Why the red armbands

I find nonintersecting reports in Abel and Gerwarth both in agreement that the revolution distributed red banners and armbands to loyalists in the army.

I reckon the later German election a decent gauge for the Germans' sentiment a scant few months prior. Gerwarth finds that the German voters - which now included women, in fact were mostly women - agreed that they should live under a democratic socialism. Three-quarters of them voted for the MSPD or allies in 1919, not for the nationalists or commies. Verily, they'd been socialists for generations: Bismarck had set up this Reich with Sparta in mind, and the monarchy/-ies was/were redundant 1916 on. Up to the next Christmas, the Berlin socialists - Ebert, Scheidemann, and Liebkneckt - agreed on secular nonroyal socialism and disputed only its form.

So at first the red armbands symbolised democracy and socialism. Peace and Bread, and Progress. NB 10/11- Robert Graves and other veterans in Blighty were wearing them too.

The armbands came off piecemeal. The Christmas bloodletting disgraced the armbands in Berlin. The Munich Soviet did it for Bavaria. The armbands came back on for a bit under the Kapp Putsch; but when their paro-general carried on too long, especially along the Rhine, this was put down too. Socialism no longer symbolised democracy, nor peace; and the socialists weren't delivering the bread.

FOCUS 9/5: split off the early progress of the revolution.

Friedrich Ebert's disciple

I have read Schama's doorstop on the French Revolution, and Wright's sociology on Iran mostly-post-revolution. Now I am on Robert Gerwarth's November 1918.

Gerwarth didn't read Arthur Bryant, or at least didn't cite the man. (Google autofills that with some barbeque joint.) Theodore Abel's compilation Why Hitler Came To Power has also gone uncited... directly. I do note where Gerwarth has cited Abel indirectly, e.g. pp. 153, 258 n.43 via Richard Evans (London: 2003), 1.69 from Abel, 24 #4.3.4. Elsewhere I note where Gerwarth uses Current Year jargon like "gay" and "LGBT" which nobody was using in 1918, not in England and not in the Reich. I smell Oxford University's style-guide. So I must suspect that Oxford has pushed Gerwarth not to cite Nazi Apologetic, as a rule. You know and I know Abel and Bryant were no such thing, but Oxford doesn't know that - look at how AJP Taylor treated the two at the time.

I (mostly) do not see this tendentious bias in Gerwarth himself. He doesn't contradict what I find in Abel or Bryant. His book is under a socialist / liberal slant. But Gerwarth is writing a Babylon Berlin; he is trying not to let the 1930s cloud 1917-23 by hindsight. Germany had a socialist / liberal slant in late 1918. In that much, Gerwarth's slant is an improvement over Abel or Bryant... for the time at hand. Why focus on the minority at the time of the majority's rule?

Which is not to ignore the minority for this time. Gerwarth must account for the (neo-)Freikorps... and that's when he must turn to Abel, however laundered.

Gerwarth's prose is confused over defining this revolution. Here he's more like Wright, less like Schama - and since he's not writing a sociology like Wright, I must fault him for this. Gerwarth further tacks on a long spiel about the Jews to his penultimate chapter; he should have inlined that content with the rest of the book, like Bryant did.

I also fault our author for his framing of the Munich Soviet - there he breaks his alliance with the average local, as to deliver a near-apologetic for a brutal Bolshevism. It is this which, I am sure, accounts for a howler in the epilogue wherein Hitler is called an "anti-socialist" after his work with the Eisner government, and before he joins the Arbeiterpartei to change its name to... all together now... the National Socialist Arbeiterpartei.

Whatever works

Jeffie Goldberg is lying - mostly.

Not to say I always agree with Cernovich, nor even respect him half the time. If we can print money, why do we have to pay taxes? is a profoundly stupid question - in a fiat system we pay taxes to unprint money. [UPDATE 10/28: and universal-income payday is dumb too, unless yer just buyin' votes, like a scumbag.] I was unhappy with his touting of Graham Hancock's latest pyramidiocy. His current Trump-boosterism stinks of opportunism and/or emotion given his earlier touting of Kanye West's quixotry. And then there's his raising of CoronaHoax memes. The man's a flake.

As to Trump's relationship with the Xatriya/Spartiates, I can believe it's fraught. Trump is antiwar by contrast to our elites. He never respected McCain; he has a problem with "losers" generally. He found his way past the Vietnam-era draft (as did Biden, to be fair; and as Clinton). I certainly believe that Herr Drumpf has questioned the wisdom of America's contribution to the First World War. The man comes from pre-War Germans; the Drumpf patriarch Frederick Senior was, in fact, antiwar (and banished from the Palatinate ~1905 for that).

All that said Cernovich does show his work when he has to. And his work against Goldberg amounts to a damning dossier.

Trump canceled a flight: he claims, weather; Goldberg claims, He Hates Our Boys. Turns out we have the weather that day. Helicopters are low-velocity, low-mass aircraft much more vulnerable to a sudden 30 mph gust than is a high-velocity, high-mass passenger aeroplane. Also they fly under the clouds most the flight-time. The weather that day was not good for helicopters which is what Trump then had.

There's also the contradiction with Sanders who was there but never mind that. John Bolton was then-n'-there too and made a written record. Bolton was no fan of Trump when he testified to that day, but he somehow wholly missed the accounts alleged today.

And there's Goldberg's credibility itself: a partisan on the side of the party of perpetual war, whatever the label the two official parties pretend over that. Much like the 1920s Klan was a sub-party feeding politicians up to both D and R (I know I know, Demz wur reel raciss 1867 and 1960 - we're talking 1920s).

Finally, it doesn't ring true that Trump is cruel enough nor ignorant enough to consider fallen Americans as "losers" in a war their comrades, er, won; and it rings even less true that he'd be stupid enough to say it.

Here we are dealing with a stew of Trump memes stirred up and remade into a steaming new lie. I'd say the Atlantic should be ashamed but, they ran that power-glute guy's Trig Trooferism for years in the first Obama term. Hey, whatever works, against fascists - right?

ASIDE - How fellow contributor Emily Hauser would get around supporting such evil: it's practicing Judaism. Kalman Katzenelson would argue otherwise but what does he know.

NuScale

The small modular reactor, tendered December 2016 and submitted the next month (h/t Green). It's now got Fed approval.

One (infamous) holdup in nuclear power is getting the plants insured. It's Pascal's Wager: the risk is deemed up to a Chernobyl level, effectively infinite. You know and I know that we don't run RBMK in burgerstan, but we do have analogous problems: corner-cuts, politics, denialism. I am not the first blogger to draw parallels with the contemporary Challenger disaster. No insurer can dish out for a Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant #4. So, insurers don't, and the government does.

"But pebble-bed", we've been saying for decades. Well sure - in theory. But there's the paradox: there's the new stuff which is safer in theory, and the old stuff which although historically flawed is at least known.

And then: Jurassic Park. What if some gamma-male on staff deliberately sabotages the works. I expect this is why the labs' management is going so nuts - they must appease the loudest constituency, and to whatever ideology they must mentally enslave the staff. Spinning off that point, insurers are in this same #woke boat. If Prudential (say) insure some plant that some greenie got xir eye on, they're getting #cancelled. "What if they go bankrupt", the whispers will whisper. Now they cannot insure anything else.

NuScale got an answer: diminish the scale of the reaction. Power-generation at 50 MW per module, in a 23x5m long cylinder; twelve (12) modules. The failsafe is handled through gravity: if the AZ-5 button is pushed, the motors stop and the control-rods just fall down.

NuScale say they can scale the design up to 60 MW / mod. ArsTechnica don't inform if that's from added fuel or from energy-capture. I hope the latter but suspect the former. Insurance will cost more for more fuel.

This design should protect insurers so to allow a private market in insurance... for the end-user. Also to be insured will be production and distribution of the isotope, which NuScale tell us is uranium: probably U-235 but conceivably U-233 ("Thorium") [UPDATE 2/28/21 which besides being breedable from a common metal, itself has a lower critical-mass so can scale the whole thing down even further]. I strongly suggest laws that the supply-chain have different insurers than those involved in the reactors on-site. Although given the Proliferation worries, the producer at least will be Uncle Sam.

These reactors will, I suspect, go out to constituencies without a strong NIMBY movement. Cheap land, low population, downscale labour-pool of that. I could see the first reactors going, ironically, into West Virginia where the coal mines will use them to mine more coal. This stands to drive down the price of coal as to make that competitive with natural-gas again. I'm afraid we'll need to stick coal with more regulations.

And who else wants reliable 50 MW off the power-grid: server-farms, I am sure. Stick 'em in the Washington / Oregon outback.

Of course this reactor should work as well for Venus' 8.7-.9 gravity as for Earth's 9.8 - failsafe will take a fraction of a second longer to drop. It won't work in space (although the inner-planet shell don't care, they got photovoltaics). Unsure about underground Mars or our Moon.

UPDATE 10/27/21: A competitor.

The trap

Nuclear is unsafe and unensurable. Coal pollutes. Natural gas belches greenhouse gas. Where's the way out?

Masks don't work. Social-distancing is onerous (RE-OPEN AMERICA!). Vaccinations are Bill Gates' way to microchip you. Where's the way out?

There is no way out... well, not for you. Al Gore will still fly on his jet, and smarter Rightists will be out on their Wyoming ranch merrily sneering at masked city-slickers on the PJMedia comments.

They want proles and olds to freeze in the dark, or simply to get sick. Eugenics and euthanasia the hard way.

Abyssal

Three articles came in pretty much at the same time over the past couple days. MIT published a recent 85-sol black hole merging with a smaller one, and an explanation of event GW190412 last year which involved a 29.7-sol with a (much!) smaller one. Somewhere around there: Hawaii offers the Generic Object of Dark Energy, which behaves like a black hole, but isn't.

What I learnt from the former is that a "mass gap" looms in black hole theory. From the beginning: when particles are given sufficient energy (that is, they approach the speed of light), quantum effects apply which spawn off additional particles. This holds true of photons, also: when bright enough, they birth an electron and antielectron. So, in the event of an iron-fusion implosion of a star, there's a mass at which the energies are too high - they create enough particles that an event horizon is not formed. The star ceases to implode, and ex-plodes. Entirely.

I am (now) told this goes boom if the ex-star's mass was such as to run the black hole higher than 65-sol. Apparently at 200-sol the star's gravity is high enough again that the event horizon forms anyway (at 120-sol, the rest blowing off). That mass gap, between 65-120, is the "pair instability" for which we shouldn't see natural black holes.

Based on the other articles, one also from MIT, one obvious answer is "derrrp what if two 40-sol black holes merge". GW190412 was a merger and, MIT think, one of the parties of that merger, itself, came from an earlier merger.

But Hawaii asks, what if a given "black hole" is a "g.e.o.d.e.", a ball of dark-energy with an outer spinning layer. Apparently the "geode" repels, not attracts, when the spin is high enough. If they don't spin much then they just act like black holes.

SNAPSHOT 10/29: The black hole census.

The Achaean Empire

Poking in at the current state of Late-Helladic scholarship, I found some articles published over the last twelve months or so. Here is a long ramble teeing off on (possible) Linear B in Bavaria. And here's an essay on "Kings and Great Kings in the Aegean and beyond" (pdf).

The latter argues that our default model of Ahhiyawa political organisation should be the contemporary closest: Anatolia. Hattusas' imperium was a loose hegemony and not always centred at Hattusas itself. Mycenae would serve this purpose across the water, for the Greeks. At the same time, the Hittites continually suffered revolts from their subjects. If Ahhiyawa was an empire, this model allows (say) Tiryns arming up and attempting a similar revolt. The scholars're mostly looking at Thebes / "Thegwas" for the Greek Tarhuntassa. So: as the local autonomy and resistance across Late Bronze Anatolia does not cause scholars to deny the Hittites' imperium; so the autonomy of LHIII megara shouldn't commend dismissal of a Mycenaean analogue. (How direct was Aztec rule over Mesoamerica? or British over India ... ?)

The former study looks at Pylos: which had recently brought Iklaina under its sway, held weak control over Tinwanthos likely Arcadia, and resorted to Metzanian (>Messenian) mercs to guard the coast. This implies that Mycenae wasn't shoring up the defence, at the end when those records were burned; the locals had to do it. That would imply a contradiction between these studies.

Much depends on when and where various events happened. Perhaps Mycenae had fallen already and other states - Tiryns, Thebes, etc - were left scrambling. Perhaps the reason Pylos felt a need to carve out its own mini-empire was precisely because it was (now) every polis for itself.