20210603

Thu Jun 3 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten to seven without waking. Cloudy in the morning, then partly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms early in the afternoon. Partly cloudy early in the evening. Highs in the upper 70s. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Work ---------------------------------------- - write costs doc for 365 for Heidi Done (and sent). - follow up with Levi about Entrata specials Done (He'll get back to me after doing research.) - Mackinac work? Thirty-five-minute walk at lunch. Warm and mostly sunny. Heard a mourning dove. Saw a dragonfly, a rabbit, a chipmunk, and a crow. Home ---------------------------------------- Took the garbage out, washed dishes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_puppetry Donated to the curl project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361818 https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/introducing-loaf-guardians > Beowulf begins with a brief history of King Hrothgar’s people, who are called the Scyldings, after their found father, Scyld, and it assures us how much they loved their leaders past and present. But it also makes clear that these leaders were lords, and the way they had achieved their dominance was far from benign. Scyld, we are told, had started life as a foundling but rose to greatness by robbing the halls of others and laying fear upon them, forcing them to pay tribute. We may suspect that something similar was occurring in late sixth-century Britain, and that men like Reada and Wocca were not necessarily benevolent father figures, but rather men with strong right arms, violent proclivities, and boundless greed, asserting control over others, demanding tribute in the form of goods and services. Ceorls who had previously been independent, farming their single hides of land, lords of their own little communities of family and slaves, now found themselves bound to contribute to the upkeep of one particular individual or family that was lording it above the rest. > If this model is correct, it meant that originally kingship was open to anyone with enough ambition and muscle—even a foundling like Scyld could quickly create a lordship that covered a large territory. And it implies that initially there may have been quite a lot of kingdoms—a good many more than the seven immortalized by Henry of Huntingdon in the twelfth century. > The most common assumption is that all kingdoms probably began as such small-scale affairs, and that some had grown larger by bullying others into a state of dependence. Having secured the submission of his neighbors, an ambitious warlord could call upon them to fight in his ranks, enabling him to take on bigger contenders, until eventually he established his supremacy over a wide region. > It is impossible to say for certain why kings suddenly emerged in the later decades of the sixth century, but the middle decades had been notably catastrophic. Trouble began in 536, when a number of writers noted that something was very wrong with the weather. “During the whole year,” said the Byzantine historian Procopius, “the sun gave forth its light without brightness…it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.” Even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, generally unreliable as it is for the sixth century, noted two eclipses around this time. > It was a “dust veil” event caused by volcanic eruptions > The consequences were obviously calamitous: crops failed everywhere and famine swiftly followed. “Failure of bread,” wrote an Irish annalist in 536, and again in 539. After the famine came bubonic plague. It began in the east, devastating Constantinople in 541, spreading to the western Mediterranean in 542, and eventually reaching Ireland in 544, where it must have torn through a population already weak from hunger. It is extremely unlikely, as some have suggested, that this plague did not also spread to Britain. > Precisely how the Anglo-Saxon communities to the east were affected will probably never be known, but it is hard not to imagine that the shocks of the mid-sixth century could have caused society to be severely shaken and radically reshaped. Acute shortages of food must have led to increased violence, with desperate communities raiding each other. > Devastated survivors may have been willing to surrender their independence and submit to the rule of others if that was the only way of guaranteeing their sustenance. (The word lord derives from the Old English hlaford, meaning “loaf-guardian,” or “bread-giver.”) Amid all the death, violence, and chaos, there must have been a few individuals who emerged as winners and were able to turn the desperation of others to their own advantage. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=lord > Old English hlaford is a contraction of earlier hlafweard, literally "one who guards the loaves," from hlaf "bread, loaf" (see loaf (n.)) + weard "keeper, guardian" (from PIE root *wer- (3) "perceive, watch out for"). https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=lady > "mistress of a household, wife of a lord," apparently literally "one who kneads bread," from hlaf "bread" (see loaf (n.)) + -dige "maid," which is related to dæge "maker of dough" (which is the first element in dairy; see dey (n.1)). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nrca05/why_were_the_27th_army_group_killing_other_army/ I had no idea how uncertain the support of the military was for the government during the Tiananmen Square protests. > The 20th of May also saw the signing of a letter by 7 retired generals of the PLA, which further reinforced the paranoia about mutinies and insubordination within the Central Military Commission. As the 21st of May passed with many units surrounded or blocked from entering their assigned positions, the first truly violent clashes started to occur on the Fengtai District, where soldiers were pelted with stones and in some cases isolated and beaten. On the 22nd of May the unit closest the square of the 113th Division of the 38th Army attempted to negotiate with the student leaders to allow them passage and to empty out the square. By 24 May the PLA leadership ordered the retreat of all units from the city, and to isolate in barracks until further notice. In practice this meant that scores units were considered completely unreliable and prone to mutiny due to their 3-4 day confrontation with had started becoming more and more like an anti-regime revolution. Effectively, all the units that had been in the city during those days, were confined to re-education regimes to build political reliability. The declaration of martial law was by this point still not widely supported in the higher echelons of the PLA, where especially the Navy produced a large number of dissenting officers and endorsements of Zhao Ziyangs perspective. Some naval cadets ended up joining the students, and in other parts of the Army and Air Force soldier-councils started forming, petitioning their commanders to not use force against the demonstrators. > Other units from supporting elements saw mass desertions, the burning of own vehicles, and the abandonment of equipment, and the first clashes between PLA units were reported in the early hours of June 4. > As the square was cleared and possibly as many a 10 000 individuals had been killed on the square as well as in Beijing as a city, the military insubordination had not stopped. In fact, it had escalated, as the post-Massacre reprisals and violence escalated before that. Insubordinate units clashed with loyal units, and in some cases civilians and students were once again involved. Much of the blue-on-blue violence was committed by the 27th Army, given their political reliability. Unsuprisingly the 38th Army and the elements from outside Beijing that had 'disloyal and antirevolutionary' components suffered significantly at the hands of the 27th Army. > It was not until 7 June (!) that most of the internecine violence stopped. Ordered groceries. Read more of A Desolation Called Peace. Servings: grains 5/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 4/2, meat 3/3, nuts 0/0.5 Lunch: pineapple, coffee, left-over curry and rice with vegetables, egg, and sausage Afternoon snack: carrots, banana Dinner: naan pizza with sausage

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