Fact-Checking the Torah -- ancient literature and the lies that bigots wrote

This post will let you get your revenge on every Victorian bigot who ever wrote lies about the literature that is the basis of your culture. It will take a lot of work, but it will be worth it. If you post about it online, send me a link. I may already know the answer but, then again, I may not.

Every once in a while it occurs to me to search Internet Archive for great books. Today I found two. One was Judy Brittain's book on needle crafts, which I bought decades ago and learned crochet and knitting from.

The other is Axel Olrik's Principles for Oral Narrative Research in English.

https://archive.org/details/principles-for-oral-narrative-research

If you are part of a culture with a fundamental ancient literature, it will pay you big-time to read Olrik slowly and then compare it to your texts or scriptures. If you find examples of what Olrik says in your literature, you can be pretty sure the material originated orally, because before he wrote his work, nobody analyzed oral literature for its fundamental qualities. Even the Grimm brothers merely collected oral narratives, they did not analyze them. 

Then you can do what I did: go back through every academic work that ever pissed you off because it took a bigoted Victorian attitude toward non-Christian literature. Write up how wrong the authors were -- and mind you, NAME NAMES -- and post a thread on your blog, or on substack, or whereever you publish. 

You should also read Dr. John Cook's dissertation on Biblical Hebrew. When I found that he had identified a grammatical equivalent of one of the features Olrik describes, THAT made me buy in to what Cook wrote and THAT is why I said all over my blog that you will never know what Torah really says unless you understand Biblical Hebrew as a different animal than Mishnaic or Modern Hebrew.

https://ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/cook-2002_bhvs_uwdiss.pdf

If you want the short version, you can start reading my blog here.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/03/fact-checking-torah-beyond-dh.html

and the verse by verse analysis here.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/p/21st-century-bible-hebrew-basic-terms.html

But you will do yourself a huge favor if you do the homework yourself after downloading the book from Internet Archive. If you write a blog thread about it, whether you're examining the Mahabharata (which I have gone through and it does have examples matching Olrik's discussion) or the Popol Vuh (same). 

Knitting -- pullover, last time, I promise

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 shorter 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 the center front, other side (armpit), and center back stitches (worsted 50/100/150, DK/sport 65/130/195, fingering 70/140/210). 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 as shown.

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. You are now going to cable on stitches for the steeking. Turn your work as if you were going to purl. Put the working needle between the last two stitches, pick the yarn, pull through, and put on the end of the non-working needle. Add 11 (13) [15] stitches. Turn your work back. Slip the first stitch on the body to the working needle, pull the last cable-on over it, pull the yarn snug and put the stitch back. 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. I find it easier to pick up cable-ons than thumb cast-ons.

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 work faux 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. This will help close a gap.

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 it still looks too big, pick up and knit the next stitch before the one on your non-working needle. 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), close the gap up the same way, 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 underarm 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 at least two inches of 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 or will pay more for in a store.

Why Fallacies are False -- Epistemology redux

So a news radio station whose work I often trust has taken to reporting health information from a specific site and I am taking them to school.

First, the site does not publish a link to the studies they tout. The report I heard today came from a June 2 posting on the site and they never updated with a link to the study. 

Second, as I just showed, the information was two weeks out of date. The radio station is not keeping up with the real latest. They are cherry picking things that will get people's attention. Cherry picking is a fallacy all on its own.

Third, the site never states whether the FDA has evaluated things they post about. That's a potential fallacy of Misleading Authority.

Fourth, this gets into something that led me to cancel my subscription to Scientific American. The radio station gets paid to run ads about health information and, to avoid trouble over misleading listeners, the ads ought to contain the FDA disclaimer. For the website not to post the disclaimer makes them worse than advertisers. What is really happening here is that the radio station is giving free air time to things that are basically ads, but not getting paid for them, with no validation from other studies and no sense of whether the subject has been dealt with before. When SciAm published the fourth "article" from a company that touted 15 year old technology that never succeeded in the market place, instead of making the company pay them for an ad, I told them about it and canceled.

In fact the subject of the study, coffee, has a down side that has been known for decades, interfering with sleep. And as we all know, we have a drowsiness problem nationwide. The study touted by the website should take that downside into consideration, but since the website didn't post a link to the study, we can't tell if it admitted this downside.

If it didn't, its results are not worth reporting. Promoting drowsy driving and the other problems of sleeplessness, just to get attention, even if it filled a bucket on your list toward getting your doctorate, is irresponsible. 

And all this originated in MSM firing their medical experts in the 1980s to save money. Nobody at the radio station's management is competent to select health or medical or science material to broadcast; or else their overlords overruled them.

Two weeks later is two weeks too late in the news cycle. That also shows that the radio station is losing its grip on how to do news reporting. 

I know people who have trusted sources, and they have followed that trust into urban legends and even been exposed to fraud. Trust is earned, not granted. You have to become the expert on subjects you care about so that you pick up on it when somebody tries to lead you around by the nose. 

Knitting -- free pattern mother lode

Valldal is another Norwegian Dale traditional pattern but nobody paid much attention to it until the 1970s; they were mostly into Setesdal, the tradition that produced the Mariusgenser.

Valldal patterns come from Sandnes Garn; the version you can find on Ravelry says it is not free. But me being OCD, I kept digging. And I found the mother lode: Sandnes Garn posts free patterns. Go to their site and type this in the search function.

"gratis"

Click on any pattern and scroll down. On the right will be a gray panel with a box in it that says kr (kroner) 0.00.

It also says "last ned", which means download. Click on that and you get a PDF with the classic download symbol.

Now go back to the last screen and scroll down the page and when you get to a box that says 

"last inn flere produkter"

click that box and it will load more products. And one of them is -- ta-da!

https://www.sandnesgarn.dk/valldalskofte

It's for kids but by now, you know how to calculate fitting a chart to your stitch counts. This uses size 3 needles, so a fingering yarn. The cuffs and hem are 10 rows or rounds of K1/P1 rib. For a jumper, you can ignore the bands for buttonholes and buttons and just knit the front the same as the back. Then you can work 30 rounds of K1/P1 rib for a turtleneck that you can fold down.

Sandnes also offers a free pattern that apparently is pretty old and it is much different.

https://www.sandnesgarn.dk/valldal-4

When you download a pattern, you may have to rotate the pages in Acrobat. Then save the file. You'll have to zoom in to use the pattern.

Anyway, go to that page of free patterns and search for "dal" to see other "dale" patterns. Also search on "kofta". Arne's grandmother's dovrekofta pattern is on there. You'll see Fana and Setesdal patterns. There's one marked Sirdal but it's nothing like the one the Dalegarn catalog had. They have pillow cases, knitted animals, cowls, etc. etc. etc. 

If it says "kollektion" under the photo, it's a booklet of multiple patterns.

Now. All the patterns are in Norwegian. If you find something you just have to have, and it doesn't have a chart, here is a site with terminology.

https://spellingtuesday.com/knitting/learn-norwegian-for-knitters/

If any of you know Norwegian, you're golden. I don't.

So now you have access to fourteen pages of free patterns. It pays to be OCD.

Knitting -- another Celtic knitting tradition

I learned about Bavarian twisted stitch traditional knitting some time ago. Having been born in Nuremberg, in Bavaria, while my dad was serving his U.S. Army hitch to pay off his dental school, I had to see what it was about and did a lot of googling at first. I think I'm hooked.

The acknowledged expert was Maria Erlbacher; she started with works by Thekla Zeiler, who in turn worked from still older examples.  Erlbacher's three volume publication is available as one volume:

https://www.schoolhousepress.com/twisted-stitch-knitting.html

Erlbacher gives instructions for working both with and without a cable needle. Some motifs need you to use extra needles to hold stitches and she tells you so.

Possibly the best thing about this book is that it never teaches you to read transcripts. All the patterns have diagrams, which I recommended when I posted about lace as much because it's harder to lose your place as because it gives you a sneak peek at what your work should look like. All the methods of making stitches travel show what the diagram shows and then there are instructions in words that cover traveling in either direction. 

In the pattern I chose for training, there was one sticky bit in row 3 that I had to unravel and re-do about three times, and then I got it. And even then I decided I was doing it wrong and changed it a bit the last time I did it.

There was also a bit in row 5 with no word instructions, but there was one that was close enough to figure out, as long as I ignored the purl stitches that it showed.

So definitely, before you start a full-up project, train yourself with some leftover yarn to work the motifs in your pattern. The book has some pages of samplers by the woman who taught Maria: you can always do that.

I used a skein of leftover Aran weight (heavy worsted) on size 8 needles, cast on 171 stitches and worked 2 rows of seed stitch at each end, plus my typical selvage at the sides. I used up about 3/4 of it and got 20 rows of pattern (plus 4 rows of seed stitch and the selvages on each end) out of 150 yards of yarn; it's about 40 x 3.25 inches. This is only the back of a specific project; in the yarn weight Erlbacher recommends it will be smaller.

Here is a video from Suzanne Bryan which demonstrates how to work on both the right side and the wrong side if you are working in the flat. Working in the round is much easier, which is no surprise for a Celtic-look pattern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl5-D8Cddpk

Norman at Nimble Needles says that he lives in Bavaria and nobody there knits this way. I'm not giving you his link because he doesn't demonstrate working on the wrong side. At one point he observes that you literally DON'T want to use a cable needle with this style because, while there are tense moments while you take stitches off the needle hoping to put them back on, it would drive you crazy to be putting a cable needle in and out of stitches as often as you would have to with this tradition.

Erlbacher's patterns are drawn from examples in Austrian museums, which explains why this pattern looks Celtic. The Celts lived in the Austrian mountains in the 800s BCE; they spread or migrated into Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and Bavaria – the names are related – and then moved northwest. In Caesar’s time they were known as Gauls -- Gauls and Gaels were the same people until the latter moved across the Channel. The resemblance between “Brittany”, "Breton", and “Britain” is no coincidence. Northwestern Europe has from 30% to over 75% Celtic DNA in its male chromosomes. In England alone the percentage is better than 50%, which wouldn't be possible if, as the Victorian myth has it, the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Brythones (Welsh). 

Most of the designs for tops are for cardigans but can be adapted as jumpers, which would let you work in the round.

The book says to knit socks using U.S. size zero or 1 needles (1.5 mm to 2.5 mm, which are UK/Canadian sizes 14 or 13). That goes with using lace weight or light fingering weight yarn, which seems terribly thin but for two things. One is, if you use a smaller than usual needle, you get a tighter fabric which is warmer. Second, as I learned with Aran sweaters, the twists and cables are warmer than flat fabric. You want 250-300 grams of wool, which is 5-6 50 gram skeins.

For a lady's cardigan with patch pockets, the book recommends 3 mm needles which are size 2.5 U.S. so use either 2 or 3 (12 or 10 U.K./Canadian). It takes some 1000 yards of wool. Cardigans are knitted in sections, washed, blocked, and sewn together, but there are discussions of working in the round. The book warns against ruining the pattern through a common habit of novices, purling plain instead of twisted. There, you've been warned.

Oh yeah. German sizing in the book is not identical to either UK or US, so here is a site with translations from German sizing to cm/inches.
http://www.bavarianspecialty.com/pages/Sizing.html

NUMBER ONE PRO TIP for this tradition. Be a tight-ass about your first row. The success or failure of your whole piece depends on getting the right number of KTBLs or Ps in the right order in that first row. Go slowly, count over and over again, until you are 110% certain that you have it right.

PRO TIP NUMBER TWO. I found out that twisted stitch works like Aran in more ways than one. The patterns in the book show what order to put motifs in. They do not show how to continue working when you get to the top of the sample. What you do is figure out the smallest increment of the pattern and go from there. So, look at the right side of my photo where it has that swath between the columns of sort of bubbles. Here's the pattern.

Can you find out how to work above this just by starting again at the bottom? I couldn't.

What you do instead is forget those top two rows and start again from the bottom for the swath. 

For the columns with circles at both sides, you work five plain rows and then do that thing between the horizontal lines, which is what produces the "bubbles". 

So every motif in a pattern is a law unto itself, the columns are not coordinated across the rows. The same is true for my Aran pattern.

PRO TIP THREE. THIS IS NOT A RACE. You will never build up the speed you can get when working a mono-color jumper using pencil hold and steeking and all those other tricks. GO AS SLOWLY AS YOU HAVE TO SO THAT EVERY SINGLE STITCH IS RIGHT.

PRO TIP FOUR. Most of the patterns for tops come in sections. Start from the bottom working right to left on the first section, then the second. Now go UP to the next row and work LEFT TO RIGHT ON THE SECOND SECTION, then left to right on the first. Every pattern is a boustrophedon. (Look THAT up in your Funk and Wagnalls.)

PRO TIP FIVE. DON'T BE ASHAMED TO UNRAVEL. I thought I was four rows from the end but suddenly the pattern wouldn't come out, and I found I had dropped a stitch. I had to unravel four rows to fix it.

PRO TIP SIX, especially for jumpers. Stop between every row and let both your eyes and your hands take a break, otherwise you'll get a headache and your fingers will cramp. Also make sure to get your meals and snacks, your potty breaks, and once in a while do a little house work or yard work, play with the kids or walk around the block. This is a piece of knitting, not open heart surgery, and you can get back to it whenever possible in between living your life.

Recommendation: save paper. Whether you're working on a sampler or pick a pattern to train on, put it on your phone or tablet or laptop. Use that to work from. That leaves the book free so you can leaf back and forth to the diagrams for each stitch. 

There's a story that one expert knitter in the Fair Isles got a special order and finished it in 48 hours. She probably had a knitter's belt and she may have kept knitting during potty breaks. You will never do that in this tradition. I doubt you could even finish a sock in 48 hours. Is it worth the trouble just to check off another item on my bucket list? No, but I'm in this to participate in the beauty of knitting traditions. You might prefer to learn enough to design your own knitted artwork, in either two or three dimensions. De gustibus non est disputandum.

I'm just saying -- again and again

So I have been trying to learn Arabic because there are Arabic versions of Samaritan scripture -- in fact, originally they used Saadiah Gaon's version but it didn't track with the differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah, so now there are at least two standard Arabic versions, both of which I found in a hardcopy edition.

Back to my sheep. I am finding the same problems in Arabic grammars that I found in grammars of Classical Greek. 

And I have to think that part of the problem with learning languages is that the grammarians who published either are lazy and copied from their sources without critical thinking -- which I'm sure is true with Classical Greek -- or they couldn't get published if they told the truth about the language.

And so while some grammars admit that Arabic is aspectual, like ancient Semitic languages and Slavic languages, most of them keep talking about past tense. Even James Price is guilty of it. No wonder the people he tried to work with, fresh off supposedly studying Arabic in college, were illiterate in Arabic.

So if you take Arabic and the instructor talks tense, drop the course and tell the department why you did it.

What's worse, Latin labels like "jussive" and "subjunctive" have been slapped on Arabic verb forms, when they have other functions. 

The laziness comes out in discussions of I'rab. Because it involves nouns that change their endings in certain circumstances, too many grammars call it declension. It's not. If your Arabic instructor talks declension, drop the course and tell the department why.

What's more, if your instructor calls Nasb "accusative", drop the course and tell the department why. Nasb has absorbed pretty much any usage in Arabic that Jarr does not work for. Some of these functions are instrumental in other languages, or comitative, or get the label dative slapped on them. Plus also drop the course if your instructor calls Jarr "genitive". 

It's like what I said on my fact-checking thread about Yale Divinity School; they're grading people on how well they memorize something that is false from the ground up, and has been since the first publication in the field.

Your Arabic instructors are grading you on something they don't even know how to teach properly.

I'm not ready to start a thread on this, I don't know enough. What I do know, is that you have to learn a language as a thing in itself, instead of as a half-assed version of something else.

I'm just saying....

Sooo history -- Cuban Missile Crisis and Ukraine

So last night I watched a movie on Youtube thinking, I know from the title what this is about, there have been other movies about it so how could they possibly find a new take?

Well.

They did a beautiful job of picking what events to show and interleaving them to intensify the message, which is something I'm familiar with from oral traditions studies. And what is it I keep saying? Film is oral literature. So a little about that and then on to the REAL history lesson.

The film has three (!) repeating themes. One is what is going on at the White House, of course, and the three (!) main characters involved. The second is how sidebar events ratcheted up the tension. The best example is, we're in the middle of a nuclear crisis and the AEC picks this moment to test a thermonuclear warhead. The WH was still keeping the crisis under wraps but it points out that unless you know everything people have on their schedules, this kind of thing will happen. 

The third theme gets me to my history lesson. The Pentagon kept pushing Kennedy to make a first strike. It was in the Rules of Engagement. Every last one of them knew that nukes were involved, but they had what I call "nuclear psychosis". They believed whoever has the most nukes wins. That's bullshit. Nobody survives a nuclear war. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCTKcd2Ko98

Kennedy issued an order that NOBODY was to fire off ANYTHING without his explicit order. So when the ship sent to deal with the Grozny cleared tubes by firing star-shells, that was a standard practice and the guy who allowed it got his ass chewed out by McNamara because it could have been mistaken for an attack.

During the movie there is a scene where Kennedy says he read The Guns of August, published that same year, by Barbara Tuchman. And she pointed out that WWI would never have gotten started except that every last government involved operated by their Rules of Engagement. Some years after her book, the BBC series Upstairs Downstairs had a character discussing the 1914 events with "Richard Bellamy" who explains that once the Central Powers declared war on Russia, its allies had to "behave like gentlemen" and meet their treaty obligations. It's another way of saying the same thing. If you don't put your brain in and use it, but follow some old plan, you could be heading for disaster.

Why?

Because every RoE in the world has "lessons learned" from the LAST conflict. And that conflict always involved the weapons OF THOSE TIMES. When the new crisis occurs, technology has moved on. And in this case, everybody involved had nukes, which was not true at the end of WWII. And like I said, the Pentagon had nuclear psychosis.

So Kennedy rewrote the rules based on, I must point out, the work of a woman writer.

How does that involve Ukraine?

As soon as the Russians started digging trenches, I said, that's WWI thinking. WWII showed that an air war trumps trenches every time. So Putin wasn't even using an RoE with lessons learned, his brain was back in 1914. And the drones of Ukraine have been racking up body counts of over a thousand Russian troops (whatever their real nationality) EVERY SINGLE DAY for at least a year and a half. Now Russia has had some 900,000 combat deaths, and up to 500,000 more from causes like rotten logistics.

Which was also what made Russia so unsuccessful in WWI.

No lessons learned. Russian strategy doesn't even qualify as RoE.

Poland and UK leaders also are not using an RoE. I have seen posts where each of them talked "boots on the ground". It's like they're not even reading reports on the Russian deaths in Ukraine. 

It also shows they are lousy managers. When you have a crisis and the boss just throws bodies at it, that is a lousy manager. It never works. You have to analyze the crisis and look for the smart fit or things blow up in your face.

Like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Guns of August is on Internet Archive to borrow free with an account.

https://archive.org/details/gunsofaugust0000unse_m6s1

Youtube has a film version which is not on Internet Archive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4zPg5Kv_ug

The British series The Great War is on Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/the-great-war-1964

Youtube also has the Fall of Eagles mini-series, named for the fact that the three Continental powers all had eagles in their crests and each of those governments was swept away.

Frank Herbert Simonds published a five-volume history of the war. Its table of contents is strangely reminiscent of the one in Winston Churchill's six-volume history of WWII. Simonds' work is here.

https://archive.org/details/history-of-the-world-war-volume-3/History%20of%20the%20World%20War%20Volume%201/

Churchill's work is here.

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarga0001wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarth0002wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwargr0003wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarhi0004wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarvo0055wins/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.536497/page/n3/mode/2up

Somewhere about the middle of the movie, either Jack or Bobby says something that sounds as if they think that the Pentagon's behavior was an attempt at a military coup. They used that actual word in the script. It explained to me perfectly well why the Kennedys promoted the making of Seven Days in May by John Frankenheimer and Burt Lancaster, about an utterly fictional coup attempt.

Which is available on Internet Archive free without ads. I'd post the link but IA is having gateway problems now. If you really want it, check back with me later because I wrote a review and I can find the link quickly by going through my reviews. I think Youtube has it free with ads.

What's important about that scene in Thirteen Days, is that it's repeated at the end where they think Khrushchev has been overthrown in a coup because the back-to-back messages do not match stylistically. Another feature of oral literature is having two episodes about the same issue, looking at it from different angles. It's all over the Tanakh.

I love tightly crafted movies like this. Lancaster's Lawman is another and it's full of things I recognize from my oral literature studies.

OK I've taken up way too much of your time, I can't help it when I write about some of my favorite things. You have a lot of reading to do.