found.

Why Fallacies are False -- the Math

Fallacies are errors in logic. Logic is not “a wreath of pretty flowers that smells bad.” Nor is it wordplay.

Logic connects up with two fields of mathematics and I’m going to use both of them so settle back.

Symbolic logic is one way of representing set theory in math. You define a set of elements (which may have nothing in it) and then you can do actual math: add, subtract, multiply, and so on. One part of this field is the stratospheric issue of infinite sets, some of which are bigger than others. If that blows your mind, dig around and find work on it.

You can say things with set theory that are not even wrong but you can also estimate the probability that you are right. I have used probability calculations and identification of fallacies to argue against Documentary Hypothesis, which I first heard about in the 1970s from one of my favorite science authors. I also used the Test of Occam’s Razor, which DH fails in many ways.  I have about 50 posts with the details.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/07/fact-checking-torah-structure-of-torah.html

When you talk fallacies, you also have to talk formal epistemology. How do we know what we know? What sources of data do we use to get elements for our sets? This is the hill on which so many conspiracy theories die. They fail the Test of Occam’s Razor because they don’t address all the available data, or they use sources that misrepresent the data. Conspiracy theories and DH have this in common.

By the way, the other way of representing set theory is Venn diagrams, those colored circles that intersect or not. Gary Curtis has some Venn diagrams on his site. Here’s an example.

https://www.fallacyfiles.org/somernot.html

The math shows that logic is not just wordplay. It’s also an example of why some mathematicians say, we don’t invent math, we discover it. The oldest description of logic that we know of is in Aristotle’s Organon, comprising his Categories, On Interpretation, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations. You can find these works free online and can download them for free.

https://archive.org/details/AristotleOrganon

But probability math is rooted in gambling and the first calculations come from the 1600s CE, while set theory is the work of the late 1800s CE and in that century, Venn adapted Euler diagrams to help with studies of Boolean logic.

As with any good STEM field, it all fits together around the edges – and it helps show objectively why a fallacy is wrong.

This is the end....

I am deactivating my Twitter account. If you have not bookmarked this page, it's time to do that, and check back on Sundays for the rest of my fallacy posts.

Why Fallacies are False 001 -- Introduction

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to do this, but people with the best and worst intentions in the world both promulgate fallacies.

It’s partly because nobody taught them about it. Even people who get through college – even people who teach college as I show on another thread – write fallacies.

So how can you expect people who didn’t get to college to do any better?

And it’s partly because so few people pull their education up by the bootstraps. One of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, grew up in the New York slums, but he had access to libraries run by the Settlement House program – and he used them. He read everything he could get hold of and got good grades at a challenging high school – but he went to college as a jock and got treated like one. That was no challenge, so he and his best friend ran away and joined the circus – and the rest is history, except that he never stopped reading. One reason he annoyed people in Hollywood so much, is that they expected him to play lover boys, cowboys and athletes, and leave the intellectual roles to people like Orson Welles. Burt was having none of that and turned in one of the most impressive histories of films in the history of films.

I have read obsessively since I taught myself at the age of four. I studied four languages, two in high school and two in college – but I learned five outside college because they were the gateway to things I wanted to know. Rene Descartes agreed that languages are the beginning of knowledge, but he went on to say that academe keeps chewing over the same old fat and there are new things on the horizon, that they will never have anything to do with. This is in his Discours sur la Method and boy was he right.

He was talking about the liberal arts, and that’s where I find the fallacies. When you come to STEM, the method promulgated by Descartes has two important features. One is, following the method means you will usually pass the Test of Occam’s Razor. The other, which Descartes might not have expected, is that STEM fits together around the edges.

But people whose concentration is run out of the Liberal Arts department at a university are, like their forebears, pipelined. So you have archaeologists who ignore radiocarbon testing, hard evidence about how old material at their site is, or historians who ignore the DNA results of the Human Genome Project in discussing the origin and movements of populations.

And especially in two fields you have people with zero cross-fertilization. The professor whose dissertation showed me that Biblical Hebrew does not work the way everybody else teaches it, never heard of Axel Olrik until I told him in an email. So he was not capable of realizing that some of his grammar has the same functions as Olrik identified structures for in oral narratives. I have a thread on that.

What’s more, in Classical Greek studies, people are just starting to realize that there’s an aspectual sense in its verb system that applies, not just to usage, but to the features of conjugation. Their problem is, they fail to understand the Test of Occam’s Razor. They have built a terribly complex structure including both versions, which is the opposite of the Test. Worse yet, they do not use examples of surviving text to support their claims, which fails the other side of the Test – and some of the surviving data contradicts their claims. I have a thread about that.

So scholars of Classical Greek not only are pipelined to ignore anything outside their field, they can’t support themselves from within their field.

People in the 21^st century have the world’s greatest library and learning tool at their fingertips, and they don’t use it. The third reason why I should not have to write this thread is that there are two great resources on fallacies, Gary Curtis’ Fallacy Files website, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is peer-reviewed. But since people don’t know what fallacies are to begin with, they don’t do their homework.

So here I am, about to put up a third site. While hits on my blog pages are approaching 400,000, the number of daily hits probably reflects people ripping down posts from the blog onto storage, not people actually reading the posts. But I’m going to do this anyway. I feel obligated.

Next, I'll talk about why fallacies are not just word games.

Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 9

There's a sucker born every minute. Twitter has turned up three new pieces of ignorantly desperate pretense that there was once a nation called Palestine.

As usual, two are newspapers that refer to Palestine which was under Arab attack. Think about the logic of making that claim: the Muslim Arabs were attacking a place full of Muslims. 

One is dated May 1, 1948. The British Mandatory period did not end until May 15.

The other is more subtle. The masthead date is May 16, 1948. The people making this claim are too young to know how print newspapers work. To get out a morning edition, the editor(s) and typesetters worked all the afternoon and night before that. The first print copy went to an editor who looked it over for gross errors. At this point, even if somebody reminded him about the end of the British Mandate, he would probably say, "I'm not going to pay a typesetter to tear apart the entire first page just because of a name nobody cares about."

They were so rationally naive in those days that they could not imagine pro-terrorists using this one piece of business rationale out of irrationally ignorant desperation.

The new example is two coins struck with the word Palestine on them. The date on one coin is 1927. Yes, people put dates on coins. If you have any lying around, check them out. Anyway, 1927 is well within the British Mandatory period. So is the date on the other, 1942.

I keep hoping that this will stop but when you're dealing with nutjobs, you have to shoot them down every time or they claim victory.

UPDATE: proof positive that you have to answer every nutjob. A third coin has turned up. The date on it is 1939, again, within the British Mandatory period. There never has been a self-governing nation called Palestine.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH's mischsprache mishegas

So I was reading Devarim last Shabbos in my own version, Narrating the Torah, and came across a comment I made. I've seen it before but obviously my brain cells were too occupied to realize what it meant.

It is a comment on Samaritan Pentateuch, which is available free online in two versions, Walton's "London" Polyglot (uses the Gezer script) and August Freiherr von Gall's critical edition (uses the Aramaic ("square") script).

The comment has to do with the Documentary Hypothesis' claim that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache incorporating Aramaic forms as a result of hybridization during the Captivity.

In fact, Biblical and Talmudic Aramaic or Neo-Babylonian is a hybrid of real Aramaic and Akkadian. It uses the lettering of Aramaic, with the full guttural set that Akkadian lost during the Gutian takeover, but the conjugations use their Akkadian vowels. On the other hand, Neo-Babylonian never did recover the nifal binyan present in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew from the start. It gained words from Hebrew, but not grammar.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, is an ancient Semitic language with many of the features of Old Akkadian, such as epistemics and other modals. I discuss this in detail in my Hebrew lessons.

So Biblical Hebrew is not a mischsprache formed from the collision of languages in the Nebuchadnetsar era; Neo-Babylonian is the mischsprache.

And Samaritan Hebrew is also a mischsprache. The Samaritan Pentateuch has all the same narratives as Jewish Torah. It has about 90% of the same words. One reason for the difference is something called regularization. When you transmit material verbally instead of in writing, each narration risks changes that make sense to the narrator and audience, because all languages change over time. When a narrator forgets the exact word to use, she is likely to use something similar that has a high frequency at the time she is retelling the story. She may also re-use a word from nearby in the story she is re-telling.

When enough time has gone by, grammar also begins to change, often to simplify. For example, English conjugations are simpler than their Norman-French or Anglo-Saxon ancestors. During hybridization, as with Neo-Babylonian, conjugations look like both their parents for a while, and then the new descendant develops its own characteristic grammar. 

This never happened in Biblical Hebrew. The grammar of Chronicles is the same as the grammar of the rest of Pentateuch -- that of the ancient Semitic languages, not Neo-Babylonian or Mishnaic Hebrew.

It did happen in Samaritan Hebrew. The surviving manuscripts have grammatical changes in them compared to Jewish Torah; the changes do not reflect either Mishnaic Hebrew or Neo-Babylonian. A classics scholar named Ze'ev ben Hayyim worked with Samaritans and the description they gave him led him to think that the way the manuscripts used Hebrew was a survival of the Second Temple period.

That made no sense to me. I thought it might be a survival of Assyrian, so I studied Delitzsch's book, which is online. It was no help at all.

Not until I went through several books on Arabic grammar that I found online, did I find the features that ben Hayyim described for verbs in Samaritan Hebrew.

One issue he did not discuss, is changing the spelling of el, alef lamed, to ayin lamed. The Hebrew spelling looks like the Arabic definite article; it is never agglutinated, which is required for the Arabic definite article. The changed spelling resembles Arabic ila, "to". The manuscripts have altered spelling that people who spoke Arabic could not tolerate, it was just too disconcerting. 

The Masoretic text of Jewish Tannakh footnotes vowel issues and qeri, it does not change the body of the text. The Jews regarded the text as canonical; the Samaritans did not.

All the surviving Samaritan manuscripts date after 1000 CE, that is, 300 years after the Muslim conquest. 300 years is how long it took English to develop out of the hybridization of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. 300 years is how long it took the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa to develop Ionian Greek out of the language that they wrote in Linear B. 300 years is how long the post-Exodus Israelites had for developing the Gezer script out of Ugaritic before the Sea Peoples destroyed Ugarit. 300 years is a reasonable period for the Samaritans to hybridize their version of Hebrew with Arabic.

I'm pretty sure the people who invented Documentary Hypothesis never accessed Samaritan material. It's not just the wording or language; there are other claims in DH that don't work, because the Samaritans are ideal candidates to produce the E text -- and they did nothing of the kind. I did a verse by verse comparison of Jewish Torah to Samaritan Pentateuch that I call The Real Difference, and if the DH people had seen what I saw, they could not logically have said what they said.

But there's precious little logic in DH. It's an absolute Conjunction Fallacy or Linda problem based on false factual claims and false logic. Nobody can tell me differently without proving they've done the homework I've done.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Clearing up a lot of ignorance part 8

I should have known there'd be a part 8 in here somewhere. This week's event, in the current environment of Jew hatred, is Twitter posts about Judaism as a religion. They come from poorly educated Jews who are selling Judaism short.

Judaism is a complete culture. It always has been. It had to be the whole way back before Abraham left Haran for the Holy Land. Why?

It's codified in Exodus. Courts run by oaths. Oaths are taken in the name of something so awesome, nobody would take that oath falsely. But what is awesome in one culture is shekets in another. You can't take an oath by a shekets. 

And you can't run a culture without a court. People get sideways to each other all the time. You have to settle disagreements with the help of impartial people. Not relatives. Not the people who already have the disagreement. And for thousands of years, the people who testify to help resolve these disagreements have taken oaths. 

But it's not just that. Every culture has its own way of doing things. The American ignoramuses shocked by a French woman proposing to her fellow after winning Olympic gold were proof of that. So there's a million and one things that are OK in one culture when you run a trial, that are a shekets in another culture.

So when a number of places in Torah warn about how to deal with judges and other officials (or not) we find that Jewish law has always prohibited a lot of things that are going on right now in America.

If you have not studied Jewish law as the basis for a complete culture, you don't know anything about it.

If you have studied Judaism as a religion, not a culture, you don't know anything about it.

There are a million and one places on the net where you can start to get your head set on straight. My blog is one of them, especially the first part on law, which will show you how many urban legends you believe about Judaism and how many fallacies have gone into that belief.

If you're not willing or don't have the guts to admit that maybe you are ignorant, you will never improve, and what you say about Judaism or Jewish law is a waste of everybody's time.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- my fellow language geeks

Me and Rachel Weisz: "YES, I am... a language geek!"

Although some of you already know that.

For the last few years I've been trying to chase down hardcopy of a specific version of Tannakh. I forget now where I first heard about it.

It's in Ladino. Fine, Internet Archive has the Ferrara Ladino edition, but it uses Latin characters.

This one is in Rashi script. It was produced in Constantinople, in a number of editions. I was looking for the 1905 edition, but the only thing being advertised was volume 2 of a two-volume set.

NEVER SAY DIE.

I was googling for it again a couple of months ago, not expecting to find anything new, and I struck gold.

Volume 1

Volume 2

The downside is that if you want to put this on your own storage, you have to download every page image, copy and paste it. Unlike the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript, which you can download as a PDF.

Rashi script is not hard to learn but then you have to realize that Ladino is based on Spanish. So having one of the Latin script versions is a good idea, and then you can type lines into Google translate for some idea of what the Ladino says. There are online resources for learning Ladino, the standard text and a website. You can also listen to programs in Ladino on Israel's Kan radio and on Radio Nacional de Espana.

So there, my fellow Bible and language geeks, is something new to errrr spend your time on.

Mendel Beilis -- the YIVO records

This turned up in a google search over the weekend. YIVO is the Institute for Jewish Research, concentrating on eastern Europe.

https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE12125685

I have given this link to Jay Beilis, Mendel's grandson. You can download the file for your private use but I have to make one thing crystal clear. On page 28 is a typed letter between two people interested in the case.

It unequivocally declares that Mendel Beilis was acquitted by the jury.

Anti-Semites will try to persuade you otherwise, but the same conclusion comes out of the trial transcript, if you read Russian. Which I do. My translation is here.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2013/11/mendel-beilis-verdicts.html

Page 31 shows that Pranaitis' claims were "exploded" years before Beilis was arrested, let alone tried. Because Pranaitis plagiarized Eisenmenger, this means Eisenmenger is also exploded. Since Laible and by derivation Herford used Eisenmenger, they are also exploded. What they say about references to Jesus in the Talmud is a lot of malarkey. Anti-Semites will also claim the contrary of this.

Several of the letters show that physicians and psychologists all over Europe debunked Prof. Sikorsky's claims about ritual murder and blasted him for saying what he did.

Several letters are addressed to a Mr. Montefiore, who was not the philanthropist and Zionist Moses Montefiore, who died in 1885. It also could not be his heir, Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, who died in 1903. It is clear that the Montefiore referenced in the letters worked with Lord Rothschild, who obtained Vatican copies of bulls and encyclicals which refuted part of Pranaitis' testimony. Page 98 from October 21st (Gregorian) 1913 confirms Cardinal Merry del Val's answer to Rothschild.

Page 149 refers to a leading article in the London Times on November 13, 1913, about Russia, which reflected western condemnation of Russia for the Beilis case. You have to have an account to access this article. Anybody who does can find a link to it here, if Google turned up the right result.

https://www.thetimes.com/archive/find/russia/w:1913-10-31~1913-11-14

Many of the YIVO papers are in German and in handwriting at that. I can read German but I didn't stop to absorb them. You're welcome to them.

Every new bit of evidence in this case is precious and this set of records makes one thing clear. Anti-Semites believe that everybody who is not Jewish agrees with them, secretly if not publicly. There is always massive evidence to the contrary and these records give some of it, including the Times article.

I'm just saying -- the long hot summer of 2024

People, we still have half of July and all of August to go and if you still don't have your hot weather routine straight, here it is.

1. Hopefully you have at least double pane windows. Close them before you leave the house in the morning, AND close the curtains, especially on a sunny side of the house. This can keep the house TEN degrees cooler even if you don't run the AC while you're gone. If you have a storm door, open the glass panes so as not to trap the heat from the sun against your inside door.

2. SET YOUR AC TO 80 degrees. This is the most energy efficient temperature, and it is much cooler than outside in a heat wave. Using windows and curtains properly will avoid stressing your AC and the grid.

3. A dehumidifier can be the equivalent of five degrees of AC. My home can't have HVAC and mini-splits don't handle these heat waves well. But my through-the-wall unit has a dehumidifier and when it's 100% humidity but not hot, that's the ticket. 

4. USE CEILING FANS. Air movement is crucial to keeping cool, as you know from experience. It will also make you feel cooler when you are trying to sleep on a hot night.

5. Make sure your pets are inside if you're not home during the day or night. Talk to your veterinarian about ways to keep nervous pets from tearing up the house, but leaving them outside in heat that would kill you is just abuse.

6. If temperatures are going to drop below 85 at night, turn off the AC and open the windows. Ventilation is crucial to sleeping well. Make sure internal doors are open so rooms don't get stuffy. 

7. COLD SHOWERS. A cold shower just before bedtime cleans and refreshes. Start with mildly warm water and then turn the temperature down every half minute or so. Then only dry your butt to avoid diaper rash, and let your ceiling fans blow you dry. It's cleaner than a swimming pool and you don't have to get into your hot car or run through the heat wave to use it. Also running cold water over your wrists, or splashing your face with cold water, are refreshing. And if you're not at work, pouring cold water over your whole head also works.

8. DRINK YOUR WATER. Not iced coffee, not alcohol, not caffeinated soda. These will all drain fluids from your body, removing your coolant. 

9. Put bottles of your emergency water in the freezer, at least 5 of them. In a heat exhaustion emergency, put one against each side of the neck, one in each armpit, and one in the groin while you wait for emergency services. You can also run cold water in the bath and put the person into that, but put in the ice bottles because I know from experience that cold water doesn't stay cold in this kind of heat.

10. Keep FOUR ice cube trays frozen. I'm just one person and I know I go through at least one tray each day.

11. Prepare cool foods in advance to eat when "it's too hot to cook". Make large batches; freeze some of it if it's more than a week's worth of food. Get vegetables, fruit, cheese, milk if you can tolerate it, and juice (not juice cocktail or fruit drink which are sugary). Yogurt is great: you can mix two tablespoonfuls with flavoring like cocoa powder and sugar or fruit preserves, and stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Chex mix with raisins and carob chips is another good choice.

12. Dress as lightly and loosely as you can. If you have to run in and out of buildings, wear light colors. Dark colors absorb light and heat up.

13. Linen bedding is the best, it is historically known for its coolness. It wicks heat away from you. It cools off rapidly once you roll over onto the other side of the bed.

14. Hopefully your bed is two people wide. When you have heated up one side, you can roll onto the cool side. Pillows are the same way, once the one you are lying on gets warm, especially if the pillow case is linen, you can move it so the cool side is under your head.

15. Have a downstairs sleeper. It can be as much as FIVE degrees cooler downstairs than up. This will help you get to sleep. Sometimes if I wake up around 2 a.m. I will then go upstairs and finish the night in my bedroom.

16. PLAN FOR THE ELECTRICITY TO FAIL. This can happen if the drain of AC is too high or a storm shreds the grid. In 2012, a derecho storm took out power to some 2 million people in the DMV who had my same power company. It lasted 22 hours. The heat index was about 112. My only ventilation was the windows on the north side of my house. My only air movement was a Victorian type wooden lady's fan. 

I keep my freezer packed with food. You cannot open your freezer when there's no power or things start to defrost. In 2012, mine stayed frozen and I didn't have to throw anything out. When Hurricane Isabel came through in 2003, my power was out for THREE DAYS but my packed freezer stayed frozen. Some things in your refrigerator freeze well. Throw them into the freezer the minute the power goes out and you might save even more. 

If you don't need electricity to run your shower, you can still use cold water in case you start to develop heat exhaustion, but you will need to keep the water running because, like I said, it doesn't stay cold long in severe heat.

You may need to leave your neighborhood to find cooling. The derecho took out power to such a wide region, I probably would have had to go 200 miles to central Pennsylvania to find a hotel that still had AC. KEEP YOUR CAR GASSED UP so you can evacuate in such an emergency. 

Keep your phone charged and plan to use it only for communication, not entertainment. HAVE A DEVICE SPECIFIC CHARGER THAT USES YOUR CAR TO RECHARGE, whether it plugs into a cigarette lighter or in-board Wifi/USB port. Some chargers come with multiple plug ends to suit most outlets.

Also since shit happens, buy one of those multi-charger boxes that you can recharge from house power. Mine has an AC/USB recharging port useful for phones. Its charge stays good for over a month; I can use it to power my laptop for 5 hours. I have a flashlight that will recharge from this box or from my laptop using a USB port -- and so it will also recharge from my car's USB port. Some multi-charger boxes can also pump up a tire. Mine has already paid for itself by saving me two towing fees.

Nobody is immune to weather emergencies, and that includes wildfire seasons in the Pacific Northwest. Emergency assistance is always stressed at first and you need to prepare to be your own first responder. But even when there's no emergency -- wildfire, derecho, hurricane, tornado -- you need to prepare to deal with hot weather, if you want to behave like a responsible adult.

Clearing up a lot of ignorance -- Part 7

They're still doing it. People are still trying to prove there was a nation named Palestine where Israel is now.

They offer up bits of yellow paper. 

But they haven't read those papers very well.

Because every single one of them falls within the British Mandatory period, the only time there was an entity called Palestine.

1929 birth registry.

Passport for somebody born in 1920 during the British Mandatory period.

Tax receipt from 1943, DURING THE BRITISH MANDATORY PERIOD

Newspaper from 1936. The masthead is hard to read and could be 1930, but the reference to Stessen says it's 1936.

So don't expose your foolishness on Twitter or anywhere else. Find the date. If it's within the mandatory period, it's not a nation called Palestine, it's the British once again confusing everybody by assigning names randomly.

Clearing up a lot of ignorance Part 6

So another ignoramus on Twitter brought up something I remember hearing about before but forgot about. The idea that Jews are Khazars.

Let's review the bidding.

Jews descended in the male line tend to have the NE Anatolian Neolithic J1/J2 Y-chromosome subclade also found in other Semitic peoples, including Muslim Palestinians. (Christian Palestinians tend to have an East African E33 subclade suggesting Coptic descent)

Jews descended from converts can have any subclade there is: Incan; Indian subcontinent; Ethiopian; Indo-European; Chinese either in those living in China or those descended from travelers on the Silk Road centuries ago; African L33, including the L33e found in the Americas. So far I don't know of evidence for C-M, K-M or S-P Australian indigenous subclades but I haven't checked.

Among Khazars, the subclades include R1a, C2b, G2a, N1a, Q, and R1b. R1a is a Siberian subclade which spread to the west before 1200 BCE. It occurs in Mycenaean Greeks, in populations outside the Basque country, but is very rare in Italy. Q is also Siberian. C2b is East Asian, 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351294127_Y-Chromosome_Haplogroup_Diversity_in_Khazar_Burials_from_Southern_Russia

The G2a subclade is all over Europe and currently is strongest around Switzerland and Austria. It would only show up in Jews descended from converts. Otzi the iceman falls into this subclade. 

The subclade that Ashkenazi Jews have is G2b which has the same origins as J1/J2 and is also found in Pakistan.

N1a comes from the Arabian peninsula. It would make more sense for the idiot on Twitter to say that all Arabs are Khazars than to say that all Ashkenazi Jews are Khazars.

Why didn't the idiot say that? Well, A, she wants Jews to go "back" to wherever, the further the better.

B, she has this hazy idea of the Jewish Khazar kingdom that conquered Ukraine and was later overwhelmed by the Turks. 

C. she really knows nothing about genetics, it's the Swiss or Arabs who have DNA in common with the Khazars.

By the way, if you think I'm snarky in these posts, you should see what I do to people who talk about "black" and "white" and "brown".

So just thank your lucky stars that you're not an idiot.

Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 5

So the latest ignorance on Twitter is about past issues in Holy Land history, and it comes in two parts.

First, a photo has been circulating of an official document with the word Palestine on it. People use it to claim that a Palestine existed before there was an Israel. But as you know, I wouldn't be posting about it unless it was an urban legend. Here's the photo.

This document was issued by the British mandatory authority which, under the Sykes-Picot agreement, took control of parts of the Ottoman Empire after WWI (the one that ended in 1918). The year on the document is 1935 or something like that.

The British named the mandate Palestine for whatever reason. The region was not under control of its long-time residents, not even the Jews of the Old or New Yishuv, let alone the Jews that remained in Jerusalem or the Kabbalistic settlement in Tsfat.

The other is claims about the term Zionist, similar to false claims about the term anti-Semitic.

The term anti-Semitic was invented by Edouard Drumont and his right-Orleanist political associates in France, to describe themselves. Ignorant, bigoted and weak-minded people have tried over the decades to pretend that the term relates to non-Jewish Semites like Arabs, but that is a fallacy called redefinition.

The term Zionist was coined by Herzl and his followers in the 1800s CE, while the Ottoman Empire still governed the Holy Land. The Empire divided its territories into units called, in the 20th century, vilayets. I googled an article which shows that the Ottomans never had a sub-unit called Palestine; Nablus (now on the West Bank) and Jerusalem were part of the same sub-unit.

A lot of things are swirling around in world affairs right now. They come down to two things. Evidence is piling up that the demonstrations and protests are promoted by Russian interests, including the photo of a "Polish protestor" with pro-Russian signs on his tractor. From promoting political candidates like Trump and Geert Wilders; to fostering secession movements including Catalonia and Brexit (ask me for receipts); to allying with existing far-right movements, to sponsoring the French Yellow Vests and, as we now know, Antifa; to the US "trucker's" convoys and Polish "farmers" protests; to embedding ISIS (which is wholly owned by Putin) with Hamas and Russian troops that attacked Ukraine in 2022; to promoting civil war starting with Syria in 2011 and including the civil war bloviating by MAGA; most of the unrest in the world is a result of Russian activities, not spontaneous or ideated movements. Russian criminal maneuvers were unmasked in 2015 with the Deutsche Bank Global Laundromat scandal over money laundering going back to at least 2010. Russian promotion of Palestine to the detriment of Israel goes the whole way back to 1948.

And two, a bunch of ignorant adrenaline addicts are committing reckless endangerment by closing down commerce and transport, providing screens to the violence prone and, in airports, to potential terrorists.

If all of this is news to you, don't get mad at me. Get mad at yourself for being 15 years behind the news cycle, and thousands of years behind crucial facts about the Holy Land.

Knitting -- a Summer Victory

Just in time for your summer knitting in cotton blends or linen.

I've been trying to find a pattern for knitting a sleeveless top, top-down, without raglan sleeves, knitting in the round, so as to use up some leftover cotton yarn. Google search doesn't turn up anything like it, not even on Pinterest or Ravelry; the patterns want you to knit a front, knit a back, and sew them together. Well, part of my mantra is "when you're done knitting, you're done" to the maximum extent possible. 

So I finally buckled down and invented it myself. 

Sleeveless, boatneck, with selvages at the armholes and optional mid-back elevation.

This top does not have the gap problems at the neck that you get when you knit bottom-up and knit the shoulders together. You don't knit the shoulders together, you make shoulders with stitch increases under the neck rib.

I used the classic Basque stripe pattern that kids used to wear for play shirts when I was actually a kid. The two versions are here.

http://freevintageknitting.com/spool194/5201-basque-shirt-and-socks-pattern

http://freevintageknitting.com/childrens-clothes-patterns/spool175/basque-shirt-and-socks-pattern

I like the Joan and Tommy pattern with 8 rows of neutral base color and the light and dark of any colorway -- 4 of light color, 2 of dark, and 4 of light again. You can reverse the light and dark colors if that uses your leftovers up better. The more contrast between those and your base, the more this pattern will pop. Or you can use any two colors that contrast with each other and with the base. 

I have calculated (sport/DK) and [fingering] stitch counts below but not tested them.

These materials and stitch counts are for a top that fits a 40-inch chest. Don't change the count for casting-on; you will need that to fit over your head. Don't change the number of rows in the armholes (before you join the round to finish the body). You need them so the top doesn't bind you under the arms.

The target stitch-count at the hem is 200 for worsted, 240 for sport/DK, and 280 for fingering. If you need a smaller size, stop doing increase rounds when you get to the stitch count that is good for you. You may want to do two knit rounds between increase rounds, to get the shoulders broad enough (like for a husky guy).

I think it took me 30 hours to make the first sample after I worked out the stitch counts for the increases.

7 50-gram skeins or balls of yarn. I used Comfy Worsted which has a nice drape and hand.

            4 in your neutral base color, especially important if your selvages will be in base color

            2 in the 4-row color

            1 in the 2-row color

1 size 5 (4) [3] 24-inch circular needle

1 size 5 (4) [3] 16-inch circular needle

Use long-tail cast-on to a 16 inch needle for 140 (147) [154] stitches. Make sure your stitches are not twisted, then join using a SLST/PSSO and put the slipped stitch back on the left needle for a smooth join. 

2.                 Work K1/P1 rib for 6 (6) [8] rounds, setting a marker at the start and weaving in the loose tail of your cast-on. For more flexibility in the neck, you can use KTBL instead of just a K.

3.                Knit one round to stabilize the neck, setting evenly spaced markers for the side “seam” and middle front. In worsted, these go every 37 stitches; in sport/DK or fingering they will more like 38 stitches apart.

4.               Work an optional mid-back elevation: K14 past midback, wrap, turn; P28, wrap, turn; K47, wrap, turn; P66, wrap, turn; K85, wrap, turn; P94, wrap, turn, knit to the mid back.

5.               Change to a 24 inch circular needle.

For worsted weight yarn: 

Increase into every 20^th stitch. Knit a round, 147

Increase into every 21^st stitch. Knit a round, 154.

Increase into every 22^st stitch. Knit a round, 161.

Increase into every 23^rd stitch. Knit a round, 168.

Increase into every 24^th. Knit a round, 175.

Increase into every 25^th. Knit a round, 182.

Increase into every 26^th. Knit a round. 189.

Increase into every 27^th. Knit a round. 196.

For sport/DK do the following:

Increase into every 21^st stitch. Knit a round, 154.

Increase into every 22^st stitch. Knit a round, 161.

Increase into every 23^rd stitch. Knit a round, 168.

Increase into every 24^th. Knit a round, 175.

Increase into every 25^th. Knit a round, 182.

Increase into every 26^th. Knit a round. 189.

Increase into every 27^th. Knit a round. 196.

Increase into every 14^th. Knit a round. 210.

Increase into every 15^th. Knit a round. 224.

Increase into every 16^th. Knit a round. 238.

For fingering weight:

Increase into every 22^st stitch. Knit a round, 161.

Increase into every 23^rd stitch. Knit a round, 168.

Increase into every 24^th. Knit a round, 175.

Increase into every 25^th. Knit a round, 182.

Increase into every 26^th. Knit a round. 189.

Increase into every 27^th. Knit a round. 196.

Increase into every 14^th. Knit a round. 210.

Increase into every 15^th. Knit a round. 224.

Increase into every 16^th. Knit a round. 238.

Increase into every 17^th. Knit a round. 252.

Increase into every 18^th. Knit a round. 266.

Increase into every 19^th. Knit a round. 280.

Knit from the mid-back to the first side marker and cast on 5 stitches. Turn and work P2/K1/P2 into those stitches and purl across to the other side marker. Cast-on again and turn. After this turn is where you will start your Basque stripe if you're using it.

7.               Work the rest of the knit rows as K3/P2, knit across and work the last 5 stitches as P2/K3. Work the rest of the purl rows as P2/K1/P2 in the first and last five stitches.

8.               Working Basque stripe. When you cast-on for the second selvage, start your Basque stripe; you have already worked 8 rows under the neck rib in your base color so start with 4 rows of your light shade, 2 of your dark, and another 4 of your light, followed by 8 in your base color.

You can work the selvages the same color as the body.

If you are going to work the selvage in your neutral base color, first, have a separate ball of that color for each selvage or use up leftovers from the ball you used to make the neck and shoulders. The alternative is to carry it across the row and that’s a waste of yarn.

When you go back to your base neutral color, work a purl and knit row with one of your selvage balls and then use the other to work the next purl and knit rows (or knit and purl, whichever). This, too, avoids carrying yarn wastefully across.

Be careful to lock stitches of the base and other colors at the body side of a selvage that is in your base color. Use your Fair Isle locking techniques. I can't find a good video so if you've never done color work before, put a comment here and I'll help you out.

9.                Work 50 (55) [60] rows of the back in the flat, ending in row 4 of the 8 rows of your base color. Leave a couple inches of tail and cut the yarn. Weave this in when you start knitting the body.

10.            Now make a slip knot in your yarn and with the right side of the front facing you, put it on the right tip of the circular needle. Pass the end (knitted) stitch over it. Turn and cast on 5 stitches. Turn back and work K3/P2 to the body and knit across. Now cast on 5 again, turn, and work P2/K1/P2. Here is where you will start the Basque stripe for the front. Purl across and P2/K1/P2 at the other selvage.

Now work 50 (55) [60] rows of the front in your Basque stripe ending again at row 4 of the 8 rows of the base color.

Join back and front by knitting. At the armpits, working from the right side, knit from the front underarm across the selvage of the back underarm, and when you get to the other side, knit across the selvage of the front underarm to finish joining into a round. Count stitches and add at the underarm "seam" until you have 200 (240) [280].

11.            Work Basque stripe in the round for 95 (110) [130] rounds ending in 8 rounds of the base color. If you run out of the contrast colors, use base color to finish so you don't have to buy more yarn and end up with more leftovers. This is what the photo shows. If I hadn't run out, or you buy your yarn fresh, there would be another band of color above the hem.

  , and  Do K1/P1 rib for 6 (6) [8] rounds. Bind off in rib with one difference. Pick a knit stitch at each of side seam, mid-front and mid-back. K into the front but do not remove; K into the back and pass the front stitch over, then P the next stitch and pass the rest of the knit stitch over. This will make 4 stitches to loosen the hem, otherwise it could be hard to get the top off.

13.          Now go back and sew together the selvage at the shoulders.

In the photo you can see the armhole with the selvage on the left. 

I often use Lindy Chain for summer tops; it is thinner than Comfy Fingering and linen is perfect for the DMV's hot muggy summers. I have some leftovers to work with and will post again when I have the counts right, but you should probably cast on 220 stitches, work 10 rounds of rib for neck and hem, do increases (start at every 22nd stitch and do two rounds without increasing between every increase round so that the shoulders are wide enough) until you have close to 300 stitches (or your target for the hem), 90 rows above the armpits and 140 below them with 10 rounds of hem rib. (I also have a vee neck tank to work in Comfy Fingering or Lindy Chain.)

You can work a Breton stripe instead of a Basque one, with 4 rows of white and 4 rows of French or cadet blue.

You can use 7 skeins of a single color and work lace in front as I did for a bottom-up top a long time ago, or beads and sequins. You can add university emblems with duplicate stitch.

If you use wool, you can work Fair Isle, houndstooth, cable (including Aran or Celtic Knot), and British (gansey) or Bavarian twisted stitch patterns, making vests to go over button-down shirts. (I also have a vee neck vest pattern.) Make sure to increase the target hem stitch count for Fair Isle and houndstooth; the fabric has less give and you need a wider garment to get it on and off easily.

So now, I hope, I've made you crazy to start knitting for summer and get rid of stuff in your stash or leftovers bin. At 30 hours per top, only your real life stands between you and working one top per week between now and the warm weather.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and the "old words"

A long time ago I pointed out that one problem with DH was its claim that P used words no older document used.

I came across my own counterargument to this while re-reading my study Narrating the Torah. On Exodus 6:2, I said that DH assigning this verse to P has no basis in the text.

Every single word in this verse appears in another Torah verse that DH has assigned to an older document like J or E. In fact it uses both elohim and the Tetragrammaton, so it can't be assigned to J or E unless it's a conflation of two verses, one from J and one from E. 

What's more, elohim appears in Amos, a Judean work from the 700s BCE which should, according to DH, use the Tetragrammaton everywhere. And the latter appears in Hoshea, a northern work from slightly before Amos' time which should use elohim everywhere.

With both names, this verse says that Mosheh was a bad writer in the estimation of Jean Astruc -- but since Mosheh took down Gd's exact words, that makes Gd a bad writer. Say what?

It also makes a liar out of Astruc for saying he only worked with Genesis. This verse is not at the start of Exodus and therefore plausibly misplaced from Genesis (which obviously closes with Joseph's death). It is six chapters into Exodus and the actual Egress will happen eight chapters later.

It's been six years since I finished posting about DH but obviously I didn't include every last detail that blows it up. For those of you who missed it, here's the start of my destruction of DH. It starts out with math and logic, and then it goes into details like this one from Exodus 6. It's about 50 posts long and each post is about a page worth in Word. Whether you never heard of it, or never liked it, or just didn't know what a pile of crap it was, you have a chance at learning the truth.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Behold! A Second Witness

One of my projects for some years now has been trawling the Internet for articles about the Akrotiri explosion that have bearing on the Exodus.

The relevant Bible verses are Exodus 10:21-23, the palpable darkness that fell on Avaris but not in Goshen across the border. This palpable darkness is characteristic of the Plinian phase of a volcanic eruption like Vesuvius in 79 CE or Mount St. Helens. The Akrotiri eruption was 20x that of Vesuvius in 79 CE which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. 

The dust streamed SSE on a ruach yam, a sea wind which, for Egypt, meant it came from the NNW. But did it happen in the spring?

Well, it happened before autumn and studies from multiple perspectives have pegged it more and more closely. Examinations of charred insects in jars of fava beans show that the beans came from the prior year's harvest; it contained all stages of the insect's metamorphosis except eggs, which are laid in spring. This pest never develops in stored beans. It can only develop out in the fields. So the beans were picked after they were infested, stored up and left behind when the dust clouds sent people scurrying from Akrotiri, accounting for the lack of human remains. They probably assumed things would blow over and they would come back for the stored food. Instead, KERBLOOEY.

Another important indicator was olive remains found in the ash deposit. This included branches, leaves with parasites on them, and olive stones. The question I always had was, did they find any way to tell if the olive flesh had started to develop yet. Finding bare stones with no trace of even charred flesh would put the disaster in early spring; finding any remains of even charred flesh sets the date closer to summer. The leaves are not enough; olives are evergreens. I haven't found the answer to my question yet.

Now comes an article on the Babylonian Venus Tablets of the reign of Ammisaduqa, containing records of observations of Venus as well as the meaning of the various phases and things. In addition to phases, the tablets record an issue called conjunction. Twice a year Venus disappears into the glare of the sun; there is an inferior and a superior conjunction and you can google about the definition of those terms.

What the tablets record is that in 1627 BCE, the dates of the superior conjunction could not be determined from observation. About 25 April, Venus should have been visible as "the morning star", then reached conjunction and come out by 5 October as "the evening star". But they never saw "the morning star". There's no explanation of unusual storms, the rain clouds of which would have hidden Venus. But given the year, the explanation probably turns out to be dust from Thera. 

It would have taken months for this dust to get thick enough to occlude Venus. American Meteorological Society data shows that historically, the most common wind in Mesopotamia came from the NNW. Ancient maps of cities put this direction at the top and free-standing buildings were oriented to keep out the wind and its dust. The main component coming from the north would have limited the amount of dust coming from Thera, which was located to the WNW. 

Avaris, on the other hand, is about half the distance from Thera as Babylon, and the prevailing wind out of the NNW at that time of the year promoted the volume of dust that produced the plague.

The article on the tablets has another suggestion to make, an eruption of Aniakchak in Alaska. However, this has the same problem as the eruption of Krakatau that I discussed for Gildas. It's thousands of km farther from Babylon than Thera. It's to the ENE. It's just another example of how academics don't take all the evidence into account (like distance and prevailing wind), or don't look outside their pipeline (such as to see the resemblance to the Krakatau claim). 

And now another example of how you can't rely on what people say. I found three tourism websites, all parroting the same text about finding flowers in the remains of the Thera explosion. I contacted one and they told me they had no data to back up that claim. So if anybody tells you that olive flowers were found at Thera, ask them for the archaeological report. I doubt they'll be able to give it to you; Google didn't find it for me, though it did turn up the paper on the Venus tablets.

Fact-Checking the Torah: clearing up a lot of ignorance Part 4

If the only thing you know about Jews is Fiddler on the Roof or some other form of entertainment, boy have you got a lot to learn.

The feature item for this post is the "go back to Poland" thing. 

As I posted some time ago, Jews have lived in the Holy Land for nearly 36 centuries.

Sephardic Jews from around the Mediterranean (especially Italy and the marranos of Spain and Portugal) live in a number of places, including Israel. The national radio station hosts programs in the Ladino language of Spain.

The Jews of Kaifeng China are natives and have been there for a thousand years. 

After 1492, Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisition wound up in the Spanish Netherlands or Brazil, and the Brazilians moved to New Amsterdam, which is now New York City. The earliest synagogues in the US, such as the Touro synagogue, were Sephardic. 

Marranos came to the Americas with Cortes and other conquerors. Their blood flows in their descendants. 

All of the Arabic nations expelled their Jews after 1948. Where did they go? Three guesses and the first two don't count.

Soon after 1948 Operation Solomon airlifted Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

After 1948, the Bene Israel of India came to Israel.

In 1966 a tribe of Inca converted to Judaism. Some of the Bnei Moshe moved to Israel. One was serving in the IDF on October 7 2023 and was killed defending his nation. 

While the LDS Book of Mormon claims the Native Americans were descended from the Ten Tribes (which is false), some Native Americans have converted to Judaism. 

African-Americans with a Jewish mother are counted as Jews. There are also African-American converts to Judaism. I remember seeing a photo of a black couple at their wedding, the man wearing a Chassidic shtreiml, but I can't find it on Google. I think it was in a Jewish calendar.

And then, Ashkenazic Jews may inherit the m33c mtDNA gene from China, which moved west along the Silk Road. I have ancestors who came from Hungary and, depending on how many generations the Kleins lived there, I might have it.

Genetic Jewishness comes through the mother, except for kohanim who inherit a specific Y chromosome unit. But with both men and women converting to Judaism for 35 centuries, there is no telling which of your acquaintances is Jewish. King Ferdinand of Aragon, who promoted the Inquisition's autos da fe, had a Jewish grandmother. So once again, curb your ignorance. And if you really want to help, use this post to bust the chops of the Jew-haters who say "go back".

Knitting -- pullover version 3

So over the last 2 years I've learned some new techniques and YOU get the benefit of them without having to evaluate a hundred different Youtube videos.

This is for a long-sleeved worsted (DK/sport) [fingering] jumper, knitted bottom up, in a woolen yarn. 

You need size 7 (5) [3] circular needles in two tether sizes, 24 for the body and 16 for the neck and upper sleeves. 

You also want DP needles in size 7 (5) [3] for the cuffs and lower part of the sleeves. Some patterns call for 6 (4) but let's not fuss with that.

It takes me 1430 yards of yarn for a long-sleeved pullover that fits my 40 inch chest and 21 inch arms. This amount allows for steeking and for a mid-back elevation. You may need less but, remember, if you overbuy you can make matching socks.

Do some math to see what stitch counts are right for you. The paper sleeve of the yarn hank or ball should give a number of stitches on a specific needle size and tell you how many inches that is. Even if you need fewer stitches when you cast on for your hem rib, you might need more rounds in the body under the arms (my back is about an inch shorted than usual for my height). You can always knit a 30 x 30 swatch to make sure your particular yarn will work out the way you want.

You may need three weeks to a month to finish this, depending on how experienced you are as a knitter and how much else is going on in your life. But the sky is the limit for how many colors there are to choose from; there are also hand-painted yarns which are multi-colored, and tweeded and beaded yarns.

If you buy hanks of yarn, wind at least two of them into one ball apiece. You will have to stop from time to time and wind more hanks into balls; it takes far less time than trying to untangle the hank as you work. Don't avoid hank yarn; there are too many nice ones out there.

Tie the ends of the two balls together with a square knot, leave a couple of inches of raw ends; you will tuck this loose yarn in during the first round of the bottom rib.

Make a slip knot near this square knot and put it on the end of your 24 inch circular needle. Now use the long-tail (slingshot) cast-on for 200 (260) [280] stitches. If you want to get straight to the goodies, go to 2:20.

I know that this cast-on seems complicated but a) it gives you a nice edge b) I find it easier to keep track of how many stitches I cast on and c) if you have a pattern that calls for a provisional cast-on, this is how you do it. 

Now make sure the stitches aren't twisted. Make sure the last five or six stitches are tight on the needle (you'll loosen them later) with the loops around the TOP and the connectors between the loops on the BOTTOM. Holding the last stitches firmly, work around to the other end of the needle making sure all the loops are on the TOP. 

Now you can start knitting the rib. Cut one of the balls of yarn off two or three inches from the end of the needle with the last stitches. Slip the last stitch on the other needle to the needle with the yarn ends, pass last stitch on that needle over, move the stitch back to the left needle, and knit it. This makes a smooth line at the join and prevents gaps. You'll use this technique again later. Drape a yarn marker before this first knitted stitch. I often put a slip knot in this marker so I know when I'm starting a new round.

In worsted, unless you are working an Iceland pattern, you will K the next stitch, then P2/K2 around, putting markers at 50, 100, and 150 stitches. For the first 6 to 8 knit stitches in the rib, thread the loose yarn ends into it. 

For all others, P the next stitch then K1/P1 around putting markers at the front center, left side and back center.

Work ribbing for 6 (8) [10] rounds and switch to knitting, flipping the marker yarns over the top when you get to them. This shows where you started knitting. Knit around for 100 (110) [120] rounds. Every 10 rounds of knitting, flip the marker yarn to the inside or outside. It will save time in checking whether you are at the marker, and it will help you count rounds.

I highly recommend Irish cottage or pit knitting for the body. a) You are better off not looking at your fingers while you work it, so you can watch TV or a movie. b) It works fast. c) It is less likely to cause tendonitis than the English hold, but the Continental or Norwegian hold also helps with this.

When you come to the end of a ball of yarn, stop 2-3 inches before the end. Start the next knit stitch and when you have wrapped the yarn around the needle, wrap the end of a new ball of yarn on top of it and pull through for a doubled stitch. Keep this up until all the yarn of the old ball has been used, and continue on. This is a join. Once you finish and wash and block your jumper, you'll never notice it.

On the last round stop 5 (6) [7] stitches before the underarm marker. Put the next 10 (12) [14] stitches on a holder. Use a thumb cast on to add 10 (12) [14] stitches for the bottom of your steeking. Do the same thing at the other under-arm halfway around. Run a marker yarn up the center of the steeking. You will later cut along this marker.

Steeking ONLY works in woolen yarn because it hackles as you wash and wear, and this keeps the cut yarn in the middle of the steeking from unraveling. If you are using a blend or cotton or linen, you want to workfaux set in sleeves.

Continue knitting around for 43 (53) [57] rounds.

Work your midback elevation which will let the hem sit parallel to the floor as follows:

K around to the center back marker and 14 stitches beyond it. Bring the yarn to the front, slip the next stitch, put the yarn to the back, return that stitch to its needle (a wrap), turn.

P 28 stitches, bring the yarn to the back, slip the next stitch, bring the yarn to the front, return that stitch to its needle (a wrap), turn.

K 47, wrap, turn.

P 66, wrap, turn.

K 85, wrap, turn.

P 94, wrap, turn.

K one round.

Knit to the middle of the steeking. Knit together at the shoulders as follows; turn the top inside out. Using one of your DPs, pick up one stitch in front and one in back, and knit together. Do this again and pass the last stitch over leaving one on the needle. 

When you have done the pass-stitch-over 23 (27) [30] times, turn the top right-side out and put the last stitch on the right-hand needle. Pass the next stitch on that needle over it and put it back on the left needle. Knit that stitch. 

Switching to the 16 inch circular needle, knit around to the middle of the other steeking, turn it inside out and knit together 23 (27) [30] stitches. Do the same PSSO maneuver.

Knit around to the other shoulder. There will be a long stitch on top; put your needle under that stitch NOT through it, and knit. This will close up part of the gap. If you still don't like it, you can come back later and fill in with duplicate stitch.

Work ribbing to the other shoulder, the same as the hem (either K2/P2 or K1/P1), slip your needle under the long top stitch and knit, and continue in rib. 

Work neck ribbing for the same number of rows as the hem. Now start a new round of rib, but pull the previous stitch over each new stitch to bind off in rib. 

When you finish, pull a loop of yarn through the last stitch, tighten it, and cut leaving at least three inches of raw end. Using a darning needle, work this end into the top of the first stitch of ribbing to make a smooth join. Poke it through the next stitch down, weave into the inside of the ribbing, knot and cut, leaving about one inch.

Now pick up stitches for the sleeves as follows: 

Using your 16 inch circular needle, knit the 10 (12) [14] underarm stitches from the holder and let this working yarn fall to the inside. Run a marker yarn on each side of the steeking middle marker, 5 (6) [7] stitches to the front and back sides.

Cut the steeking up the middle, taking the marker out as you go. Now using your crochet hook, insert it from outside to inside in the first stitch after the underarm. Pull the working yarn through to the front and put it on your circular needle. Pick up every stitch along the marker, front and back, including one through the shoulder seam.

When you get back to the underarm, slip the first stitch to the right-hand needle, pass the last body stitch over, put it back, and knit it. Knit across the underarm, slip the first body stitch to the needle, pass the last underarm stitch over, put it back, and knit it. This will close up part of the gap that usually develops here. Later you can use duplicate stitch to close up any loose stitches.

Run a marker stitch from the middle of the underarm; usually I pull the "seam" marker below the underarm for this. Count how many stitches you have around. It should be 97 (121) [129] or something like that.

Subtract from that the number of stitches you need at the cuff, 68 (72) [76]. The answer is how many stitches you have to decrease from shoulder to cuff. 

Divide by 2; this is how many rows will have to have decreases. 

Divide that number into 132 (145) [163] which is the number of rounds I need in the sleeves. The answer is how many rounds to knit before you do another decrease. 

Knit that many rounds. When you start the next row, K1 at the underarm marker, K2TOG and at the other end of the round, Slip/K1/PSSO/K1 before the underarm marker. Then knit the rounds to the next decrease.

When you have knitted 100 rounds, count the number of stitches left and do your math again. You may need to leave more rounds between decreases. If you have at most 100 stitches left in a round, divide between your DPs as follows: 35 on N1, 30 on N2, and 35 on N3. Or whatever number adds up to how many stitches you have left.

Finish knitting the sleeve and stop decreasing when you get to 68 (72) [76] stitches. When you have done 132 (143) [163] rounds in the sleeve, work ribbing the same as in the neck, and bind off in rib as you did for the neck.

Check the underarms and the neck rib at the shoulders. Use duplicate stitch to close up any stretched-out stitches. Wash in cold water and allow to drip dry. 

You can work triple the rounds at the neck for a turtleneck.

You can work short instead of long sleeves, which will save you one or two balls or a hank of yarn. In fingering weight, this will be comfortable for mid-spring and autumn. 

You can put any interest design onto this basic jumper. If you want to work Fair Isle, houndstooth or Icelandic patterns, add stitches when you get to the body, to allow whole-number repeats of the horizontal pattern. Also add 8 (10) [12] stitches in the body because these colorwork designs create a fabric with less give than monocolor knitting and you will need the extra stitches to make the upper body comfortable. 

Use the photo album for links to all kinds of beautiful ways to make your jumper. The main thing about them is, you can't work them on autopilot like you can with mono-color untextured jumpers, so they will take longer. But you owe it to yourself to make something that you will never find in a store or that will cost you more than you can afford.

Fact-Checking -- Josephus and Aristeus

So a long time ago I pointed out that the Aristeus letter about the origin of the Septuagint is known to be a forgery and can't be anything but an urban legend in the first place.

I refer to Josephus there and since I'm at loose ends just now, I thought I owed you chapter and verse.

It's Book XII of Josephus' Antiquities, Chapter 4. You can read the English here.

But as you know, translations are useless. Translations of Classical Greek are just as bad as translations of Biblical Hebrew, as I told you on my Greek thread.

And the problem is that while Aristeios is a name that appears in Josephus' Antiquities, Book XII, the chapter 4 designation is an invention of the translator, William Whiston. Book XII of Josephus refers to Aristeios in section 17, 19, and 53, none of which have to do with the Septuagint. Whiston's reference is in a footnote in the English; it's not in the Greek.

The footnote is even worse because it refers to Philo. As we all know, Philo is almost entirely urban legend.

I have said this over and over. If you want to know what ancient sources say, you must learn the language. Even then, you have to suspect that they have been doped to say what later fans wanted them to say. So you have to know the history of the culture, and you have to know the provenance of whatever you are reading. This includes whether it is a record of an oral tradition, for which there will be indications in the text, or invented in writing. Unless you're willing to do all that work, you don't really know anything about what you are reading.

Fact-Checking: Olrik and Film part 2: Bookending

One of the things oral traditions never do is say "this is important". Instead, they tell multiple tales about an issue important to the culture.

Torah does this at least twice. One set has to do with stealing wives. There are three (!) narratives, each with a different emphasis and outcome. The textual location and sequence of the narratives have to do with genetic relationships between the characters.

The other set has to do with slander. The three (!) narratives happened at different times, and two of them happened at Sinai while the other happened on the borders of the Holy Land. These narratives show the associative principle at work; slander is such a killer transgression that the tradition put all three stories in the same place to really pound the lesson into people's heads. It also teaches that nobody is above the law, and it illustrates Olrik's Law of Ascents as each opponent to Mosheh is more important or numerous.

While studying Burt Lancaster's movies, I felt that his life of reading taught him how narratives work, and that he copied oral narratives features in his work, consciously or not. A number of his film pair up as studies of the same issue from different angles; I call these films bookends. There was also room for two movies he never made, that would have been bookends to films he did release.

• ·         Eternity and Run Silent both deal with genuine issues in the military, but Eternity is more about the destruction of people while Run Silent has more to do with the tension between human concerns and the norms of behavior in the service.
• ·         Scalphunters and Nuremberg which show that just because you don’t hate doesn’t mean you won’t engage in hateful behavior.
• ·         Lawman and OK Corral show how a sheriff may want young criminals to turn from their way and live.
• ·         Mister 880 and Young Savages about compassion for criminals.
• ·         The Train and Cassandra Gorge about how resistance is not futile.
• ·         Rainmaker and Elmer Gantry, about miracles.
• ·         Cattle Annie and Tough Guys about a younger generation venerating criminals of the past.

I think that All My Sons should have been followed in the 1970s with a film about the Apollo 1 disaster of 1967, with John Glenn's quote about "two million parts" shown above the credits. Lancaster had an excellent opportunity to hire Noriyuki "Pat" Morita as technical advisor, since Morita was an aerospace manager in the 1960s. Didn't happen. If a studio ever considered it, probably NASA refused to cooperate and the studio wasn't willing to film it with a disclaimer.

I also think that if Lancaster had played General Gordon in Khartoum, it would have been on condition of making it anti-imperialist in sentiment. The studio wouldn't do that, the schedule slipped, and Lancaster headed to Italy to film The Leopard. It would have been a bookend with Zulu Dawn, which hit on a number of themes that probably made Lancaster hot to do it as soon as he read the script:

• ·         Racism sits at the top of the bill, and Lancaster gets a great line about whether relegation to a place at the rear has something to do with the Basuto troops that his character, Dumford, raised, trained, and commanded.
• ·         You see classic British prejudice against the Irish, which Lancaster’s character is, and he even managed an Irish brogue. (He was tone-deaf about accents: this is the only time in 45 years when he tried one but it was a natural due to his being of Belfast stock.) This anti-Irish sentiment becomes explicit when Chelmsford sneers at Colonel Brown for being Irish, as much as for his concern over his troops’ lack of provision.
• ·         Assimilation. Simon Ward’s character enthusiastically shakes the hand of a black man who attends a garden party, but Ward’s character only has one function: killing blacks. The black guest has assimilated to the imperialists, but those who will not assimilate must be destroyed. Bishop Colenso’s “there should be room for all of us” is disingenuous; the empire may have geographic room for all, but not cultural room for all.
• ·         At minute 29 we get a chilling “let us hope that this will be the final solution to the Zulu problem.” I would not doubt that Lancaster took this role in part to get that statement in front of audiences who had learned in school about the Holocaust, especially after his role in Nuremberg.
• ·         Chelmsford comes across as a British Custer: “my only fear is that the Zulu will avoid engagement.” When the empire lost the battle, he blamed Dumford, who was dead, and whose advice the film pointedly shows the general dismissing. This was Lancaster’s chance to do a version of 1970’s Little Big Man.

Colenso was an avid missionary and that means he was an assimilationist, though he tried to get blacks treated equally under the law. He also rejected a common origin for all human races. He knew there was not cultural room for all when the Anglican church attacked his Hexateuchal commentary and filed suit to deprive him of his salary. If Lancaster came across this information while studying the script, it would have made him even hotter to do the film because it illustrates how religious institutions hang on to power by suppressing inconvenient unconventionalities. And in a sense that makes Zulu Dawn a bookend to Elmer Gantry for the hat trick.

If you have seen Lancaster's films, look again with this in mind and let me know if you find other sets. Also let me know if your favorite thespian does things like this. Lancaster was one of the few in Hollywood who gained control of his career early on, so he may be one of the few if not the only one to do this kind of thing. 

But it's not the same as doing one sequel after another, or doing films that follow on from a TV series, or making films about comic book characters. Those are just the studios trying to ensure an audience instead of daring to reach beyond the tried and true, the familiar and possibly tired. Reaching beyond is what Lancaster always tried to do, one reason his reputation has grown over the years.