The Slaveholder’s Bible

Carrying out God’s will, circa 1840. Via Fine Art America.

The Bible is a long book, but fortunately only two passages matter and override all the rest:

1. The Curse of Ham (Genesis 9:18-27):

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. 19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread. 20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. 24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

The descendants of Ham have long since overspread Africa. It is God’s will that Africans be “the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water” (Deuteronomy 29:11), the slaves of non-Africans forever and ever. A race cursed by God.

2. Obedience of slaves (Ephesians 6:5-8):

5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; 6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; 7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: 8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.

Verse 6: “the will of God”!

God’s plan for Africans: No less an authority than Stephen Elliott, Episcopal Bishop of Georgia (from 1841 to 1866), says that slavery brings Christ to Africans as part of God’s Providential plan:

“For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? … thousands, nay, I may say millions … have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery!”

Millions of Africans in the US were:

“learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people – lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life.  …  their condition … is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Frederick Douglass himself was asked again and again in England in 1846:

“Douglass, are you not afraid of injuring the cause of Christ? You do not desire to do so, we know; but are you not undermining religion?”

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: King James Bible; “The Great Stain” (2018) by Noel Rae by way of TIME; “An Appeal to the British People” (1846), a speech by Fredeick Douglass.

See also:

• The Complete Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr: The White Edition
• The curse of Ham
• New Testament words: doulos (servant, slave)
• American slavery
• God
• Early White Americans
• Frederick Douglass
• John Fea: Believe Me – how US Christianity has been warped by slavery down to this day
  • White Evangelicals and the US border camps
• Does the Bible say that slavery is wrong?

596

The Complete Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr: The White Edition

If you are White, only the “I Have a Dream” (1963) speech matters, and not even all of that, but just this one sentence:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I  used to think there was more, but after careful study I found out that this is all there is for True White people.

Enjoy!

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• Quoting MLK
  • Kumbaya anti-racism
  • Being colour-blind will not end racism
• Martin Luther King, Jr
  • March on Washington, 1963
    • I Have a Dream
  • Riverside speech against the Vietnam War
  • Where Do We Go From Here?
  • I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
  • Lost Speech of Martin Luther King
  • Letter from Birmingham Jail
  • The best MLK quotes

Luke 4:4 – a brief history

Luke 4:4 in the 300s in Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest existing copies known.

Luke 4:4 through the ages:

c. 30-33 AD: Jesus preaches.

c. 50: the verse appears in the Q Gospel.

c. 75: Luke and Matthew copy the verse from Q as Luke 4:4 and Matthew 4:4, quoting Jesus quoting Deuteronomy 8:3.

325-50: Codex Vaticanus, the oldest manuscript that has the verse (I added spaces):

και απεκριθη προϲ αυτον ο ι-ϲ γεγραπται οτι ουκ επ αρτω μονω ζηϲεται ο ανθρωποϲ

(my word-for-word translation: and answered to him the Jesus it-is-written that not by bread alone lives the man)

330-60: Codex Sinaiticus – identical to Vaticanus.

400-40: Codex Alexandrinus (with spacing added):

και απεκριθη ι-ς προς αυτον λεγων· γεγραπται οτι ουκ επ αρτω μονω ζησεται ο ανθ-ς αλλ’ επι παντι ρηματι θ-υ

(and answered  Jesus to him saying: it-is-written that not by bread alone lives the man, but by every word of-god)

405: Vulgate – St Jerome’s Latin translation, based on the Old Latin Bible and available Greek manuscripts:

et respondit ad illum Iesus scriptum est quia non in pane solo vivet homo sed in omni verbo Dei

(and answered to him Jesus written is that not in bread alone lives man but in every word of-God)

1534: Tyndale:

And Iesus answered hym sayinge: It is writte: man shall not live by breed only but by every worde of God.

1598: Textus Receptus: scholarly reconstruction based on available manuscripts:

και απεκριθη ιησους προς αυτον λεγων γεγραπται οτι ουκ επ αρτω μονω ζησεται ο ανθρωπος αλλ επι παντι ρηματι θεου

(and answered Jesus to him saying it-is-written that not by bread alone lives the man but by every word of-god)

1611: KJV –  the King James or Authorized Version, translating the Textus Receptus:

And Iesus answered him, saying, It is written, that man shall not liue by bread alone, but by euery word of God.

1769: KJV with updated spelling and punctuation:

And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

1881: Wescott and Hort: scholarly reconstruction:

καὶ ἀπεκρίθη πρὸς αὐτὸν ὁ Ἰησοῦς Γέγραπται ὅτι Οὐκ ἐπ’ ἄρτῳ μόνῳ ζήσεται ὁ ἄνθρωπος.

(and answered to him the Jesus It-is-written that Not by bread alone lives the man.)

1881-85: RV:

And Jesus answered unto him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.

1904: Greek Orthodox Church:

καὶ ἀπεκρίθη ὁ Ἰησοῦς πρὸς αὐτὸν λέγων· Γέγραπται ὅτι οὐκ ἐπ’ ἄρτῳ μόνῳ ζήσεται ἄνθρωπος, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ παντὶ ῥήματι ἐκπορευομένῳ διὰ στόματος Θεοῦ.

(and answered the Jesus to him saying: It-is-written that not by bread alone lives man, but by every word proceeding through mouth of-God.)

Luke 4:4 as it appeared in the 1966 Gideon Bible, used in hotel rooms across the US, still using the 1769 KJV text nearly 200 years later.

2012: Nestle-Aland, 28th edition: latest scholarly reconstruction:

καὶ ἀπεκρίθη πρὸς αὐτὸν ὁ Ἰησοῦς· γέγραπται ὅτι οὐκ ἐπ’ ἄρτῳ μόνῳ ζήσεται ὁ ἄνθρωπος.

(And answered to him the Jesus: It-is-written that not by bread alone lives the man.)

2021: ESV: straight off the Internet:

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’”

Remarks: The vast majority of Greek manuscripts have “but by every word of God.” But it is missing in the two oldest ones with this verse: Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. So, in the wake of the discovery of Sinaiticus in 1844, Western scholars moved it to a footnote as an “alternate reading”.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: in particular: Codex Vaticanus (page 1310, starting after the space on line 5 of the third column); Codex Sinaiticus (folio 230b, begins with the first outdented line in third column); Codex Alexandrinus (folio 23r, second line, first column); Gideon Bible (1966); esv.org.

See also:

• The Lord’s Prayer in English through time
• Bible
  • Jesus Christ
  • The Q Gospel
  • Codex Sinaiticus
  • Codex Alexandrinus
  • Vulgate
  • Textus Receptus
  • Bible translations
  • English Bible translations
    • Tyndale
    • KJV
    • NKJV
    • The Gideon Bible – brings up Luke 4:4, inspiring this post.
    • ESV
• Veterum Sapientia – the argument for why the Catholic Church should stick to using Latin
• Roman alphabet
• codex
• Internet

637

The Gideon Bible

a Gideon Bible, circa 2020. Via Best Western Siesta Key.

The Gideon Bible (1908- ) are those Bibles you see all across the US in hotel rooms, usually in the drawer of the nightstand. It is not just the US but 194 other countries. And it is not just hotels, motels and Holiday Inns, but hospitals, prisons, military bases, police stations, universities – anywhere the lost may be found. They are printed and distributed by Gideon International with help from its Financial Friends and over 260,000 Gideons.

A pocket-sized New Testament. Colour-coded green because it is meant for students.

• Number: 2 billion since 1908.
• Location: found in 195 countries (nearly all of them).
• Life expectancy: an average copy lasts six years.
• Identifying mark: their logo: a jug with two handles.
• Translation: ESV (with more than 50 verses changed) has been their main English translation since 2013.
• Editions: complete Bibles and pocket New Testaments (with Psalms and Proverbs thrown in).
• Readership: 25% of hotel guests or 2,300 people per copy (according to a Gideon study in 2012).
• Souls saved: 88 million – if it has the same 4.4% response rate as junk mail.

They do not sell them, not on Amazon, not at book shops, but you can take one from any hotel room. In fact, they want you to! I wish I knew that as a child. But later at university, they did give me one of their little green New Testaments. My parents never gave me a Bible, yet they did!

From the 1966 edition, which had John 3:16 in over 20 languages. Click to enlarge.

If you open a new hotel, a Gideon will show up offering free Bibles for all your rooms and make sure you never run out.

The original Gideon is a hero in the Bible. See Judges 6 and 7. He did what God said even when it seemed hopeless, thereby defeating the Midianites with only 300 men.

Translations: Gideon Bibles come in over 90 languages and various English translations. There is no “official” translation. But there is one they print the most. As best as I can tell, it goes something like this for the US:

• 1908-74: KJV (King James or Authorized Version)
• 1974-83: Revised Berkeley Version
• 1983-86: NIV*
• 1986?-2013: NKJV
• 2013- : ESV*

* = customized translation (see below)

They moved from the KJV because it was turning off Catholics. They moved from the NKJV because the publisher, Thomas Nelson, was bought up by HarperCollins by way of News Corp (the Murdoch media empire) and would not renew their contract.

Customized translations: The Gideons will move alternate readings of its choosing out of the footnotes into the main text and then wipe out all the footnotes. In the case of the ESV they changed more than 50 verses to make it more closely match the wording of the NKJV or KJV.

Luke 4:4 as it appeared in hotel rooms across the US in the late 1960s.

Compare Luke 4:4:

KJV: And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

NKJV: But Jesus answered him, saying, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’ ”

ESV: And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’”

Gideon: And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.'”

Why the ESV (and most new Protestant translations since 1900) got rid of “but by every word of God”, of all things, is another story.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: The 1966 edition (KJV), Gideon International, Best Western Siesta Key, David Cloud (translation history), Joshua Holman (changes to ESV).

See also:

• External links:
  • The 1966 edition (KJV)
  • Gideon International
• Bible
  • Luke 4:4 – a brief history
  • English Bible translations
    • KJV
    • NKJV
    • ESV
• White Evangelical Protestants – the Gideons have a clear conservative Evangelical Protestant slant, though not necessarily always White.
• Muzak

 

Early White Americans

Jefferson Davis and Varina Howell on their wedding day, February 26th 1845. Some say she was part Black or Native American.

Early White Americans (1776-1845) in this post means those White people who lived in the US from its founding in 1776 till 1845, when famine-stricken Irish Catholics began flooding into the country. Despite the fears of the Know-Nothing Party and other nativists, Old Stock Americans would hold on to control of US politics and culture for a hundred years more.

Europeans came in three main waves:

1. 1607-1775: First Wave Whites: mostly British, Dutch and German, heavily Protestant.
2. 1845-1890: Second Wave Whites: mostly Irish and German, heavily Catholic.
3. 1890-1924: Third Wave Whites: mostly Italians, Poles and Jews.

This post is about First Wave Whites after 1776.

• Population: 14 million or 83% of the US in 1840.
• Ethnic composition: British (English, Welsh, Scottish, Scotch-Irish), French Huguenot, Dutch, German Protestant, even some Swede (of New Sweden). Some were part Black but could pass for White. Perhaps a fourth of the British who came in the 1700s were convicts.
• Language: mainly English.
• Religion: mainly Protestant, many of them Nonconformists (= religious misfits of England). From 1790 to 1840 they experienced a Second Great Awakening of religion – and began burning down Black churches.
• Culture: Anglo-Protestant, which successfully assimilated later waves of European immigrants (known as “Americanization” in the early 1900s). Still the base US culture.

Eyewitness accounts:

In 1831, Tocqueville, a Frenchman, visited the US. Later he observed:

“there is no country in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men.”

In 1832, Black Hawk, a Native American chief of the Sac and Fox nations in Illinois:

“The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers. . . . The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse – they poison the heart.”

In 1837, Hosea Easton, a Black pastor in Connecticut whose church was burned down by them a year earlier, noted:

“[they are] not unlike their fathers, staining their route with blood, as they have rolled along, as a cloud of locusts, toward the West. The late unholy war with the Indians, and the wicked crusade against the peace of Mexico, are striking illustrations of the nobleness of this race of people, and the powers of their mind.”

Judaeo-Christian values: They practised genocide and race-based slavery. God was on their side: the Curse of Ham and Manifest Destiny proved it!

Important vocabulary: savage, heathen, civilization, nigger.

How they saw the world:

Where they are now: By 2010 their descendants still accounted for 26% of the US or 41% of White Americans – larger than any single ethnic group. They are found in the highest proportions in New England, Utah, and the South. Most seem to be White Evangelical Protestants.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: Mainly “The History of White People” (2010) by Nell Irvin Painter; “A People’s History of the United States” (2003) by Howard Zinn.

See also:

• White Americans
  • White America: A brief history
  • The three pillars of American white supremacy
  • White Evangelical Protestants
• American ethnic groups – a brief history: 1492 to 2100
• Americanization
• nativism through the centuries
  • Know-Nothing Party
• American slavery
• The Curse of Ham
• The Cherokee Trail of Tears
• Manifest Destiny
• Jefferson Davis
• The term “civilization”
• counter-frames
• Madison Grant

Bella Poarch: Build a B*tch

Remarks:

This came out in 2021, reaching (so far) the top ten in India, Malaysia, and Singapore, #30 in the UK, #56 in the US – and #20 worldwide. I love the video and the lyrics! I laughed when she sang:

Boys are always playing dolls
Looking for their Barbie
They don’t look like Ken at all
Hardly have a heartbeat

See also:

• songs: the 2020s
• Solange: F*ck the Industry (Signed Sincerely)
• Yuna ft Usher: Crush
• Barbie

Lyrics:

This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
You don’t get to pick and choose
Different ass and bigger boobs
If my eyes are brown or blue
This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
I’m filled with flaws and attitude
So if you need perfect, I’m not built for you (Yeah)

Bob the Builder broke my heart
Told me I need fixing
Said that I’m just nuts and bolts
Lotta parts were missing
Curvy like a cursive font
Virgin and a vixen
That’s the kind of girl he wants
But he forgot

This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
You don’t get to pick and choose
Different ass and bigger boobs
If my eyes are brown or blue
This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
I’m filled with flaws and attitude
So if you need perfect, I’m not built for you (One, two, three, ooh)

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Boys are always playing dolls
Looking for their Barbie
They don’t look like Ken at all
Hardly have a heartbeat
Need someone who falls apart
So he can play Prince Charming
If that’s the kind of girl he wants
Then he forgot

This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
You don’t get to pick and choose
Different ass and bigger boobs
If my eyes are brown or blue
This ain’t Build-A-Bitch (A bitch)
I’m filled with flaws and attitude
So if you need perfect, I’m not built for you (One, two, three)

La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Source: AZ Lyrics.

The War in Afghanistan

Afghanistan, November 2002. Via CNN. (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021?) is what people in the US, and at the English-language Wikipedia, call the US war in Afghanistan. It is also called “America’s longest war”. Afghanistan, aka the Graveyard of Empires, has brought the British, the Russians, and now the US Americans to grief.

As I write this on August 14th 2021, the Taliban is swiftly retaking Afghanistan in the wake of the US and NATO pulling out nearly all their troops. Of the four main cities, Herat in the west and Kandahar in the south have fallen in the past few days, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north is under attack, and Kabul, the capital in the east, could fall by March 2022 (according to one US intelligence estimate). The Taliban now controls at least half the country.

Timeline:

• 1979-89 – Soviet (Russian) war
• 1989-96 – civil war
• 1996-2001 – Taliban rule
• 2001-21 – US war
• 2021-?? – ??

By the numbers:

• Body count: 212,191+, about 22% civilians, 1% US troops (2,420).
• Refugees: 5 million have fled their homes and have not returned since 2012. That is about a sixth of the country.
• Cost: $978 billion for the US as of 2020 (= nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in the US). By 2050 it will be about $5 trillion after you throw in all the veteran benefits and interest payments on the money borrowed to fight the war.

In 2001, in the wake of the Al Qaeda attack of 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban for harbouring Al Qaeda. The US quickly overthrew the Taliban, but both it and Al Qaeda (there is no clear line between the two) melted away into Pakistan to fight another day.  Afghanistan sank into warlordism while the US propped up puppet governments in Kabul.

In 2007 the Taliban made a comeback and it has been a long grind ever since. The US generals think they know how to fight a guerrilla war, but there is little empirical proof of that. Their drones killed important leaders, sometimes several times over, but in the process wound up bombing even weddings! Not the way to win hearts and minds, if the US still cares about that sort of thing (I doubt it).

In 2009 Obama became the US president. In addition to becoming an evil dronelord with his infamous Kill List, he sent in a surge of troops in hopes of winning the war. He drove the Taliban back for a time, but was unable to defeat them.

All the US military had learned from the Vietnam War was to avoid a draft and to manage the press. It did both successfully: there were few protests against the war. Most people in the US were barely aware of the war.

From 2014 the US had mainly been training the Afghan army, providing them air cover, and providing target practice for ISKP (Islamic State, Khorasan Province). The Afghan army is kind of a joke. And the Taliban has long known that sooner or later the US will leave. That day has come.

– Abagond, 2021.

Update (August 16th): Kabul fell yesterday. When the Russians pulled out in 1989 it took three years for it to fall. The US still controls the airport, barely, but it is a madhouse as people try to flee the country.

See also:

• 9/11
• Osama bin Laden
• guerrilla warfare
• military-industrial complex
• Afghanistan (افغانستان)
  • Taliban
    • The Taliban takes over in Swat, Pakistan
  • Islamic State (ISIS) – before they spread to Afghanistan
  • Afghan wedding bombings
  • The Operators – a 2012 book about the war
  • Michael Flynn
  • The Kyrgyz of Afghanistan
• Dronelandia
  • The incomplete list of children Obama has killed with drones
• my past predictions for the future – my prediction about this war, among other things.
• Vietnam War – lesson in hubris unlearned

African Latin

A lingustic map of the Byzantine Empire in the year 560. The light blue part of Africa spoke African Latin. Via Brilliant Maps.

African Latin (-146 to 1154?), also known as African Romance or Africitas, is the dialect of Latin spoken in Roman Africa, in what is now Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco. Its main city was Carthage, which at one point was the second largest Latin-speaking city.

Like British Latin (and Pannonian and Moselle Latin), it died out before giving birth to a modern Romance language like French, Italian, or Spanish.

It lasted till at least 1154, when al-Idrisi wrote of Gafsa in southern Tunisia:

“Its inhabitants are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue (al-latini al-afriqi).”

It may have lasted in Tunisia till the late 1400s.

Had it lived, that part of Africa would most likely speak a language that seems kind of like Spanish but with more k-sounds, with Berber and Semitic words. But it would be even more like Sardinian, its closest living relative.

Influences: Punic (Carthaginian) and Tamazight (Berber), both Afro-Asiatic languages that were spoken in that part of Africa before Latin arrived and would have affected its vocabulary and pronunciation. Augustine’s mother (St Monica), for example, was Berber. Many veterans lived near Berber lands. In Roman times, Punic was mainly spoken in the countryside, Tamazight out in the desert, Latin in the cities.

Writing: Augustine, Terence, Suetonius, Apuleius, Tertullian, Cyprian, and grammarian Marcus Cornelius Fronto are all from Roman Africa. But they generally wrote in a literary dialect they learned at school. The same goes for the lawyers who wrote the legal documents that have survived. But from their mistakes and complaints we can work out some of the:

Pronunciation:

• Dropped m’s at the ends of words, with -um becoming -u, and -am becoming -a.
• Mixed up b and v
• Always pronounced c’s as k’s, not softening them to an s or ch before e and i as in other Romance languages.
• Mixed up short and long vowels (Augustine: “African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of vowels.”)

Thus rostrum became rostru and meant “mouth” and not “beak” because the Latin words for mouth (ōs) and bone (ŏs) are separated only by the difference of a long and short o.

In “De Ordine”, written by Augustine in 386, he remarks how he was criticized for his pronunciation by Italians. Septimus Severus, the Roman emperor from 193 to 211, had an African accent.

Some scholars say this accent affected the Latin that would become Spanish and Portuguese by way the Muslim invasion of the 700s: many of the soldiers who took part would have spoken African Latin.

Borrowings: Spanish and Tamazight, and maybe Northwest African Arabic and Maltese too, seem to have words that come from African Latin. For example:

• the pollo of arroz con pollo in Spanish probably comes from Berber by way of the African Latin pullus, meaning “rooster”.
• ġasru (castle, village) in Berber, likely comes from Latin castrum by way of what would have been an African Latin castru.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• Roman Empire
  • Roman Africa
  • Romanization
• Latin
  • Vulgar Latin
    • Spanish
    • Sardinian
• Africans in the Greek and Roman world
  • St Augustine
    • Augustine’s Bible – in which Augustine complains about the dreadful Latin of African Christians, copied from a bad Latin translation of the Bible
• al-Idrisi
• Afro-Asiatic languages
  • Arabic
  • Aramaic

568

Viktor Orban

Viktor Orbán (1963- ) has been the prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002 and from 2010 to the present (2021). Without firing a shot, he has turned Hungary, a “fully free democracy” in 2010 according to Freedom House, into a “hybrid regime”, one step up from authoritarian. The Economist, which called Hungary a “quasi-autocracy” in 2019, now calls it a “corrupt autocracy”.

All legal, all by the book – because Orban wrote the book. Or rewrote it:

Rewriting the book: In 2010, Fidesz, Orban’s party, won 53% of the vote. Thanks to quirks in the constitution, that turned into 68% of the seats in parliament.

With that supermajority Orban did six main things:

1. Gerrymander – voting districts were gerrymandered so that Fidesz could maintain its supermajority. So, despite getting 45% of the vote in 2014 and 49% in 2018, it still held onto its two-thirds majority.
2. Pack the courts – he added seats to the top court and lowered the retirement age, increasing the number of Fidesz judges. He also controlled who got promoted and which judge heard which cases. When, on occasion, the courts ruled against him, he used his supermajority to rewrite the law. Easy peasy.
3. Control the media – he turned MTI, the public news agency, into a propaganda machine and charged nothing for its news. That drove other news agencies out of business. In addition, Orban uses government advertising dollars (well, forints) to bring rogue media to heel. By 2019, some 80% of Hungarians got their news from pro-government media. The independent press has been reduced to websites that few read outside Budapest’s liberal circles.
4. Investigate and fine opposition parties – the State Audit Office investigates political parties for wrongdoing and fines them. Oddly it never finds Fidesz at fault.
5. Claim emergency powers – Orban wasted no time in 2020 to use the pandemic to claim emergency powers and rule by decree without the interference of parliament. Parliament can in theory overrule him – but that is unlikely since his party has two-thirds of the seats!
6. Control the universities – He more or less forced Central European University (CEU) to mostly decamp to Austria. He restructured the Hungarian Academy of Sciences giving government direct influence over scientists. And he set up and filled boards to control the 11 main state universities. Since the boards pick their own replacements and since Orban had all this written into the constitution, it will be hard for any future government overturn it.

Crony capitalism: The second richest man in the country always seems to be one of Orban’s friends. The economy is propped up by German car factories  and billions from the European Union. Hungarians keep it all going by providing cheap labour – and their votes. In return they get an economy no better than its Eastern European neighbours.

Defending the faith: In 2015, during the Syrian refugee crisis, Orban built a razor-wire fence at the border:

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. … European identity is rooted in Christianity … Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• strongmen
  • “Hitler was democratically elected”
  • Trump is more like Hitler than he was
  • Bolsonaro
• Ur-Fascism

519

 

Geldingadalir

Geldingadalir, “the valley of the geldings”, in Iceland used to be a Viking burial ground. Now it has been the scene of repeated volcanic eruptions since March 19th 2021 – streaming live on YouTube.

Reykjavik, the capital city, has not seen anything like it in 800 years. It is just 40 km (25 miles) outside the city, making it close enough for tourists to visit and Internet videos to stream, but far enough (so far) for the city to be safe. (Vesuvius was about 12 km from Pompeii.)

Most volcanoes erupt for a day or so. This one keeps erupting every few weeks or months.

Prime time: It is best viewed at night. In August that runs from about 22.00 to 05.00 GMT – or from about 6.00pm to 1.00am New York time. That puts it in prime time aross North America.

Names: CBS News calls it Geldingadalir, after the valley it is in, the Wikipedia calls it the less-snappy Fagradalsfjall, after a nearby sleeping volcano. Fagradalshraun is the name of the lava field itself.

Geldingadalir on April 14th 2021 at 13:35 UTC. Via Views of the World.

Right now (August 11th 2021) it is not yet a proper volcano but more a collections of vents that sometimes smoke, sometimes ooze lava, sometimes do nothing – and sometimes erupt. In time the valley will probably become a shield volcano, like Mauna Loa in Hawaii, looking something like this (unlabelled diagram):

As of August 6th there were 19 active volcanoes worldwide that we know of, most of them in Indonesia or round the edge of the Pacific – the Ring of Fire:

Via VolcanicDiscovery

Iceland is one of the most active volcanic regions of the world: it had 39 eruptions in the 1900s. Volcanoes seem destructive, but they are what created Iceland. And are still creating it before our eyes. Iceland is part of the longest moutain range in the world: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which runs all the way down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Only bits of it stick above the water – like the Azores, St Helena and Iceland.

The Earth used to be a big ball of molten rock. Lava World. About 4 billion years ago the outside cooled into rock: the crust. Even now, though, the crust is only 5 to 70 km thick. Below the crust the Earth is still molten rock. It will take at least another 4 billion years for all of that to cool. In the meantime that molten rock (magma) sometimes comes up through the cracks and holes in the crust, what we see as lava coming out of a volcano. Lava is escaped magma.

One of the biggest cracks runs down the middle of the Atlantic – the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There the magma cools into rock and widens the Atlantic, by about 2.5 cm (an inch) a year or 25 km (16 miles) every million years.

But since there are not Icelands all down the middle of the Atlantic, there is more than just that going on in the case of Iceland, something strange that geologist, so far, can only guess at.

A window into the depths of the Earth: The lava from Geldingadalir comes from 14 km deep within the Earth, which makes it, even as volcanoes go, a deep window into the Earth.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• volcano
• Iceland
• Pompeii
• Lyell
• Terrestrial Time
• human evolution: the last 4 billion years

528

 

 

English in 1851

From The Economist of August 9th 1851.

Sample: from “Moby-Dick” (1851) by Herman Melville, showing US English in both Standard and Black (or at least minstrelese) form:

Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.

“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!

Literate Black people, like Frederick Douglass, then as now, wrote in Standard English.

Maps:

The British Empire in 1850. English was also spoken in California, Utah, Liberia, and the eastern US.

E is for English: a linguistic map of Britain and Ireland in 1850. Via indo-europeanlanguages.blogspot.com.

Race map of North America in 1850. Most of the White people in this map spoke English except for those in and near Quebec. New outposts of English: San Francisco, Salt Lake City.

A race map of southern Africa and the Antipodes in 1850. Nearly all the White people in this map spoke English. By 1851, Afrikaners had migrated into the grey part of map during the Great Trek (1835-40).

• Speakers: 77 million (as a first or second language), putting it third worldwide:
  1. 350m – Mandarin Chinese
  2. 87m – Hindi
  3. 77m – English
  4. 69m – Russian
  5. 66m – German
  6. 48m – Spanish
  7. 46m – French
  8. 43m – Japanese
  9. 31m – Swahili
  10. 25m – Italian
• Countries: US (the East, California, Utah), Liberia, and the British Empire (especially Britain, Ireland, Canada West, British West Indies, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Falklands, Australia, New Zealand),
• Script: Roman (26 letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z)
• Language family: Germanic branch of the Indo-European family

New words: drapetomania, graffiti, student teacher, bullied, yeshiva, gynaecologist, carbohydrate, Boolean, Pecksniffian, bloke, toff, stove-pipe (hat), soft wares (woolen or cotton fabrics), radiator (for rooms), nocturne, saxophone, godless communism, canard, curio, Cretaceous, or bust, etc.

Preferred spellings: aging, aluminum, analyze, centre, connection, cosy, encyclopaedia, foetus, fulfil, hemorrhage, honour, judgment, practising, recognise, spelt, to-day, travelling, whiskey, yoghourt.

Preferred words and expressions:

• Abyssinia > Ethiopia (as a country name)
• American Indian > Red Indian
• Amoy > Xiamen
• Asiatics > Asians
• Bible > Scripture (but just barely)
• he who > someone who
• hyphenization > hyphenation
• interrogation point > question mark
• Jehovah > Yahweh
• melancholy > depression
• Moslem > Mohammedan (just barely)
• Near East > Middle East
• nine day’s wonder > flash in the pan
• negro equality > racial equality
• negroes > blacks > Negroes
• sharpshooter > sniper
• sneaked > snuck
• surname > family name > last name
• ten per cent > 10% > ten percent

Media diet: According to Thoreau, people back then mainly read the Bible, the newspaper, and cheap, contemporary fiction.

• Bible: mainly the King James translation or Authorized Version.
• newspapers: the biggest were:
  • UK: Times of London
  • US: New-York Daily Tribune (edited by Horace Greeley)
• bestsellers: in the UK in 1851:
  • Wilkie Collins: Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box
  • Charles Kingsley: Yeast: A Problem
  • Eliza Lynn: Realities

And, of course, there were blackface minstrel shows.

In the UK, “David Copperfield”, “Vanity Fair”, “Jane Eyre”, and “Wuthering Heights” were all bestsellers of the past five years.

In the US, Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper was then active. And “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was being serialized, one chapter a week. In 1852 it will outsell even the Bible for a time.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: Google Books Ngram Viewer, Online Etymology Dictionary, Victorian Web, Data is Beauty, “Moby-Dick” (1851).

See also:

• Black American writing, early 1800s
• 1851 media diet – my version
• 1851 in maps, pictures, songs
• English
  • Standard English
  • Black English
    • minstrelese – from the minstrel shows
    • Black English in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  • A Victorian glossary
  • Anachronistic words in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
  • Oxford spelling
• Thoreau’s library
• Frederick Douglass
• The Economist

663

Terrestrial Time

an atomic clock

Terrestrial Time (TT) is the time independent of the turning of the Earth. In 1902 it was the same as GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, the time based on observing the Sun at the Greenwich Observatory in London. But, because the Earth is slowing down, by April 30th 2021, GMT had fallen 69.3673 seconds behind TT.

Formerly known as: TT has gone under different names:

• 1952-1984: Ephemeris Time (ET)
• 1984-1991: Terrestrial Dynamical Time (TDT)
• 1991- : Terrestrial Time (TT)

Sometimes you still see the old names.

It used to be based on astronomical observations, particularly eclipses. Now (since January 1st 1977) it is defined in terms of TAI, the time of the atomic clocks, as:

TT = TAI + 32.184 seconds

UTC, the time the Internet uses and what all the time zones are based on, is currently 69.184 seconds behind:

UTC = TT – 69.184 seconds

That number goes up by one each time a leap second is added.

Leap seconds are added at the end of June or December to keep UTC to within a second of GMT. In effect, all the clocks stop for a second to give the Earth time to catch up. Even Unix time stops. The clock on your computer or mobile phone, if it is automatically updated by the Internet or the telephone company, will think it is a second fast and correct itself. But TAI and TT do not stop for anyone or anything, not even the Earth. They go on remorselessly counting the seconds. Tick, tick, tick….

When leap seconds were added:

• 1970s: Jun 1972, Dec 1972, Dec 1973, Dec 1974, Dec 1975, Dec 1976, Dec 1977, Dec 1978, Dec 1979
• 1980s: Jun 1981, Jun 1982, Jun 1983, Jun 1985, Dec 1987, Dec 1989
• 1990s: Dec 1990, Jun 1992, Jun 1993, Jun 1994, Dec 1995, Jun 1997, Dec 1998
• 2000s: Dec 2005, Dec 2008,
• 2010s: Jun 2012, Jun 2015, Dec 2016
• 2020s:

There has not been a leap second in five years. That is a bad sign. Because the most likely cause is water melting from the ice caps and flowing towards the equator. That would cause the Earth to spin slightly faster – just like when a skater pulls in her arms to spin faster.

As the Earth turns: melting ice caps are believed to be the main thing that speeds up the Earth. The main thing slowing it down is the Moon by way of the tides. In the long run its effect is much greater:

Hours in a day:

• -900,000,000 (900 million years ago): 18.0 hours
• -510,000,000: 20.7 hours
• -410,000,000: 21.4 hours
• -290,000,000: 22.9 hours
• -70,000,000: 23.7 hours
• +1821: 24.0 hours

The day was exactly 24 hours in about 1821 because the second is based on astronomical observations made between 1750 and 1892. On average the day gets 2.4 milliseconds longer every 100 years. In 150 million years the day will 25.0 hours long. In a billion years it will be 30.7 hours long.

Delta T (ΔT) is the difference between UT1 (the scientific name for GMT) and TT. The 69.3673 seconds at the beginning of the post was the Delta T for April 30th 2021. It has changed considerably through the years:

• 501 BC: +17,190 seconds
• 1 BC: +10,580 s
• 500 AD: +5,710 s
• 1000: +1,570 s
• 1500: +200 s
• 1902: 0.0
• 2000: +63.83
• 2021: +69.3673

 

Delta T from 1650 to 2018.

In the 1600s observations became more precise because of the telescope. In the late 1900s atomic clocks made them more precise still.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• External links:
  • Leap second and UT1-UTC information – from the US government (nist.gov), updated monthly. See how far off UTC urrently is.
• UTC
• The Meso-American Long Count

536

 

Rick James: Super Freak

Remarks:

This came out in 1981 and went to #3 on the US R&B chart and #16 on the pop chart. In New York it seemed like a #1 song and probably was.

James’s original lyrics were toned down to increase the song’s chances of getting on the radio and crossing over to White audiences. It did get on the radio, but not on MTV. In fact:

This was the first song by a Black artist that MTV refused to play. It was killed by Caroline B. Baker, who said:

“It wasn’t MTV that turned down ‘Super Freak.’ It was me. I turned it down. You know why? Because there were half-naked women in it, and it was a piece of crap. As a black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first black video on MTV.”

Instead Musical Youth received that honour in a song celebrating drug use, right in the title: “Pass the Dutchie” (1982).

James’s video seems very tame now 40 years later. Especially compared to what came later. And, since the “freaks” are racially integrated in the video, it does not, strictly speaking, promote the Jezebel stereotype. Though, to be fair, prejudiced White viewers will see White freaks as individuals, Black freaks as representing their race. That is how a prejudiced mind works. Thus Baker’s concern.

Not sure what “new-wave magazines” are – or were.

See also:

• songs: the 1980s
• MTV
• The Jezebel stereotype
• prejudice
• more Rick James:
  • Rick James ft Teena Marie: Fire & Desire
  • Rick James, Smokey Robinson: Ebony Eyes

Lyrics:

She’s a very kinky girl
The kind you don’t take home to mother
She will never let your spirits down
Once you get her off the street, ow girl

She likes the boys in the band
She says that I’m her all-time favorite
When I make my move to her room
It’s the right time
She’s never hard to please

Oh, no
That girl is pretty wild now
(The girl’s a super freak)
The kind of girl you read about
(In new-wave magazines)
That girl is pretty kinky
(The girl’s a super freak)
I really love to taste her
(Every time we meet)
She’s all right, she’s all right
That girl’s all right
With me, yeah
Hey, hey, hey-heeeey

She’s a super freak, super freak
She’s super-freaky, yow

Everybody sing
Super freak, super freak

She’s a very special girl
(The kind of girl you want to know)
From her head down to her toenails
(Down to her feet, yeah)
And she’ll wait for me at backstage
With her girlfriends
In a limousine
(Going back in Chinatown)

Three’s not a crowd to her, she says
(Ménage à trois)
Room 714, I’ll be waiting
When I get there she’s got incense
Wine and candles
It’s such a freaky scene

That girl is pretty kinky
(The girl’s a super freak)
The kind of girl you read about
(In new-wave magazines)
That girl is pretty wild now
(The girl’s a super freak)
I really like to taste her
(Every time we meet)
She’s all right, she’s all right
That girl’s all right
With me, yeah
Hey, hey, hey-heeeey

She’s a super freak, super freak
She’s super-freaky, yow

Temptations sing
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oooooh
Super freak, super freak
That girl’s a super freak
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oooooh

She’s a very kinky girl
The kind you don’t take home to mother
She will never let your spirits down
Once you get her off the street

Blow, Darry

Source: AZ Lyrics, Songfacts.

The Vanishing Half

“The Vanishing Half” (2020), a novel by Brit Bennett, is about twin sisters, Stella and Desiree, who live in a small town in Louisiana in the 1950s where everyone is light-skinned. Both sisters can pass for White. Stella leaves her town and family behind, cutting all ties, and lives as a rich White woman, while Desiree does not. Stella has a blonde daughter, Desiree has one black as coal. One day in 1978 the two daughters meet by accident ….

What a wonderful idea! I am surprised it has not been done before. Or maybe it has. It most reminds me of “Passing” (1929) by Nella Larsen, though that compares and contrasts two friends who could pass for White, not twin sisters.

Unfortunately, it was lacking in execution. A tear-jerker, to be sure, and, unlike “Skin” (2008), it avoided the obvious schmaltzy ending (Phew!) – though HBO still has a crack at it. There are way better books and films about passing than this. Not just better, but actually true, like story of Sandra Laing or Lacey Schwartz (my two all-time favourites).

Tragic Mulatto – a beloved trope of US fiction since at least 1842, this is where a Black character denies that she (almost always a she) is Black, turning her back on her Black family so she can pass for White. It works for a while – till the truth catches up with her. In this book that was the main plot. But it does not get going till page 141 (of 343) when Stella re-enters the novel as a White woman.

The hype – in the US this book was a “Good Morning America” Book Club pick and the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year. That meant the waiting list at my library was over 300 long. And by the time I got the book, there were 90 people behind me. So it was use it or lose it. So I read the whole thing. If it was just another library book, I would have read the beginning and returned it – there are way better books to read than this one.

Identity, presentation and truth – is a big theme. One supported not just by the twin sisters but by side characters too: a transgender man, a drag queen, an actress, a mother who is losing her memory, etc.

“The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”

Can you live a lie forever? Is it worth it? If you have lived as White for 20 years, are you White? If you are part Black but do not know it, are you Black? It has the makings of a deep and  profound book about race and identity, but, at least for me, the parts did not come together. They were merely adjacent within the same two book covers. Some assembly required. Even the subplot of Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter living in a town where everyone is light-skinned is not examined with any depth.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• books – books I read in 2021
• passing for white
  • Lacey Schwartz
  • Anatole Broyard
  • Skin – film about Sandra Laing
• Tragic Mulatto
  • Imitation of Life
  • Nella Larsen – Passing
  • Danzy Senna – Caucasia – not tragic!

533

 

 

 

The calendar in the Bible

I found this on Pinterest. I do not vouch for its accuracy, but it does give you a good rough idea.

The Bible mainly uses an old form of the Hebrew or Jewish calendar, which itself was a knock-off of the Babylonian calendar.

The Bible has bizarrely precise dates. Genesis 7:11, for example, dates the beginning of Noah’s Flood this way:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

Or Noah 600.02.17, as I will call it.

Here is the break-down of what that means:

The day: begins at sunset.

• Daylight was divided into 12 hours, the sixth hour being noon. That meant the hour was longer in summer, shorter in winter.
• Night was divided into 3 watches, the Romans divided it into 4 watches. Back then cities had an outer wall guarded by watchmen.

The week: is a period of seven days. A Babylonian invention of the -600s. The seventh day is the Sabbath, a day of rest. It runs from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine made the week part of the Western calendar in the year 321.

The month: Like the Islamic calendar, the month begins at the new moon, the first sliver of the crescent moon seen at sunset. That made the month 29 to 30 days long and the year 12 x 29.5 = 354 days. Unlike the Islamic calendar, though, a leap month was added every three years or so (or seven every 19 years) to keep the year roughly in line with the seasons.

Months are most often just numbered – “in second month” and so on. But sometimes they are given names. Those I could find in the King James Bible (with their present-day names and Gregorian equivalent in parentheses):

1. Nisan or Abib or Xanthicus (Nisan, roughly late March, early April)
   
2. Zif  (Iyar, Apr/May)
3. Sivan (Sivan, May/Jun)
4. ??? (Tammuz, Jun/Jul)
5. ??? (Av, Jul/Aug)
6. Elul (Elul, Aug/Sep)
7. Ethanim (Tishri, Sep/Oct)
8. Bul (Cheshvan, Oct/Nov)
9. Chisleu or Casleu (Kislev, Nov/Dec)
10. Tebeth (Tevet, Dec/Jan)
11. Sebat  (Shevat, Jan/Feb)
12. Adar (Adar, Feb/Mar)

So when the Bible says “the first month”, it means Nisan.

The leap month is called Adar II in our day.

Calendar of events:

• Nisan 14th: Passover
• Nisan 15th-21st: Feast of Unleavened Bread
• Ethanim 1st: Blowing of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah)
• Ethanim 10th: Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)
• Ethanim 15th-22nd: Feast of Tabernacles or Booths (Succoth)
• Adar 14th-15th: Purim

The cheat sheet for these is found in Leviticus 23. Purim was added in the book of  Esther.

The year: is counted in terms of patriarchs, kings or emperors: “in the first year of Darius the Mede”, blah blah blah.

Bible chronologies: These try to match events in the Bible to years AD and BC (= CE and BCE). They are the work of various self-appointed experts, none of them agreeing. It is not their fault: dates more than 2,500 years ago are hard to nail down to a particular year. The further you go back in time, the shakier and guessier the dates become. The Bible is no different.

– Abagond, in the 2,542nd year of of Darius the Mede, in the fifth month, the twenty-eighth day of the month.

See also:

• Bible
  • Bible chronology
  • Authorized Version – aka the King James Version (KJV)
  • archaic words and meanings in the King James Bible
• Bible chronolgy
• calendar
  • Roman calendar
  • Julian calendar
  • Gregorian calendar
  • Islamic calendar
  • The Meso-American Long Count
  • AD (Anno Domini)