Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho

And it certainly helps when you can call in an asteroid strike. From WUWT, Bronze Age City Destroyed by Bolide

This is one of the best forensic history efforts I have seen in a long time…

A Giant Space Rock Demolished an Ancient Middle Eastern City
By Christopher R. Moore

As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).

Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.

Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.

About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.

It all sounds like the climax of an edge-of-your-seat Hollywood disaster movie. How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?

[…]Real Clear Science

The authors also concluded that this bolide was also the likely cause of the destruction of Jericho.

One of the songs my Dad (in his once a week job as choir director, excuse me, Minister of Music) made us sing in church: 

We didn't do it quite that well.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Gwen Verdon up and awaiting your digital pleasure.

Google Gets Down with Deuteronomy

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I, the Lord Google thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me. But to be fair, Google is too young for more than 2 or 3 generations.

Just in from Stacy McCain: YouTube Suspends Jordan Peterson’s Daughter @MikhailaAleksis

If the Left ever decides you’re an Enemy of Social Justice, they won’t stop at trying to destroy your life, they’ll also attempt to destroy the lives of your family members. This appears to be the case with Professor Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila, whose YouTube account just got a “first strike” suspension because . . . “spam and deceptive practices”?

This is obviously bogus, as bogus as Twitter’s claim that I was a participant in “targeted abuse,” and anyone who has followed the SJW jihad since #GamerGate understands what is really happening. YouTube is owned by Google, a company that is controlled by SJWs; the company fired James Damore and is being sued for allegedly prohibiting the hiring of white males. While the Cultural Marxists within the company are afraid to ban such a high-profile free speech advocate as Jordan Peterson, they figured they could get away with punishing his daughter, depriving her of advertising revenue and whatever other limitations this “first strike” suspension involves. The process whereby Google enforces its terms of services, however, is arbitrary and opaque. We don’t know which SJW apparatchik inside the company imposed this “first strike,” and there is no way the executives at Google (all of whom are major Democrat campaign contributors, by the way) will give an honest explanation.

I haven't really seen any of the YouTube posts by Mikhaila Aleksis Peterson, but I've seen an awful lot of YouTube, and based on what I've observed, the general bar against "spam and deceptive practices" must be awfully high, since I see an awful lot of low level spam and deceptive practices. However, I've heard she has an unusual food sensitivity resulting in rheumatoid arthritis, and promotes a vegetable free diet as a treatment for it. Clearly an enemy of all that is good and right.

However, I have seen quite a number of videos by her father Jordan, and he truly is a target of the left. By way of Maggie's Farm: IQ, the "Big 5", and pursuing life goals



You can see why.

From the American Thinker: Google pulls a fast one for political correctness in sponsored New York Times post

. . . Now that's a good news hook, for presumably a story with a list of feel-good news from the past year, and it's likely that many readers were tempted from that lead-in to click on the list.  Who wouldn't want to re-read the wonderful stories of the Thai cave rescue or the Paris building rescue one last time?  I did, and I clicked, because that was what they were holding out for the readers.

But, this being Google, I didn't quite get what the list promised.

Instead of the feel-good stories for the year, Google got some TED talk-type people to tell us some crappy stories for the year, the ones that scolds for political correctness get all excited about.

It was all about the wonders of the ban on plastic straws and the European Parliament's ban on single-use plastic (seriously, the European Parliament?), some identity-politics crowing about a third woman to win the Nobel prize for physics (as if we care more about the fact that she is a woman than her actual research achievements), and oh, they, including the cave rescue, second from the bottom, sort of as an afterthought. No Paris building rescue – not good enough.

Seriously, was the ban on plastic straws really the ultimate feel-good story of the year? That's the story of how saving the whales comes well before saving the people. Banning straws, for many handicapped people, who depend on straws to stay independent, means they got stiffed from the measure, and the rest of us got inconvenienced. That may make a few lefties feel good, but rest assured, it was the inconvenience part they liked, not any serious prospect of saving the environment, which isn't going happen from this petty bit of tyranny anyway.

The rest from the list are just as bad.

The irony of my making this essentially anti-G00gle post on Blogger, a Google platform, is not lost on me.

Linked at nourishing obscurity in Epiphany and Orthodox Christmas. Merry Epiphany! Wombat-socho has Rule Five Tuesday and FMJRA 2.0: (Like) There’s No Tomorrow up at The Other McCain. Linked at Broad Oak Magazine in Four Factors for Life Success.

Did a Meteorite Strike Destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?

Lot Fleeing Sodom - Benjamin West

According to Newsweek, Biblical City of Sodom Was Blasted to Smithereens by a Massive Asteroid Explosion

An asteroid that burst in a searing aerial explosion may have destroyed the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam 3,700 years ago, archaeologists reported Saturday.

The city, which lies in the Middle Ghor region of the Jordan Valley, is considered a plausible site for the biblical city of Sodom by some researchers. But this conclusion is hotly debated within the field.

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God for their sinful behavior, according to the Christian Bible.

 And so far, he hasn't messed with San Francisco.

Scientists presented their preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Denver, Colorado.

Excavations and radiocarbon dating at Tall el-Hammam suggested most of its mud-brick walls vanished about 3,700 years ago. It’s thought that several Middle Ghor sites were inhabited for 2,500 years or more before the proposed impact.

 That's pretty old!

Minerals that suddenly crystallized in blistering heat support the concept, archaeologist Phillip Silvia, of Christian institution Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, told the conference. Silvia and his colleagues have been excavating the city for more than a decade, Science Newsstated.

The enormous blast “not only [wiped] out 100% of the Middle Bronze Age cities and towns, but also [stripped] agricultural soils from once-fertile fields,” researchers wrote in an abstract. Shockwaves may have pushed super hot briney water from the Dead Sea over the east of the Middle Ghor, they added.

And the brine could account for Lot's wife. Well, other than not really knowing where Sodom and Gomorrah were located, and whether or not a meteorite or asteroid really exploded overhead there, it sounds plausible.