The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.
Add to this the repeated tactical blundering visible on videos even to amateurs: vehicles bunched up on roads, no infantry covering the flanks, no closely coordinated artillery fire, no overhead support from helicopters, and panicky reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of vehicles destroyed to those captured or abandoned bespeaks an army that is unwilling to fight. Russia’s inability to concentrate its forces on one or two axes of attack, or to take a major city, is striking. So, too, are its massive problems in logistics and maintenance, carefully analyzed by technically qualified observers.
Yesterday I read the news on the internet, on a Ted Goia email, that Jessica Williams, the extremely talented jazz pianist, had passed away. The news has been slow coming but I'll link to several sites that have examples of her work or interviews with her. We are fortunate in that she is very well represented via her broad discography. Years ago when I attempted to learn about her talents I read that she actually grew up in Baltimore and attended Peabody Prep which stunned me as I had never heard her name mentioned here in Baltimore. Part of that reason is that she left for Philadelphia nd then San Francisco in the mid-70's. That still meant I could have run into her when I was an undergraduate at Hopkins and going to the Ballroom. From the an announcement at KNKX:
Two-time Grammy nominee Jessica Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and classically trained at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. In her teens, Williams moved to Philadelphia and began playing with drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Relocating to San Francisco in 1977, Williams became the house pianist at the famous Keystone Korner jazz club. She also worked with Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon, Tony Williams, Stan Getz, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Charlie Rouse, John Abercrombie, Charlie Haden, Leroy Vinnegar, and others.
Williams received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Grant for composing, the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was an honored guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She also wrote musical scores for PBS and HBO programs.
Williams recorded more than 40 albums over her career, eight of them on the Seattle-based Origin Records label.
Celebrated for her absolute control of the keyboard, her wit, and her solid sense of swing, the influence of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was evident in many of Williams' performances and recordings.
Williams settled in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and then later in Yakima, Washington. She created a her own record label and music publishing company in an effort to retain control of her creative output.
Severe spinal problems sent Williams through major surgery in 2012. The medical procedures and recovery were lengthy, complicated and expensive; she ended up having to sell her beloved Yamaha piano.
A cancer diagnosis came in 2017. Williams tried to stay positive and active, posting on her website, "I have decided that the best thing I can do for myself is to do what I do, and be who I am. I love my music, and I will soon release new music and begin performing again. There are many things to do, and I will start slow, but speed alone is not music — soul and passion are. I am not done."
Jessica Williams' music will be featured on Jim Wilke's Jazz Northwest program on KNKX this Sunday, March 20, at 2 p.m.
She had recently moved to the Bay Area, and was all but unknown even among jazz insiders—but not for long. She would occasionally play piano at the Keystone Korner during the break between the headline acts, and her powerful command of the keyboard was immediately apparent to listeners. This wasn’t tinkly intermission piano, but something quite extraordinary.
You could hear the magic in her playing. Her tone control and ease of execution were the first things that hit you. But Williams also had a remarkable ability to enter into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow state’—a openness to the possibilities of the immediate moment that is the ideal mindset for jazz improvisation.
I’d always believed that music was an ecstatic vocation, and here was someone demonstrating it right before my eyes. It might just be an intermission between sets, but Jessica had blocked out all the noise and conversation, and was flying off into some higher sphere of music-driven nirvana.
I became an ardent fan, and bought copies of the few indie albums featuring Williams that were now showing up in record stores. I had heard of her quirks and eccentricities—and even just seeing her in live performance I could tell that Jessica Williams would not be a typical teacher. But that didn’t deter me. Her approach to the keyboard—with that singing tone, harmonic richness, and melodic freedom—was very closely aligned with what I was pursuing in my own music.
I tracked her down at gigs, and we eventually had several conversations. Her first reaction was that she had no idea how to teach what she did. Her music just happened. She didn’t have a method to share.
My glib response was: “No worries. We will do stop-and-cop.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ll watch you play the piano. And at certain junctures, I will ask you to stop. And I’ll cop what you just did. That’s the stop-and-cop method—and it always works.”
Jessica eventually agreed to be my teacher—but now things really got strange. She set certain conditions: (1) I had to provide the piano and a place for the lesson, (2) I had to drive her to and from the lesson, and (3) the lesson had to be in the middle of the night. 3 AM was the best time for her.
Yes, jazz education was a little different back then. The students at Berklee have no idea.
I’m married to a great guy named Atherton and I finally quit playing jazz and married him after knowing him for 34 years. I did not take my site down- it was stolen from me 5 years ago during the cyber war between Trump and Truth began.I lost $200,000 and I had a nervous breakdown.But I’m fine now.I’m a good cook and my husband is a health care provider.He watches over me. He’s my fourth and final marriage!As for jazz, I made some really beautiful music with the best musicians in the world and I got to live in Italy and France and Denmark. I’ve been to Tokyo and I played in South Korea. I quit smoking and drinking 27 years ago.I’m not a jazz musician anymore but I love good music.Now is my time to enjoy myself!All light and love to you !Jessica Jennifer Williams pianist and composer.
But I really use Jessica Jennifer Williams as a work and medical name but everyone else calls me Angie or Angela Emily Atherton because that’s my chosen aka and my husband is named Atherton and so after all these years my life is safe and good. I went through a lot of operations and then I was attacked viciously by jazz musicians and critics. The audience was cool but a lot of people hated on me with their prejudices. A white trans girl playing with Hutch or Getz or Dexter Gordon or Philly Joe Jones or Pharoah. And many more. It’s hell for trans people and for women. Enjoy the music and know that you are still just one person among billions who loved me and it’s still me. I’m changing every day and its been my entire life and I love it.
But what if a society being interrogated had no written words—and their mode of expression was itself a kind of elaborate lock? So it is with the Inca and their endlessly enigmatic counting tool, the quipu. The device comprises a series of colored cords hanging from a topmost strand. Tied into the pendant cords are a variety of knots that, depending on their type and position, encode various pieces of information, including values from a base-ten numbering scheme. Perhaps the mightiest empire of the New World, located in what is now Peru, substituted talking knots for an alphabet.
“If we want to understand the Inca from their own point of view, the only sources available to us—i.e., the only ‘primary sources’—are the quipus,” writes anthropologist Gary Urton. A Harvard professor of pre-Columbian studies, Urton received $4,750 from NEH in 1993 to study the world’s largest archives of both quipu samples and Spanish documentation from the New World. Two grants of $30,000 each followed, which helped support the research that has made him an authority on the mysterious objects and their function. “I am studying the quipus,” he said, “in an effort to recuperate the Inca viewpoint on their world.”
That viewpoint was imperiled following the arrival of Spanish colonizers, led by Francisco Pizarro in 1526. The Inca were conquered, subjugated, and often enslaved. Wave after wave of European diseases killed off many of those who weren’t slain in battle. Only centuries later did we gain an appreciation of the people extinguished by the conquistadors’ swords. The site of Machu Pichu, located in the Inca heartland of Peru, is today one of the most visited attractions in South America, and examples of the sophisticated culture’s textile and ceramic output fill museums.
Quipus tell a story that is no less important: They were critical instruments of factotums and bureaucrats, an imperial language of record-keeping that helped tally censuses and tribute payments from far-flung communities to the capital city of Cuzco. Urton and others believe that some could contain even more complex ciphers, such as narrative histories or the names of deities. Unfortunately, their messages have frustrated modern interpreters. Though the Spanish transcribed a small number of quipu readings, none of them match the roughly 870 samples that still survive. The search goes on for the “Rosetta quipu,” as Urton puts it. If one could be found, it would represent more than an anthropological coup—it would forever unfasten the knot of a language lost to time.
For decades now, Vladimir Putin has slowly, carefully, and stealthily curated online and offline networks of influence. These efforts have borne lucrative fruit, helping Russia become far more influential than a country so corrupt and institutionally fragile had any right to be. The Kremlin and its proxies had economic holdings across Europe and Africa that would shame some of the smaller 18th-century empires. It had a vast network of useful idiots that it helped get elected and could count on for support, and it controlled much of the day-to-day narrative in multiple countries through online disinformation. And many people had no idea.
While a few big events like the US’s 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.
All that changed the moment Russian boots touched Ukrainian soil. Almost overnight, the Western world became overwhelmingly aware of the Kremlin’s activities in these fields, shattering the illusions that allowed Putin’s alternative, Kremlin-controlled information ecosystem to exist outside its borders. As a result, the sophisticated disinformation machinery Putin spent decades cultivating collapsed within days.
Russia’s network of influence was as complex as it was sprawling. The Kremlin has spent millions in terms of dollars and hours in Europe alone, nurturing and fostering the populist right (Italy, Hungary, Slovenia), the far right (Austria, France, Slovakia), and even the far left (Cyprus, Greece, Germany). For years, elected politicians in these and other countries have been standing up for Russia’s interests and defending Russia’s transgressions, often peddling Putin’s narratives in the process. Meanwhile, on televisions, computers, and mobile screens across the globe, Kremlin-run media such as RT, Sputnik and a host of aligned blogs and “news” websites helped spread an alternative view of the real world. Though often marginal in terms of reach in and of themselves (with some notable exceptions, such as Sputnik Mundo), they performed a key role in spreading disinformation to audiences in and outside of Russia.
But the digital realm is where Russia found the most success in opening new fronts in its disinformation war. Social media, quasi-legitimate blogs, and bots reached ordinary people en masse all the time. With skill and care, Russian operatives tested and retested how best to polarize audiences. Using different platforms, content, and messaging, they built up a profile of users for their targeting purposes and then reflected back to them a picture of the world that would make them angry, frightened, and despairing—a picture that only exists online. For evidence of this, look no further than recent discourse in the West, where the Kremlin has been amplifying everything from climate denialism to the anti-vaxx movement to QAnon. All these things already existed but were the preserve of conspiracy theorists, quacks, and pranksters—now millions believe, in the face of reality, that climate change was made up by Green extremists, that “they” (whether it be Bill Gates, George Soros, or the World Economic Forum) are using vaccines to microchip people, that there's a satanic cabal of baby-eaters in Washington, or all of the above.
Prominent social media users and conservative voices have amplified a baseless theory promoted by Russian state media accusing the United States of funding biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.
There are biological laboratories inside Ukraine, and since 2005, the United States has provided backing to a number of institutions to prevent the production of biological weapons. But Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and others have misleadingly cited remarks from American officials as proof that the labs are producing or conducting research on biological weapons.
“Out of nowhere, the Biden official in charge of Ukraine confirmed the story,” Mr. Carlson said on his program Thursday night. “Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state, casually mentioned in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that actually, yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine.”
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, characterized Ms. Nuland’s remarks as a “serious admission.” Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president, tweeted that her comments propelled the claim from “conspiracy theory to fact.”
Mr. Carlson also pointed to an interview with Robert Pope, the director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which helps countries in the former Soviet Union secure or eliminate nuclear and chemical weapons.
“As Pope put it, scientists are scientists, they don’t want to destroy all the bioweapons,” Mr. Carlson continued in his segment. “Instead, they’re using them to conduct new bioweapons research — that’s what he said.”
Mr. Carlson mischaracterized those remarks from Ms. Nuland and Mr. Pope.
In congressional testimony this week, Ms. Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was asked by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, whether Ukraine has chemical or biological weapons.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of,” she responded. “So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”
If there were a biological or chemical weapon attack inside Ukraine, Mr. Rubio asked, would there be any doubt that Russia was behind it?
“There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame the other guy what they’re planning to do themselves,” Ms. Nuland responded.
The State Department said Ms. Nuland was referring to Ukrainian diagnostic and biodefense laboratories during her testimony, which are different from biological weapons facilities. Rather, these biodefense laboratories counter biological threats throughout the country, the department said.
Mr. Rubio made the same clarification in another congressional hearing on Thursday, noting that “there’s a difference between a bioweapons facility and one that’s doing research.”
In referring to Mr. Pope on Thursday, Mr. Carlson was distorting a February interview Mr. Pope gave to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization and publication.
Mr. Pope had warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may damage laboratories in the country that conduct research and disease surveillance and are supported by the United States. He noted that some of the facilities may contain pathogens once used for Soviet-era bioweapons programs, but he emphasized that the Ukrainian labs currently did not have the ability to manufacture bioweapons.
“There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Mr. Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”In a March interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s concerns about the laboratories falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specifically about the Pentagon’s support of 14 veterinary laboratories that provide Ukraine with sampling and diagnostic abilities to detect infectious diseases.In a March interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s concerns about the laboratories falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specifically about the Pentagon’s support of 14 veterinary laboratories that provide Ukraine with sampling and diagnostic abilities to detect infectious diseases.
In an age of eroding privacy, many of us may wonder why we are so willing to share our most private details with the rest of the world. The common wisdom is that Silicon Valley taught us how to promote ourselves and taught us to eschew privacy. After all, we often blame social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for making us into a nation of self-revealing narcissists. But while social media facilitates this behavior, it is not solely responsible for it. Silicon Valley is the culmination, but not the origin of our obsession with self-presentation.
To understand how the national preoccupation with self-presentation took root, one needs to go back two centuries. For men and woman living in the 18th and 19th centuries, our cavalier exhibitionism would have felt foreign. Most believed that it was pointless and wrong to be proud of one’s achievements or possessions, since the grave would, sooner rather than later, steal those things back from you. Connecticut preacher Solomon Williams explained this to his congregation in 1752: “Our Days on Earth are as a Shadow … it is a vain Life. A Shadow is a thin airy Image, which has no Substance in it; … It flies from you, and runs away as fast as you pursue it.” Because life was itself vain, colonial preachers counseled humility. As Williams put it, “we should live in an humble sense of our meanness …” In today’s world, however, such advice seems out of tempo with the times.
The shift in disposition from William’s day to our own is the result of two hundred years of technological change and capitalist growth. The development of the postal service and low postage rates in the 19th century encouraged letter writing and taught Americans to talk about themselves in ways they had previously resisted. As a letter writing manual of the time gently advised: “The friendly letter is the very place for egotism.” The invention of photography in 1839 also served to awaken people’s sense of self as well as the nascent desire to express that self. For colonial Americans, a painted portrait was something only the affluent could afford. But by the late 19th century, a small photograph cost only 25 cents, and as a result, Americans of all races and classes were flocking to photography studios to have their picture taken. Finally, mirrors, which had been scarce in colonial times, became ubiquitous in middle-class households by the late 19th century, further amplifying Americans’ growing sense of self and how that self might appear to others.
These technologies did not immediately or completely banish older worries about vanity and the transience of life. Indeed, many hoped these new tools might be morally improving. For instance, early commentators on photography believed the camera would eliminate vanity, for unlike portrait painters, who might flatter their subjects, the camera was more honest, and showed all of one’s flaws. Some also patronized photography studios precisely because they realized life was short. Grieving families frequently had photographs taken of their recently deceased kin, so much so that historians estimate that in the 1840s and 1850s there were more photos of dead children than living ones. And many photographers capitalized on this belief, urging their customers to “Secure the shadow, while the substance yet remains …”
Yet while Victorians carried these older notions of vanity in their heads, strictures on the behavior were loosening. With photography, Americans became accustomed to studying their own images. And with the spread of the postal service they filled the mails with letters and photos telling friends and family of their recent doings. These were the ancestors of Facebook and Instagram posts. With the growth of consumer capitalism in the early 20th century, the idea of sinful vanity declined further. To spur consumption, advertisers appealed directly to people’s egotism and pride. In 1914, for example, one clothier ran an ad asking, “Has your real vanity been tickled lately?” Also epitomizing this shift was the emergence of the word “vanity mirror,” which seemed to legitimize preening and perfecting one’s self-presentation.
As a result, Americans over the course of the 20th century gradually became accustomed to celebrating themselves in word and image, and sharing that self with others. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, then, did not create these trends; they have merely amplified them.
For the last eight years, we’ve been studying such emotional transitions, trying to understand how technologies — from the telegraph to Twitter — have reshaped Americans’ emotional lives over the past two centuries. We’ve read the diaries and letters of 19th- and 20th-century Americans and interviewed 21st-century men and women living through the technological revolutions of our own day. And many of them have told us how their heightened sense of self has led them to think about promoting and marketing their identities, and increased their willingness to divulge intimate details about themselves to others. Indeed, some of the younger people we talked with told us it was essential to their social life to do so.
Yet in spite of technology and consumer capitalism, we are still vaguely aware of vanity’s older meaning. We police people who we think are taking too many selfies. We mock the duck face. And we’re uneasy about those, like our president, who have excessive self-regard. However, the words that we use to frame this concern have changed. Where pride and vanity were all the currency in Solomon William’s day, today we increasingly describe chronic selfie posters as narcissistic (a term that was not invented until the late 19th century). To be sure this new word still has a negative ring to it. But it emerged from the field of psychology rather than from religion. It pathologizes pride rather than condemning it as a sin. Sometimes too we use the word over-sharer, or frame critiques in terms of privacy. We don’t condemn people for sharing and celebrating their accomplishments; instead, we merely worry about them being careless about where they do this. As a result, the existential dimensions of vanity, and its ability to remind us that we’re mortal and that the human condition is limited, are generally lost to modern-day Americans.
This morning while drinking our coffee I told my wife that we will look back at these last 4-5 days and consider it a new stage-probably more relevant for our children but much like 9/11 it will color the future in a different light. Here's an article from Richard Fontaine at The Atlantic:
Just days ago, Russia was widely seen in Washington, D.C., and major European capitals as a sullen and revisionist power, led by a president discontented with his country’s place in the world, but who generally chose pragmatism and opportunism over blundering savagery. This sentiment has transformed overnight, and Moscow is now viewed by Western leaders as a clear and present danger. Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the obvious, but not the only, evidence. Russia threatened “military and political consequences” against Finland and Sweden should they join NATO, and put nuclear forces on alert. Just days ago, European leaders visited Moscow to discuss the international deal that sought to end his last territorial assault in Ukraine, in 2014. No more—governments now have no trust in or tolerance for the Putin regime.
The world’s economies, save China, have combined to inflict harm on the Russian economy with remarkable speed, fomenting a financial crisis and enacting restrictions on Russian imports that will touch all of its citizens. The sanctions on Russia’s central bank alone may well force the country into a default on its sovereign debt. Previous worries about risks that could hurt countries pulling out of COVID-induced recession have been cast aside. So too have concerns that economic upheaval could provoke unrest inside Russia, with unknown implications.
Germany’s long-underweight military role and low defense budgets are also things of the past. Olaf Scholz, the recently elected chancellor, announced a onetime increase in defense spending of 100 billion euros, and committed to spending 2 percent of German GDP on defense annually. As a result, Putin’s aggression accomplished in days what decades of haranguing by American presidents could not. “We must put a stop to warmongers like Putin,” Scholz said. “That requires strength of our own.” In security terms, this may well mark the birth of a new, post–post–Cold War Germany.
Neutrality is on the wane, too. Finland and Sweden are firmly aligned with the West and against Moscow, and the invasion may tip them into NATO membership. Policy makers in both countries are openly discussing the possibility—hence Moscow’s preemptive threat—and for the first time a majority of Finns favor joining the alliance. Even if Helsinki and Stockholm do not sign up as allies, they have already begun collaborating with NATO more closely than ever before. Both, for example, are sending arms to Ukraine.
Even neutral Switzerland—Switzerland!—will freeze Russian assets as a result of Moscow’s aggression. “Russia’s attack is an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy, an attack on the civil population, and an attack on the institutions of a free country,” the country’s president, Ignazio Cassis, said over the weekend. “This cannot be accepted.” Large-scale protests on the streets of Bern, expressing popular revulsion at the invasion, helped focus minds in a country that has essentially been militarily neutral since 1516.The sudden shifts extend beyond Europe. The sanctions now imposed on Russia are global, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Singapore, and more joining the anti-aggression bloc. Turkey, which previously maintained warm relations with Russia, has denounced Moscow’s “unjust and unlawful war” and will block the passage of Russian warships through to the Black Sea. The UN General Assembly will convene an emergency session, for the first time in 40 years, to discuss the crisis.