Volunteers Raising Money and Supplies for Ukraine

Fascinating story in the Washington Post today on the volunteer effort in Lithuania to raise money and collect supplies for Ukraine. Among other things they have collected hundreds of SUVs and pickup trucks, donated or sold at discount prices. One Lithuanian donor said, "We have no choice, they are fighting for us."

The convoy was carrying 45 vehicles — retrofitted Jeeps, ambulances, an armored bank truck and an army field kitchen — as well as 24 tons of diesel. It had traveled overnight from Lithuania as part of a swelling supply network racing to catch up with the return of war to Europe. More than a dozen volunteer drivers, including one whose relief work was normally limited to helping motorists stranded on the highway, had driven hood-to-taillight almost around-the-clock to rendezvous with Ukrainian fighters.

While governments negotiate over fighter jets and high-end weapon systems, soldiers on the ground are struggling to fill more basic needs. With Ukraine’s own factories shut down by shelling, its forces rely increasingly on volunteer, pop-up supply chains like this one for vital gear, including body armor, medical supplies and the pickup trucks and SUVs they covet as fighting vehicles.

A second convoy was scheduled to arrive later in the day, packed with generators, radios, surveillance drones, night-vision gear and, most coveted of all, almost 7,000 bulletproof vests and helmets. For the soldiers, they are a lifeline.

“That is what we need the most,” said Lt. Andrey Bystriyk, one of the many Ukrainian fighters who had traveled across his war-ravaged country to meet the convoys. His blue eyes teared up when he talked about the aid pouring in from neighboring countries.

“From the army, we get the gun and the ammunition and the uniform,” he said. “But under the uniform, what we eat, what keeps us safe, how we move around and fight — that comes from the people, our people and foreign people.”

I've been reading a lot of military blogs and the like lately, and one of these guys wrote yesterday about the reforms under way in the US Marines. They have abandoned tanks and cut back on artillery and other armored vehicles, instead spending the money on mobility, missiles, and weapons and equipment for infantry: night vision, other advanced optics, tactical drones, hand-held anti-tank and anti-air missiles, body armor, etc. He said, "Everything that has happened in Ukraine has confirmed the wisdom of this move." Properly equipped infantry is now, once again, the strongest force on the battlefield. And this is what makes volunteer effort so powerful in the Ukraine war: private people can't buy tanks or missiles – not in Europe, anyway – but they can buy night vision gear, body armor, bullet-proof helmets, light drones, and vehicles, all things that multiply the effectiveness of infantry. Not to mention, bandages, fuel and food.

Hot air balloons over Vilnius, Lithuania, March 17

Esaias van Hulsen

Dutch goldsmith and engraver, 1570-1624. I was blown away by these when I saw them, but I discovered that they are very much part of a tradition called blackwork prints. But anyway I think these are amazing.

Links 18 March 2022

The Floor of Florence Cathedral, 16th century

According to this twitter thread, entrepreneurial capitalism is taking off in India, with all sorts of "incubators" and young people wanting to "launch ideas" instead of "working to survive."

Amazing photos of slime molds by Barry Webb.

Why attempts to "clean up" the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" are foolhardy and possibly destructive.

CNN editor Nic Robertson on how Putin extinguished the hopes of millions of Russians. Essay, interview.

Iron arrowheads melting from the ice in Norway, likely used by reindeer hunters.

Strange little porcelain figurines by Sophie Woodrow.

Life at deep sea hydrothermal vents off California, very cool 4-minute video.

Chemists have developed AI systems to devise new helpful molecules, for example drugs. These chemists switched their software around and trained an AI to devise new poisons. It came up with hundreds, some of them predicted to be more dangerous than VX nerve gas. No, they didn't publish the details, but they do helpfully mention that this software is open source and widely available.

Michael Vickers, former US Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, in this video: "If there's a bigger strategic blunder in modern military history, I can't think of it. . . . I can't think of a more disastrous intelligence analysis . . .  Putin has zero chance of achieving any of his objectives. . . . He is wrecking his army."

Reconsidering Jack Kerouac and On the Road. My take is that literary attacks on the novel are almost beside the point, considering how huge an impact it has had on many thousands of young Americans.

The proposed Rivian electric truck factory in Georgia has brought out a determined opposition from environmentalists, Nimbyists, and conservatives who hate electric vehicles; some also hate George Soros, a major investor in Rivian, and don't like that Georgia is giving his company a big tax break. (NY Times)

Education and religion in America: "Teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys." (NY Times)

Storm uncovers a Roman shipwreck in just 2m of water, 50m from a popular tourist beach in Mallorca.

Weirdly fascinating Freddie de Boer essay from 2017 on our shared obsession with policing each other, "Planet of Cops."  Which I learned about from Scott Siskind's new essay on how the word "justice" has taken over the discourse.

American CIA officers are speaking publicly now (on background, of course) about the secret training program they ran in Ukraine in 2014-2017, in parallel with an openly acknowledged Army program. Among the topics covered were sniper training and secure communications. I suppose everyone wants to claim credit for helping Ukrainians fight so well.

What, exactly, is "burnout"? Is it the new trendy malady, like gout in the 1700s or nearasthenia fifty years ago? Or is it really a way to pat ourselves on the back for working so hard?

One business booming in Afghanistan is smuggling people over the border to Iran. (NY Times)

BBC report from the front lines in Kharkiv, 5-minute video.

When ornithologists fitted Australian magpies with GPS harnesses they thought were both unobtrusive and unremovable, the birds helped each other shed the harnesses by finding the only weak point, a tiny clasp, and biting it. All were removed within three days. This is either a rare example of altruism among adult birds, or they just really hate ornithologists. (NY Times, original article)

Francis Kéré of Burkina Faso has become the first African to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. (My Modern Met, dezeen, his firm's web site)

Russian Fascism

Wow, some straight-up 1930s Fascist rhetoric from Vladimir Putin this week, something you could use in a history course as a perfect example of the type:

Yes, of course, the West will rely on the so-called fifth column, on traitors. On those who earn money here, with us, but live there. And they live not only in the geographical sense of the word, but according to their thoughts, according to their slavish consciousness. I do not judge all those who have a villa in Miami, or on the French Riviera, who can't do without foie gras, oysters or the so-called gender freedoms. The issue here is not in that, but in the fact that many of these people by their very nature are mentally located exactly there, and not here, not with our people, not with Russia. This is, in their opinion, a sign of belonging to a higher class, a higher race. Such people are willing to sell their own mother if only they are able to sit in the hallway of the highest caste. They want to be like her [the caste, presumably], imitating her in every possible way. Yet they forget or do not understand that if they are needed by this so-called higher caste, it is only as expendable material used to inflict the maximum damage on our people.

The collective West is attempting to splinter our society, speculating on military losses, on the socio-economic effects of sanctions, in order to provoke civil unrest in Russia, using the fifth column to achieve its goal. And there is only one goal, as I have said: the destruction of Russia. But any people, the Russian people especially, are able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and will spit them out like gnats that flew into their mouths. Spit them onto the pavement. I am certain that this necessary and natural self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, our togetherness, and our readiness to answer any calls to action.

Populism in Wartime

Ross Douthat in the NY Times:

Putin’s war has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader, European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal, forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization or a shameless pivot. Which is to say: Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump somehow evolves into the biggest Russia hawk you’ve ever seen come 2024.

The more damaging blow, though, is the indirect one, the way the Ukraine invasion has revealed how uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.

This uncertainty isn’t confined to right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the Ukraine invasion because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Ukrainian resilience because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist aggression and Western unity does not.

Indeed American populism has a strong history, going back to before the Revolution, of thinking that international conflicts are just distractions from our real problems, likely ginned up by the bosses to justify their continued hold on power. American populism lacks a language for speaking about dangerous threats from outside.

Islamic Governance has Made Turks Less Religious

From a new academic paper by Murat Çokgezen, via Marginal Revolution:

This paper first evaluates the impact of a two-decade-long Islamization policy carried out by a pro-Islamist party, which came to power in 2002 in Turkey, on the attitudes of Turkish people toward religious values, religious practices, and clergy. In this regard, how the importance of religion, frequency of going to mosques, and trust in the clergy have changed among Turkish Muslims between 2002 and 2018 were examined by using World Values Survey data and employing logistic regression analysis. Estimation results indicated a reduction in belief in God, attendance to mosques, and trust in clergy, which imply the failure of the Islamization policy. Second, we explored what caused the failure by using the same data set and methodology. Our estimations suggested that the symbiotic relationship between the pro-Islamist government and religious clergy and institutions may explain the failure. As the government is identified with religion in the eye of the public, dissatisfaction with the government turned to dissatisfaction with religious values.

Unfortunately the paper is paywalled so I can't tell you how big the changes were. Since religious faith has declined across much of the world in the past 20 years, this might just be the international norm, not the fault of the Turkish government; but at any rate they are not succeeding in fighting that trend.

Historical Shadows

Some Ukrainian commentators have called the war currently unfolding, even if it continues to new phases with intermittent pauses, the final victory of Kievan Rus against both Muscovy and the legacy of the Golden Horde. Some really long historical shadows being cast.

–Boris Ryvkin

Museums in Crisis

One job that people really are quitting at a higher rate is "museum director." There are dozens of openings across the US, should you want such a position. But why would you? It is almost inevitable that within your first year you will be accused of racism, harassment, elitism, and insufficient support for Black/Trans/Asian/Immigrant/Some-other-category artists, besides having to struggle with declining visitation and revenue, plus increased moral scrutiny of the rich people who might bail you out, plus an overhanging cloud of worry that art museums are irrelevant anyway.

The "museum crisis" that has been going on for decades is only getting worse. As art critic Barry Schwabsky explains in The Nation, the root of the crisis is a decline in the importance of the aesthetic as an independent value. Art these days is less and less about form, and more and more about morality and politics. Not that there is anything new about art being political or ethical; there was a time when most elite art was made for churches and kings. But the art museum is a creation of the aesthetic era, and therefore is bound to decline as the rest of the world turns away from aesthetics. I was struck by this theory of the art museum's origins:

It’s noticeable that young people, including artists, bring different questions, different demands, to artworks than do many of their elders. The change is deeper than it may seem—perhaps a tectonic shift in art itself, which will mean rethinking the very idea of the museum. Jacques Rancière, in his 2011 book Aisthesis, speaks of how an “aesthetic regime of art” began to dominate in Europe in the late 18th century, succeeding earlier representational and ethical regimes of art and leading to the emergence of museums such as the Louvre. This aestheticization of art, he argued, was the result of the French Revolution: The king had been overthrown, and his works of art now belonged to the people by way of the state. But many of these works were essentially visual paeans to royalty, and more still were devotional works, testaments to the power of the church, which the revolutionaries were determined to suppress. How could these royalist and clerical images be considered glories of a free and secular nation?

The solution was radical: These objects made to honor king and church were recast, simply, as examples of sublime art—that is, of beautiful form and transcendent skill. Precisely for political reasons, an essentially aesthetic vision had to prevail. “Only one solution was available,” Rancière insisted, “to nullify the content of the paintings by installing them in art’s own space,” thereby “training a gaze detached from the meaning of the works.” In other words, through what later came to be known as formalism, any subject, even when the content of the work was one that could no longer be supported, could be admired for the sake of art. And therefore art comes from art: “Painters, from this point onward, imitate painting.”

I would add that class plays a big role here. Art museums were creations of the new upper class, where the rich bourgeoisie mingled with the remains of the aristocracy. Understanding art as aesthetics was one of the upper class's defining traits; art museums and concert halls were the temples where they worshipped their own aesthetic superiority. The collapse of these class assumptions is hitting art museums hard.

There are still millions of people, like me, who just really like art, and the social category of “artist” seems to be as fashionable as ever. Art museums will survive. But they will have to change, and it seems unlikely to me that they will retain their cultural importance.

Scapegoating Begins in Russia

Multiple western media outlets are confirming rumors that Sergey Beseda, the head of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch – Moscow's top spy – and his deputy Anatoly Bolyukh have been placed under house arrest. The official charge is corruption, of which they are surely guilty, but everyone assumes they are being made the fall guys for the failure of the invasion of Ukraine to go as planned. If they endorsed intelligence estimates that said Ukrainians would not resist and Kyiv could be taken in three days, they certainly deserve to lose their jobs. In their defense, they were probably telling Putin what he wanted to hear, but here we see the dangerous limits of yes-manning.

Strikes me as important that the army is not being blamed, at least not yet.

Archangel Michael

Commander of the Army of God, Patron of Kyiv. Above, in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Siennese School, 14th century.

From a book of hours, Flemish, 14th century 

Jaime Huguet, 1456

Lieven van Lathem, 1469

Raphael

Albrecht Durer

Guido Reni, 1635

Luca Giordano, 1660

St. Michael as the Archangel of the Apocalypse, one of the traditional Slavic icons; this one is 18th century.

Gustave Doré

By Emily Young,  part of a memorial to the victims of the 2005 bombings in London

Letters from Ex-Slaves

At the Washington Post, a collection of letters from ex-slaves to their former enslavers. Here are excerpts from one that was dictated by an ex-slave living in Ohio to his employer, to be sent to his former owner in Tennessee. It was later published in a local newspaper.

I want to know particularly what “the good chance” is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane, and Grundy, go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master.

Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.

Is Russia a Special Problem?

Western thinking about Russia has always fallen into two camps. One, which used to be led by George Kennan, holds that Russia is just a powerful nation like any other, looking out for its own interests, amenable to the usual diplomatic and economic leverage. This kind of thinking leads people like John Mearsheimer to argue that much of the blame for the Ukraine war lies with the west for pushing NATO expansion and threatening Russia in ways to which any nation would have to respond.

The other way of thinking holds that Russia is a special and strange place in ways that make conflict with the west inevitable. Historian Stephen Kotkin, author of a famous biography of Stalin, holds to this view, and he defended it in this interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker:

I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. 

This is, of course, one of the oldest debates, probably going back to discussions held around council fires about how to treat the tribe in the next valley. But anyway here is Kotkin's analysis of Russia:

Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place––a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.

Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. [1721, 1815, 1945] In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially. Russia has a spurt of economic growth, and it builds up its military, and then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The very attempt to solve the problem worsens the problem, and the gulf with the West widens. The West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.

The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.

And this, part of Kotkin's response to the question, "What is Putinism?"

You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners.

And so we think, but we don’t know, that he is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.

Strange Defeatism about Ukraine

To me one of the strangest things about the war in Ukraine has been the hopeless defeatism of many western "experts", which has been reflected in the media. From day one we have been told, over and over, that the Russians' overwhelming military advantage means they are bound to win in the end – "win" here meaning take Ukraine's cities and overthrow its government. Consider this, from the commanding general of the US Marine Corps:

If one were to run a virtual wargame knowing how Russian forces were postured and understanding their capabilities, the computer model would have said Russia would be victorious in a matter of 72 to 96 hours.

Here's one I just found on Twitter:

At some point, we will have to stop encouraging Ukraine to continue fighting a losing battle. . . . Putin will continue attacking until Ukraine ceases to exist.

Meanwhile, here is part of the Institute for the Study of War's situation update for today, March 11:

Russian ground forces attempting to encircle and take Kyiv began another pause to resupply and refit combat units on March 11 after failed attacks March 8-10. Russian forces also appear to be largely stalemated around Kharkiv. Russian advances from Crimea toward Mykolayiv and Zaporizhya and in the east around Donetsk and Luhansk made no progress in the last 24 hours, and Russian forces in the south face growing morale and supply issues. . . .  Uncoordinated and sporadic Russian offensive operations against major Ukrainian cities support the Ukrainian General Staff’s assessment that Russian forces face growing morale and supply issues and have lost the initiative. 

The Kremlin likely seeks to increase its combat power by drawing Belarus into the war and leveraging Syrian proxies, in addition to ongoing efforts to directly replace Russian combat losses through individual conscripts that are unlikely to be well-enough trained or motivated to generate effective new combat power. Putin is reportedly conducting an internal purge of general offers and intelligence personnel and recalibrating Russia’s war effort to sustain combat operations far longer than the Kremlin initially planned. Russia likely requires a new wave of combat-effective reservists or recruits in a short period of time to achieve its objectives in Ukraine but is unlikely to be able to generate such a wave. 

I am not saying Ukraine is winning; as I have said repeatedly, I cannot tell who is winning, because I see very mixed signals. But anyone who thinks the Russians are "overwhelming" Ukraine is not paying attention. I don't even understand where this notion came from that Russia's forces have an overwhelming advantage. Sure, Russia has a much bigger army, but if you just count the forces in Ukraine, Ukraine has more troops on the battlefield. Ukraine has also been at war continuously since 2014, and they require all the conscripts that pass through their army to spend some time on the front lines. A higher percentage of Ukrainian troops had seen combat when the invasion started. Manning a trench and dodging the occasional mortar round is not like repelling an assault by a battalion of T-90 tanks, but in war even a little experience under fire gives veterans an advantage. It is certainly true that the Russian army in Ukraine has more tanks, but especially in the north they are not proving to be decisive. The Ukrainians have destroyed at least 200 of the 1200 or so tanks in the invading force. The Russians have a lot more aircraft, but they have been very reluctant to use them.

The one thing Russia clearly has more of is artillery, and they may end up pounding many Ukrainian cities to rubble. But that won't win the war.

The event that made me think this would be no easy victory for Russia was the failure of their airborne assault on Kyiv on the first night of the war. Their "elite" airborne troops landed as planned at Hostomel airport, but the Ukrainians drove them off. This would, I decided then, be no US-invasion-of-Panama cakewalk.

So why the relentless negativity? George Orwell once wrote that during World War II Britain's educated elite was always more defeatist than the masses; some of the elite, he said, went on being defeatist long after the war had obviously been won. He ascribed some of this to imagination. If you knew enough to understand what would be involved in defeating the Nazis, and could imagine what it would be like to live through that, it might just be easier to anticipate a swift defeat.

I wonder if this is at play in western reactions to the war in Ukraine. A swift Russian victory would have avoided the horror of the war we see unfolding before us: the thousands dead, the cities destroyed, the world economy teetering, the looming threat of escalation. The longer the fighting goes on, the greater the chance that Ukraine will emerge as an independent nation; but the longer the fighting goes on, the more will be lost, and the greater the chance that this will spiral into a European conflagration.

Links 11 March 2022

Finding the Endurance: NY Times, CNN, BBC, great video at YouTube.

New Pictish symbol stone discovered in Aberlemno, Scotland.

Fascinating tomb of a mummified freedman in Pompeii.

Excellent 1922 prediction of the world 100 years in the future, by W. L. George.

Curator's Corner with the Bush Barrow Chieftain, "Stonehenge's Richest Man," 8-minute video. 

As if deer weren't enough of a menace, now they're infected with Covid-19, serving as a reservoir and developing new mutations.

Creeks, which developers used to consider nuisances and put underground whenever possible, are now seen as key amenities that can raise the price of nearby real estate. Better check the 500-year flood line before you buy, though. (NY Times)

Japanese officials confirm that Sessho-sekithe, a stone said to contain the spirit of a deadly nine-tailed fox demon sent to kill Emperor Toba, has split in half, potentially releasing the demon from its 899-year confinement.

Review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman, which looks at the cultural developments that take place in obscure intellectual circles before revolutionary change burst on the world. In Beckerman's view the Arab Spring failed because not enough of this quiet foundation-laying had taken place.

Long, interesting review of a new biography of John von Neumann, towering genius and, some say, moral monster.

Meta-study of walking and mortality finds "Taking more steps per day was associated with a progressively lower risk of all-cause mortality, up to a level that varied by age." For older people like most of us at this blog that threshold was 6,000 to 8,000 steps per day.

Some winners of the Sony World Photography Awards.

Drone video of Ukrainian artillery ambush of Russian armored column NE of Kyiv. Authenticated by a bunch of Osint experts.

More Ukraine links: Institute for the Study of War, Military Land, Military Times, Google Map, Nathan Ruser's maps, constantly updated list of photo-verified equipment losses during the campaign.

The Bad Old Days

Many images circulating of Russian vehicles in Ukraine flying Soviet flags.

A Few Notes on the War in Ukraine

Ukrainian soldiers are great diggers. People have observed that the front line between government-held territory and that of Russian-allied separatists looks like a trench zone from World War I. Glimpses I have seen of positions from this war also feature lots of deep digging. Russian attempts to overrun these positions with armored assaults have mostly failed, presumably because the defenders are well-equipped with modern anti-tank weapons. But then anyone who ever played an SPI board game could have told them that you can't take entrenchments with armor.

Terrain matters in war, which is why the Russians are doing much better in the south than the north. Northern Ukraine is forested and marshy, and in the spring vehicles are limited to improved roads. Since Russian attacks can't break through Ukrainian positions, they pile up into 40-mile traffic jams. Their supply columns have to move through dense forest perfect for ambush. In the south the country is drier and more open, and the Russians have been able to bypass entrenched positions with rapid armored movements. Ukrainians seem less bold under the open sky, even though Russia has not yet made much use of its air force.

It remains very hard to get a sense of how the war is going. The Russians have committed the force they assembled for this war and have no more operational reserves, but have not won. Does that mean they are on the ropes? Or just that they will need time to bring up more forces? Have they been stopped militarily, or are they just out of gas? They have brought in mercenaries from the Wagner Group and are seeking recruits in Syria; does that mean they are desperate for troops, or just that they want to limit Russian losses for domestic political reasons? How bad a sign is it that Ukraine has taken many prisoners, they claim more than 2,000? I mean, the Germans took a lot of Russian prisoners, too. The Russians have lost at least 150 tanks and 300 other armored vehicles; this is a small part of their overall armory, but given what we have learned about shoddy maintenance etc. how many of their other tanks are really ready to fight? A military train was spotted headed for Belarus with a cargo of civilian trucks, presumably because they are running out of military trucks. Is that desperation? People on Twitter are laughing about it, but I suspect they would feel very differently if the Ukrainians were pressing civilian trucks into battlefield use.

Ukraine has been very successful in exposing Russian problems while hiding their own, so we have no sense of how close Ukrainian forces who have been fighting for two weeks might be to cracking. There are hints that they are holding back substantial reserves (for example, none of the tanks their reserve regiments use have yet showed up in lists of destroyed equipment). But maybe that is another clever ruse. Some of the things they have not done worry me. For example, they have not sunk any of the Russian ships floating within missile range of Odessa. In fact the only successful missile strike I know of is one on a fuel depot in Belarus. Given that they are supposed to have hundreds of missiles, what's the deal? Why are they yelling so loudly for a no-fly zone when so far as I can tell the Russian air force is barely active? Seems like a fearful thing to be doing.

One group that seems to have a lot of confidence in Ukraine is the Pentagon. Their spokesmen are verging on gleeful, perhaps remembering Napoleon's famous adage, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." You have to think that NATO would not have given effectively their entire ready store of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine if they expected Ukraine would be quickly overrun. They see a chance to wreck the Russian army and are seizing it.

Ukrainian resolve has been amazing, and there seems to be no way the Russians could conquer and rule this country. Various talking heads have said, "This will be a 15-year war." I doubt it; I think some kind of negotiated settlement will have to be reached. The only question is who will have the upper hand on the battlefield and therefore the upper hand in negotiations. Right now both sides are talking tough, which means the fighting will go on.

Russia is in a terrible place, politically, morally, economically, and that is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Meanwhile in the West, a big group of conservative and moderate commentators are welcoming the war. They are all saying some version of, "Now here is a real moral crisis, so shut up about micro-aggressions and trans rights and let's focus on defending freedom against tyranny." This is the fight they want. This is also the fight that thousands of ex-soldiers who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan want, and they are on their way to Ukraine to put their killing skills to use in a cause they can believe in.

The risk that the war will spread is real. NATO is giving Ukraine all kinds of support, including near real-time intelligence from AWACS planes flying just over Ukraine's borders. According to a story I read yesterday, 16,000 westerners have volunteered to fight in Ukraine, and the first are already in the trenches. A lot of Russians are being killed with NATO weapons flooding over the border, and the simplest way to reduce that flow would be to bomb the border crossings. In a deeper sense I feel the worry that Yuval Levin expressed in the video I linked to yesterday, that this is the dawn of a new era of war. Between the weapons, the blown-up buildings, the lost and maimed lives, and the financial wreckage, it has surely cost the world hundreds of billions already, and we may just be getting started. People say "Putin is finished," but it looks to me like millions of Z-wearing neo-fascists are loving this fight. The world is going to be a poorer, darker place, perhaps for decades.

"Cultish" and Me

Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism (2021) is a very interesting book by linguist Amanda Montell, bringing out the ways every sort of "cult" from Heaven's Gate to Amway uses language to create a separate world for its followers. Listen to a conversation between two high-ranking Scientologists, she says, and you will not have a clue what they are talking about. The special cult language bonds members together, creates a sense of being special insiders, and divides them from the rest of humanity.

It's a good book, a bit too chatty for me, but that's probably why I will never write a best seller. If you're interested in the topic, read it. I enjoyed it, and the topic is fascinating.

I wanted to write about my own very personal reaction. Montell's father was raised in a cult, and she describes herself as someone with a special sensitivity to anything that smacks of cultish language. I feel the same way.

Whenever I hear words used to divide us from them, signal membership in a group, or create any kind of unthinking emotional response, an alarm goes off in my head. I despise political slogans of every sort. I can't hear anyone say "family values" or "taxation is theft" or "diversity is strength" or "black lives matter" without cringing. Not that I disagree with all of these slogans; some strike me as mostly true. I just can't take seriously any idea that can be expressed in three words.

I used to go to demonstrations once every year or two, but I never liked them. I hate to hear slogans chanted, because to me they all sound like cultish mantras rather than actual thoughts. The speakers mostly mouthed strings of buzz worlds they knew would fit into certain emotional receptors in their audiences. People around me cheered, but I always thought, "That was a weak argument and you mischaracterized what your opponents actually believe." To me the world is too complex to express in all the words ever spoken, let alone by your slogan.  If you think allegiance to your slogan says something about people, I think you know nothing about either slogans or people.

Consider "diversity." I believe very strongly in diversity; my political ideal is what John Dewey called "pluralism." Let 10,000 flowers bloom. But I cringe almost every time I hear the word used in our discourse, because they people who use it don't seem to believe in it at all; in fact they all seem to be using it to attack those who disagree with them, thereby denying any kind of meaningful diversity. What they mean is, "I am a not-racist, non-homophobe etc. and therefore good, and you are not and therefore bad." Which makes my stomach turn over. And I feel this way about every slogan, every politically charged word.

Freedom? What sort of freedom? For whom, to do what?

Revolution? Against what? For what?

What, exactly, is a "community"?

And for me this goes far beyond just politics. There are exercise groups where people work out while shouting affirmations. I am about as likely to do that as I am to walk on the moon. 

I have friends who enjoy church services despite their agnosticism, but I can't take it. My mind is too taken up with quibbling about the details of what is being said or implied to ever relax.

I used to be arrogant about this and felt superior to the world. I don't any more. Instead I worry that as I age I will grow increasingly lonely. I do not feel like I belong to anything, have ever belonged to anything, and I worry that the consequences of this will get ever more dire after I retire and my children move on. I suspect this is largely because I am so allergic to the things that create belonging.

As Amanda Montell shows, cultish words and ritual actions are not tangential to belonging, they are its heart. These things are what creates group feeling, and that sort of group feeling has always been central to human life. Yet I have hardly experienced it at all.

Amanda Montel believes that cults are dangerous and bad, and that people should resist being drawn into them. Ok, fine, Jonestown was a disaster. But my reading of history is that if you go far enough back, everybody lived in a cult, a small community with its own language, its own rituals, a deep suspicion of outsiders, and shunning of people who questioned the agreed rules. We evolved in that sort of world. 

Our world is too big and diverse for us to be able to feel anything in common with the people of our town, let alone our nation. So those who crave belonging throw themselves into various groups. We have a million options: churches, exercise clubs, yoga studios, fandoms, political movements. I often hear people ask, "How could anyone believe that?" I always think, they are looking for a home, and this belief provides one, and you almost certainly hold to unquestioned beliefs of your own because you also want a home.

Without that sort of belonging, does anyone really have a home? Do I?

Yuval Levin on the Impact of the Ukraine War

Fascinating 50-minute interview with historian/pundit Yuval Levin on the broader impact of the Ukraine war, which he fears will mean the return to an "era of war."

Mary Oliver, "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac"

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it,
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened
Or not.
I am speaking form the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Volodymyr Zelensky, or, Heroes and Statues

Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a good person? 

Who knows! All I know about him is that he used to be a comic actor and then ran for president on an anti-corruption platform; until a month ago he was a very controversial figure in Ukraine with a lot of opponents. Now he is a war hero.

If Ukraine survives this war, will he deserve a statue?

I was struck by this thought yesterday, reading yet another adulatory piece about his great leadership. This, I thought, is why people put up statues.

Phil Sheridan and the Complexity of Historical Judgment

Consider the career of general Phil Sheridan (1831-1888) and ask yourself, was he a good man, or a bad one?

A career US Army officer, he spent most of the 1850s in the Northwest, leading topographic surveys and defending settlers against Indian attacks. Much of his job involved negotiating with Indian leaders, and he came to like them. For a while he lived with an Indian mistress, the daughter of a chief. So far as I can tell he tried to be fair, but after all it was his job to restrict Native Nations to reservations to make room for white settlers, and he did it.

When the Civil War broke out he rose rapidly from 1st Lieutenant to Brigadier General, commanding troops in a long list of battles. Grant, a pretty good judge in these matters, once called him the best battlefield commander in the world. When Grant was summoned east to take charge of the Union army in Virginia he brought one subordinate with him: Sheridan. Sheridan became commander of the Union cavalry corps but his role grew until by the end of the war he was Grant's all around right-hand man and the driving force of the pursuit that ran Lee's army to ground at Appomattox. 

Sheridan was one of the hard men of Grant's school, who thought the way to win the war was to fight harder, kill more Confederates, and destroy more of their property. In the Fall of 1864 Sheridan led an expedition into the Shenandoah Valley, which was the main source of food for Confederate troops in Virginia. After defeating Confederate forces in two battles he instructed his men to wreck the valley so thoroughly that a crow flying across would have to carry his own food. 

After Appomattox Sheridan was sent to Texas, because Confederate troops there were slow to surrender, and because a Civil War in Mexico threatened to spill over the border. Benito Juarez was leading Mexican opposition to a French effort to install Archduke Maximilian of Austria as ruler, backed by 40,000 French troops; Sheridan was supposed to neutral but later said that he found covert ways of supplying Juarez's men with weapons and ammunition.

During the first years of Reconstruction Sheridan was the military governor of Texas and Louisiana, and he was one of the hardest fighters against neo-Confederate resurgence. Here's a snippet of his wikipedia bio:

On July 30, 1866, while Sheridan was in Texas, a white mob broke up the state constitutional convention in New Orleans. Thirty-four blacks were killed. Shortly after Sheridan returned, he wired Grant, "The more information I obtain of the affair of the 30th in this city the more revolting it becomes. It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre." . . . In March 1867, with Reconstruction barely started, Sheridan was appointed military governor. Sheridan severely limited voter registration for former Confederates and ruled that only registered voters (including black men) were eligible to serve on juries. After an inquiry into the deadly New Orleans riot of 1866 implicated numerous local officials; Sheridan dismissed the mayor of New Orleans, the Louisiana attorney general, and a district judge. He later removed Louisiana Governor James M. Wells, accusing him of being "a political trickster and a dishonest man". He also dismissed Texas Governor James W. Throckmorton, a former Confederate, for being an "impediment to the reconstruction of the State", replacing him with the Republican who had lost to him in the previous election. . . . If Sheridan was unpopular in Texas, neither did he have much appreciation for the Lone Star State. In 1866 his quip was widely reported: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell."

Sheridan's efforts to reconstruct the South got him fired by Andrew Johnson, so in 1867 Sheridan was sent north to take command of the army fighting Indians on the plains. Realizing that he did not have enough men to defend all the points he was supposed to be defending, he went over to offense:

In the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 he attacked the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, taking their supplies and livestock and killing those who resisted, driving the rest back into their reservations.

The massacre of peaceful Cheyenne known as the "Battle of Washita River" was part of this campaign. Sheridan was in overall command of the Department of Missouri for the next decade, presiding over the wars that destroyed the Cheyenne and Lakota nations. 

The world's first National Park, established at Yellowstone in 1872, was part of Sheridan's military territory, and he fell in love with the place. In 1881 he wrote a formal report arguing that the park needed more funding for development (things like boardwalks so people could see the hot springs without damaging them) and a company of cavalry to prevent wanton destruction by loggers, hunters, and trophy takers. The report was ignored. Feeling that his military position prevented him from going directly to the press, he enlisted master publicist Buffalo Bill Cody to draw public attention to the cause. (Love it that this Washington Post article identifies Cody as one of the first "reality stars.")  Sheridan also brought President Chester Arthur to Yellowstone on a carefully managed trip; no reporters were allowed, but Sheridan's staff wrote up daily press bulletins. In the end Sheridan managed to secure the funding he wanted, and when Washington refused to authorize cavalry patrols he just ignored them and sent men to the park anyway. 

To my mind Sheridan's career is a good example of what we can expect to see in any major figure of the nineteenth century. He fought for some things I can believe in – Union, abolition, Reconstruction – and he fought hard and well for them. He also reveled in battle to an alarming degree, and ruthlessly sacked officers he thought were too soft, too much concerned about the lives or comfort of their men. He did what he could to promote Reconstruction, including the rights of black men to vote, hold office, and serve on juries. He was probably a racist in the way of most men of his time, but on the questions that mattered he was for equality. Against orders, he helped Mexico fight off foreign domination. He then turned his military talents to the Indian wars, found the weakness of the plains tribes and brought them to heel. One of his last public acts was to insure the future of Yellowstone National Park.

What can we say about him, except that he was soldier of another time?

Links 4 March 2022

A new search engine that focuses on text-based sites and brings up a lot of older material hard to find via Google: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Auctions of leases for wind farm sites in the ocean off New York and New Jersey has raised $4 billion for the US government; power companies expect to make a lot of money from offshore wind. (NY Times; Interior Department announcement)

This week's master criminals thought they could shut down the US power grid by shooting at transmission lines with rifles, thereby triggering chaos and civil war. 

In the US, men are lagging far behind women in attending and completing college. But that only applies to straight men: "About 52 percent of gay men age 25 or older in the United States have a bachelor’s degree. For context, about 36 percent of U.S. adults 25 or older have a bachelor’s; this ranks the United States ninth in the world in college completion. If America’s gay men, however, formed their own country, it would be the world’s most highly educated by far." (Washington Post)

Kenya's ambassador to the UN explains why his country, born from the "embers of empire," opposes Russia's attempt to rejoin people by force. (2:20 video)

Microsoft and other tech companies are throwing themselves into preventing Russian cyberattacks. (NY Times)

Thomas Edsall looks into the partisan affiliations of Asian Americans. On the whole they are strongly liberal, but many are worried about crime and education. Some political scientists are voicing the worry I expressed recently, that violent crime and progressive educational policies will drive many to the Republicans. (NY Times)

Warfare and state power: a new article, which I can't read because of paywalls, says that over the period 1789-2018 there is a strong correlation between the strength of states ("state capacity") and warfare. It seems clear to me that it was warfare that drove the rise of strong states, taxation, etc.

New Roman mosaics found in London.

Wall Street Journal piece mulling over possible outcomes to the Ukraine war. I was able to access the article from this Tweet.

Twitter thread on Russian truck tires in Ukraine, an interesting look at what military logistics really requires. Short summary is that all the photos we have seen of Russian vehicles with blown tires implies they weren't doing the required upkeep.

In Arizona, dozens of voting "reform" bills have been introduced, including one that would require hand-marked paper ballots counted by hand. Most will surely fail, but the issue won't die. I find it interesting that many Republican-sponsored bills take aim at voting by mail, which has been associated mainly with older voters who lean conservative.

Institute for the Study of War summary of the Ukraine situation as of yesterday.

Art by Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko, very much rooted in tradition, some of which has been destroyed in the war.

9,000-Year-Old Ritual Site Found in Jordan

A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists have been investigating the features known as "desert kites," which are essentially converging pairs of stone walls. Some lead to a walled enclosure, but some just come to a point. The reigning theory is that these are traps used in hunting wild gazelles. Not everyone agrees with this, because some are also closed off with walls on what should be the open end, and some seem the wrong size and shape for that purpose. Plus none of the walls are tall enough to actually enclose a gazelle. But anyway it's the best theory. These archaeologists had been trying to date these features, and using radiocarbon and OSL dating they found that some are 9,000 years old. Potsherds of this period have also been found in the area.

Anyway, while they were carrying out these studies in a place called Jibal al-Khashabiyeh they stumbled across what they are calling a "ritual complex." The complex includes round, semi-subterranean structures, stone stelae, ritual deposits, and even what they say is a small stone model of a desert kite.

The installation was constituted of two standing steles with anthropomorphic representations. The tallest of the two (ca. 1,12 m high) also bears a depiction of a "Desert kite" intermingled with the human figure. The second standing stone (ca. 70 cm high) exhibits a human figure with finely carved details. Behind the two standing stones, a structured deposit was unearthed. It was composed of nearly 150 marine fossils, many of them were carefully arranged, set vertically and following a specific orientation, along with a variety of stones of natural unusual shape, as well as a number of uncommon worked artefacts, including animal figurines and exceptional worked flint objects. The various finds, in addition to a ritual altar stone associated to a hearth, were organized within a reduced model of desert kite, built with stones in the middle of the campsite. This is the only architectural model of its kind known to date worldwide in a Neolithic context.

Charming.

The deposit of fossil sea shells is particularly fascinating. Because so far as the excavators can tell, these rituals were tied to hunting using the desert kites:

The ritual nature of the deposit is compelling including an unexpected use of natural marine fossils in the symbolic and spiritual realm through the Neolithic. The altar and associated hearth suggest that some kind of sacrificial offerings must have been involved in the ritual process. The reminiscence of symbolism referring to the “Desert kites”, evidenced by the depiction on one of the steles and even more in the three dimensional architectural model at the core of the installation indicates that mass hunting using the “Desert kites” was at the root of the ritual activities involved. The sacral symbolism and ritual performance evidenced were most likely devoted to invoke the supranatural forces for successful hunts and abundance of preys to capture. In this respect, the discovered installation is not only unique due to its exceptional state of preservation, but also due to the fact that it sheds an entire new light on the symbolism, artistic expression as well as spiritual culture of these hitherto unknown Neolithic populations specialized in mass hunting of gazelles using the “Desert kites”.

A lot of paganism can be described as the spiritual side of whatever it was people did for a living: farming, hunting, fishing. I suspect one reason that religion is fading in the modern world is that it no longer has this connection.

Lotte Reiniger, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed"

Stills from a silent film of 1926