The rescue station

Venus - central location - supplies the primary rescue team for the solar-system. The Royal Navy, if you like. As to where that Navy's based:

Earth and Mars each will have a fleet to patrol environs but as far as sending a "torch ship" to rendezvous with an errant liner like the Aniara, only Venus can count on being the closest at worst position. Okay okay: Mercury's a bit better but that's uncomfortably far in Sol's well - and its radiation. Venus' own Hilda might be a compromise; it can be supplied more easily from the planet and her Lagranges.

The issue with a Torch Ship is like what we saw in Event Horizon - high acceleration, so high gravity. This blog is in the habit of measuring that in meters-per-second-squared and calling that lower-case "g". Earth is 9.8 (I live in Colorado so, I never mind that "9.80665" autismo); Venus (cloud-deck), 8.7. Too high g and a man gets "G-LoC", loss-of-consciousness. There was a movie about that. Not as good a movie as Aniara.

That's a point in Venus' favour, that its d00dz are accustomed to high(ish) acceleration. It's just that Earthers are better. Even we're not as good as we need.

Since the nozzle would be pointed at the Sun, pushing outbound: here is the best, if not only, site in the inner Solar System to test and use Bob Zubrin's saltwater nuke. Or to collect antihydrogen for microfission thereby the Fusion Orion.

I suggest that Venus have a space-station and/or space-station levels to acclimatise people to higher g. As in: from birth. These people will be born and bred short and (very) stout, to staff Torch Ships. That's home base. The rescue station, which these people staff in shifts, is the higher-radiation Hilda. Parked at the stone Rama version of O'Neill, I assume.

Serbian names in a Walloon land

The southern edge of our Romania was, aforetimes, the Wallachia. The first links the land to a language; the latter, to a people. The people were Romanised Celts: walloons, as the Belgians call them.

This implies that Wallachia was a throughly Dacian and/or Latin land as far as local records take it. So it interested me a couple weeks back when Old European Culture found Yugo-Slavic toponyms here.

I am on record as seeing much of our Serbia as ancestrally Albanian. However as I reread that post, it concentrated on the Ibër. Wallachia lies to the east of that, along the Byzantine Danube.

I'll start with a philology of "Wallachia". Other cognates are "Welsh" and "Wallace". The basal word is German. The Goths ruled the region up to the AD 500s or so but the Avars and Slavs kicked 'em out, so I don't see this exonym sticking. The Vikings and Old English(!) got to the Crimea but I don't think they settled the Danube. In the late Middle Ages, plenty of German-speaking lords settled across that old Habsburg transylvania. The Wallacians had already separated from the Kingdom of Hungary and, when the Habsburgs had Hungary, those lands stayed just out of their reach - until the Great War debacle. So I see "Wallachia" as a Habsburg imposition.

As I dig up the primary sources, Wiki offers this in AD 1485: Haec Inscriptio ex Valachico in Latinam versa est sed Rex Ruthenica Lingua scriptam accepta. It's a (Slavic) Pole saying it, but his world is increasingly Central European - hence the Latin - which explains his recourse to a German exonym. Here is a local "Wallachic" language, not "Ruthene" =Slavic. In 1534, one Tranquillo Andronico notes the Wallaces as speaking Romance. Scholars agree that this people did not switch from, say, Celtic in those fifty years; that they were in 1485 already walloons speaking a form of our Romanian.

Adding to the mix, Romanian has a sister: Aromanian, sometimes "Vlach". (Wallaces again!) Aromanian clusters along Greece's northern border, both sides, mostly west. Where Romanian (and Moglen) took on Slavic, Aromanian took on Greek. The split is vaguely dated: AD 800-1200. I know not if Aromanian shares in the Balkan Sprachbund with Albanian, Romanian, and Yugoslav - I assume, yes. Given Aromanian's Greek loans, implicitly late Greek; I see Basil II's hand in this.

Before anyone answers what all this Yugoslav is doing in Wallachian toponyms, I'd first answer: to what degree is Aromanian a Balkan language, and how did it attract its Sprachbund elements; and, what's the history of Greek loanwords into Aromanian? I also want to know when and why this German term "Vlach" got applied to Aromanians far from Habsburg influence, deep in the Ottoman Europe.

Fuel of the Franks

That dustup in 1200 BC Tollense provides a wide snapshot of the LBA North. Some researchers figured - hey, they're the ancestors of modern White People, how's their lactose tolerance? We can test Cochran and Harpending on this!

(We don't, here, need to discuss "Indo-European" theories. We actually have the people - never mind pots, nor other forms of language.)

Joachim Burger presents the results - 92.9% were weaned. Lactase persistence existed but was uncommon and not - yet - a factor of Darwinian "Selection". In retrospect perhaps the Black Forest and the fisheries weren't the space for animal husbandry; milk in bulk comes from cows. (Also from sheep and goats, but those hilly areas are populated by... hillmen. Impoverished, depopulated, clannish, don't fight well far past their hills. Incas excepted.) Cows need pasture and most lowlands are earmarked for human-edible crops.

Another commenter counter-proposes AD 800-1000. Notable span - Charlemagne's Austrasia.

Here I wonder about the Low Countries reclaimed from the old Doggerland plain. Salt flats are poor for crops but might support grasses. The 7.1% drift toward this new European Rajasthan. Breaking out into Europe with the Franks, especially that greatest Frank.

BEWARE 9/6: Davidski has words. He is an expert in genetic structure on which job this paper these authors fall down. Now, my post here doesn't care about the structure going in; it is about the structure going out. Still: for those seeking a more refined snapshot of the ethnicities arrayed at Tollense, they'll need to await a new, corrective paper.

MOAR 10/28: Merchant massacre! If they were Southern European then that would explain the low lactase.

The first phase of the German Revolution, 1916-18

I propose more depth to the German Revolution: from 1916. All based on what facts I find in Gerwarth.

In 1916 the Kaiser Wilhelm II turned his Reich over to the generals. The generals - as we know - won the East but not in time to feed the West. There the 1918 advance stalled - then retreated.

In summer 1918 the Kaiser formalised his now-constitutional-monarch status by handing his authority to the parliament(s) except for the war effort. Of course Germany was by then only a war effort so this political move was rightly derided as a feint. During the peace negotiations, coinciding with the midterm election-cycle in the US, the emissaries were given to understand that there could be no peace with an unrepresentative regime.

That November all the principalities in the Reich rebelled against the Kaiser and his field-army; the Kaiser - then in occupied Belgium - abdicated and fled.

[SEPARATED from the armband post.]

The Munich debacle

Gerwarth devotes pp. 11.173-83 to the communists' adventure in Munich. He titles that "Democracy Besieged". His own narrative undercuts its title.

Ludwig III lost his throne in the revolution(s). He was succeeded by a red armband, the infamous Kurt Eisner. Gerwarth rehabilitates this particular armband somewhat: although he was USPD, he wasn't KPD. He'd issued a slate of "Stalwart Kamarad, Let Us Nationalise The Means Of Production!!" edicts... which the rest of Bavaria laughed off. You see, Bavaria was pretty much Austria North, with Munich for its Vienna. The local farmers were a Catholic and conservative bunch who weren't about to surrender the (literal) fruits of their labours to cityfolk (i.e., Jews) without fair compensation.

After two months of local Fail, and seeing how the armbands were a-faring elsewhere (badly); Eisner chose to be a mensch and in January called an election. His crew got spanked. Eisner took the L and held out as a minority representative, under Hoffman's moderate Left government.

Unfortunately for Eisner, and for Munich, violence followed. He got murdered and various factions in the city took sides. A "Soviet" was declared. Some non-Soviets became hostages; others, led by Hoffman, fled. Hoffman did what they did in Berlin: he called in the Freikorps... and the Weimar government. "Look at what those RUSSIANS *wink* and FOREIGNERS *dogwhistle* are doing to OUR *winkity-whistle* fair city."

The Soviet government back in Munich "executed" - murdered - several hostages, Lenin style. Gerwarth chooses this moment to smear the dead as Thule-Society and aristocrats, as if that excuses the crime. No defence convinced Munich's burgers; instead they concluded that here were more Bolsheviks, thus proving the Freikorps right.

The Freikorps subsequently proved the commies right, but that didn't matter because after they were done there weren't so many commies in Munich. The surviving Bavarians blamed the armbands for everything and the region became stalwartly anti-Left.

Here, Gerwarth is too kind to the Soviet... to the edge of ethics. The Soviet had left no democracy to besiege; the democracy - Hoffman's legally-elected government - did the besieging. I recommend the summary in Black Book of Communism over the summary here.

Bundesrepublik against Prussia

Scheidemann had already declared a Republic in Berlin the previous November, against Ebert's wishes, and Ebert had a point that this may have been premature. Then there came an election and the Republic was declared again, but not in Berlin. It was in Weimar.

Weimar was supposed to symbolise a rebirth of German Occident-facing Kultur, against Prussian militarism. The Prussians and militarists chose to interpret this site as an insult. As Gerwarth warns us, we cannot let 1930s propaganda influence our assessment of 1919. Still.

HBDChick is another source Gerwarth should have used and didn't. She could explain how the divisions across the Elbe are real - real before the Berlin Wall.

1919 Weimar is the ancestor to Bundesrepublik Bonn.

I commend the French to "thank" that the Bundesrepublik didn't form at the time, perhaps even including the Germanophone pieces of now-defunct Austria. (No less a liberal than Ebert was promoting Anschluss in 1919.) I recall somewhere - Belloc maybe - a claim that Clemenceau the laïcist nixed at Versailles the possibility of a [Catholic] German state along the Rhine. Further research points otherwise, for instance McCrum "French Rhineland Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919" (1978), doi 10.2307/2638928 - one more article Gerwarth didn't read. Abel and Bryant record how the French cut off the Rhineland as a "separate state" under French occupation. It wasn't that the French opposed a Rhineland Catholic state... it's that the French tried to create one, by force.

These Germans truly desired autonomy from Berlin, and may have accepted independence; but not at the pleasure of Paris.

The battle for Berlin

I cannot rightly judge from Gerwarth's text who putsch-ed whom. It may not matter.

Gerwarth does state this much: Liebknecht's side of the Left - the Spartakists - shattered their sinn-fein shell of a party, the USPD, forming instead the Kommunist Party KPD which scorned the democratic process. Ebert and Scheidemann then ordered troops against a naval cadre allied with the KPD. The Republic lost, and the KPD counterattack took over some important buildings. Ebert saw this as a repeat of how the Bolsheviks took all Petrograd the previous year.

So Ebert called in the Freikorps. In this battle between two fundamentally antidemocratic forces, the Right could at least pretend to be shoring up democracy which, I repeat, most Germans wanted. The Freikorps won - without taking prisoners for trial. Inter enim arma, mein gute Kamerad.

Gerwarth doesn't like it but he must admit the KPD would have behaved no better.

THE OTHER GIRL 10/3: I didn't know what to make of Fraulein Rozalia. Now I know enough to be contemptuously dismissive.