Maximilien Robespierre as retroactive scapegoat

Laurent Guyénot offers a summary of Maximilien Robespierre's theology. Meanwhile he revises the common understanding of 1794 in France.

Robespierre was a key thinker of la Révolution. Guyénot - who is French, which I am not - argues that, nonetheless, Robespierre did not approve the actions for which la Révolution is infamous: the anti-theism and (the full extent of) the mass murders.

The historian can test that. When Robespierre was unseated 31 July 1794, did the coup against the public figure end the public Terror? His immediate successor, as it happens, was Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne - whom Guyénot does not name. This one had been a direct agitator for the Terror. If you haven't heard of JNBV, partly that's because his reign lasted only through August. The next one up was Merlin de Douai, by all accounts a decent sort, who ushered in le Directoire which attempted a restoration of the rule of law. The coup, then, did nothing to end the Terror.

That flawed Robespierre was killed, and so abruptly, where the truly evil JNBV was exiled implies a political murder on the part of JNBV. Over July 1794 JNBV feared that Robespierre might indeed push la Révolution into something other than tyranny - which de Douai, barely more than a month later, would do in truth. Robespierre then, however, was ill and not in direct contact with la Révolution. This weakened Robespierre and allowed more forceful personalities to wrest power.

De Douai was too decent to kill JNBV - and for that, his Directoire needed some means to kill JNBV's career. As Justinian II had proven and as Napoleon would prove, you don't exile Caesar.

Since Guyénot omits JNBV, and since JNBV had only a month to say whatever he was going to say anyway, we do not learn from Guyénot how August 1794 remembered Robespierre. I can, however, take a good guess at le Directoire. This nouvelle régime accepted Robespierre's execution as to make the man a scapegoat for all the evils of la Révolution which it replaced. Napoleon, who usurped le Directoire, admitted as much. By calumniating Robespierre, le Directoire cut down potential support for the true villains starting with JNBV over in Guyana.

Le Directoire made of Robespierre a cautionary tale. Mary Shelley or a Jew would say, he was killed by his own golem. This meme had the powerful rhetorical value of being true.

UPDATE 8/12: On finishing Simon Schama: JNBV was on Robespierre's Right. He was a Girondin holdover. JNBV and his Directoire successors presided, instead, over chaos between Jacobin diehards (now out in the hinterland) and an ever-fumbling Paris.

Schama paints Robespierre instead as a (failed) philosophe. Schama implicates him in that tyrannical 22 Prairial law although he's aware that Robespierre was not in good health at the time. But after the fact Robespierre certainly used the law, being increasingly paranoid, toward the end. Killing Danton was a mistake.

CFR

CFR stands for Case Fatality Ratio, or maybe Rate. The denominator would be the proportion who we know got the disease, and are done with it. One way or another.

The number of cases should not be considered for CFR… at all. Many of those are ongoing. These, we do not know how will all end up. We use CFR alongside total cases to guess those still-living cases' outcome.

Here is how maximum CFR should be calculated: deaths / (full recovery + deaths). I say “maximum” because the “full recovery” variable is a minimum - here, because some "asymptomatics" are caught early, so may be presymptomatics. But some are lucky and go through it all just fine. I'm assuming that the statistics aren't lying about the deaths.

Once you're in the ICU, from what I understand, you're in trouble. That CFR is 30% going in, 70% on mechanical respiration. And that's not counting the morbidities that the machine adds to your account when you "survive". Our job is to stay out of the ICU.

Also, we need frequent and free testing. That requires different leadership than what we got in Trumpestan, and in all its little statelets passive-aggressively letting this play out. As far as different leaders, we'll see what alternatives we get.

UPDATE 5/15: Infection Fatality was 1% in April and prior. CFR is therefore greater than that - and that's where morbidity kicks in. A hospital stay [as of April] would boost this to 30%. But maybe this is better now.

Upload #189: deus lo volt

The suwar 74, 76, and 81 end similarly. My projects dealing with these - "Mantle", "The Test of Man", and "Reminder" - had got into a tangle as a result.

Fortunately, I'd already suspected each component of this trio as somewhat late. Here, the shared text happened to depend on sura 18. My next task was to sort out whatever other parallels are in each. For these, "Promised Egypt" now proposes 80>10; "Blasting the Caliph", 73:1-19>69. With these, and with what I'd already argued about sura 18, I was clear to stick suras 73 and 80 into the distant past of all 74, 76, and 81. That cleared the field: sura 74 before the other two.

I was wondering in "Mantle" about some parallels with sura 45 which, now, involve 25 too. It turned out behind all these parallels' bases were 14 and 54, respectively... and sura 25 looks to be quoting the sura 74 form of it. In the process, sura 45 evinced that selfsame sura 14 parallel. "Mantle" has sura 74, then, as another House Of War era text, like suras 34 and 67 (but not sura 45). "Days of Allah" has a tightened argument for that in sura 45.

Speaking of "Days of Allah", I also needed to untangle sura 45 from its parallels in suras 23 and 43. So "The Ararat Tax" and "Defending Jesus" argue for their use of sura 45.

Meanwhile "Provision" has changed mainly that sura 51 doesn't actually name Isaac. So it's not "Ishaq" there. May as well upload that whilst I'm about it.

Madrassa.

Hard sweep

With a tip o' the beret to HBDChick: Souilmi et al., "Ancient human genomes reveal a hidden history of strong selection in Eurasia".

This paper pinpoints 57 suspect parts of the European genome(s), which diverge most sharply from the African baseline. After populations entered Europe, and after Sundalander men took charge: the Aurignacian "Cro Magnons" faced the European winters. Many parts of the pre-33kBC genome underwent "sweeps" - and of these parts, many align with genes common to "circumpolar" mammals. The Magdalenians, soon to be Solutreans and finally Western (and Eastern) Hunter Gatherers, were the Aurignacians' descendents.

As for the nature of the Aurignacian sweeps: over-represented with genes encoding proteins acting at the cell membrane, including the enriched pathway specific to cell-surface interactions itself (Focal Adhesion). This is potentially important as cell surface proteins coordinate appropriate cellular responses to extracellular information, including potential stressors. "Extracellular information" would include germs. What sort of germ in a hunting-and-gathering society? I expect from small game, birds, and gathered shellfish. Coronaviri and influenzas would be among those bugs from the flying game. Since these tribes weren't as inbred as were the Neanders, those airbourne bugs would then spread throughout the populations.

The paper notes that after 28kBC those sweeps get harder to identify - it notes by contrast the agricultural and pastoral adaptations of the Meso/Neolithic. Also this paper doesn't say what happened with the Gravettians between A. and M. [UPDATE 5/5/22 -but this does!] I understand the G. people were more Moroccan and Spaniard by origin. Their genome got swept the old fashioned way, I assume when the winters got worse again. The Solutrean toolkit was likewise southern by origin, but by then those southerners were Magdalenians.

After 28kBC I take it that the Solutrean toolkit and the domestication of the dog gave more range to hunters, Magdalenian so better-suited for the Ice Age. Some of the old cold-adapt genes didn't matter as much for better-clothed Solutreans so they attenuated over time.

Toward a better Aeneid

My university had us read Virgil's Aeneid in translation. We were to concentrate on books 2, 4, and 6 of twelve, all in "the Odyssey half". Those are, by coincidence, the same books which Virgil tested out to the Imperial family when he was writing the thing.

There's a legend around that epic as a whole. Virgil was dissatisfied with the text and asked Augustus to burn the draughts he had. Then Virgil caught sick and died. Somehow, those draughts were maintained. Either Augustus had the whole set of galleys, or else Virgil failed to burn what he had (understandable if he was going to revise it).

I remember leafing through books 7-12, the "Iliad half". All I remember of it was that it was a tiresome waste of time. I read books 1, 3, and 5 more closely. Book 1 is bogstandard intro, 3 is where the Odyssey Half goes fanfic, and 5 is Aeneas' character-establishment... 5/12ths into the story.

I expect that whatever changes Virgil was going to make to books 2, 4, and 6 would have been superficial - to tie it all in better with the more drastic changes made elsewhere. Why ruin what you already know to be good. And why upset an Imperial patron.

Books 7-12 would have taken the brunt of the changes. An editor would then target Book 1 for foreshadowing, after overhauling books 7-12. I couldn't tell you how to save book 3. Maybe book 5 was slated for full-on deletion, with an eye to trim the B-Side of the overall epic to five books. But I have a better notion about book 5: replace it. There's room for a saga of Italy before the Trojan landing.

It may even be why Virgil wanted back to Italia, to collect Oscan and Rasnal folklore and legendry (respectively) to write that new book 5. In the 10s BC, those peoples yet lived.

Perspective?

Tunku Varadarajan offers "perspective". With 3D perspective, no less! ISWYDT

The graph's visual design is purty enough. It's good that the past, which its lower population, is marked as narrower. The misses I see are Cyprian's Plague during the early third anno domini century, and the cocoliztli in Mesoamerica in the middle sixteenth. It doesn't go before the Antonines, so we don't read (say) the Hittite Plague in the thirteenth century BC nor Yersinia during the Balkan Chalcolithic. But these are nits. Or fleas, in the latter case.

@tunkuv's main problem is that Covid sits on his list at all, since this virus has only just started. The curves for affected countries are still in their expo part of the bell-curve.

I'm afraid that @tunkuv has offered yet more comfort-food to those who would downplay this beast.

BACKDATE 4/3

Vinegar

Science Daily has relayed this on, about making acetate from nanowires. Acetate is vinegar. (Of course I could also make acetic acid from my cold underground moonshine still but anyhoo.)

The process' ingredients are Sporomusa ovata bacteria, water, and sunlight - and CO₂. Its use of sunlight is 3.6% efficient, almost as good as sugarcane for sucrose; at that level, it's thought that Martian insolation would suffice for it. Another byproduct is oxygen (yay!).

Venus' clouds would also suffice for it. I can get water there too. Here I prefer to engineer such bacteria as can break down concentrated sulfuric acid, instead of water.

OR 1/12/2021: you could make your acetic from carbon-monoxide.