Althouse

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• "Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a 'total failure' that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany."
• "A Russian gymnast has been placed under investigation for wearing a 'Z' symbol linked to support for President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on his leotard while sharing a podium with a Ukrainian rival...."
• "Hundreds of French châteaux for sale as owners cut and run."
• "Russia did not show up for a hearing at the United Nations’ top court on Monday, effectively boycotting Ukrainian efforts to seek an immediate end to the fighting."
• At the Sunrise Café...
• "Being deprived of seeing half of the face could be overcome precisely because of that brain plasticity. Babies and young children are far more adaptable to their changing conditions in the world than we are as adults."
• "There can only be one conclusion: You also want us to be slowly killed."
• "It hadn't penetrated my think-tank that this was your hacienda when I came mavericking in."
• "How does Putin extract himself from this nightmare of his own making?"

"Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a 'total failure' that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany." Posted: 07 Mar 2022 04:34 AM PST "A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB... said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.... FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. 'You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor... otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,' they wrote. 'Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.'" The London Times reports. That makes it sound as though the spies are trying to save their ass by saying that before the invasion they were trying to save their ass. We weren't wrong, we were deceptive, and we didn't think it would matter. We did bad work, yes, but it was all because we wanted to meet your standard of doing good work.   A bit more from the unnamed analyst: The war, the writer said, had been given a "provisional deadline" of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. "I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog," they wrote. "Maybe it's from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora's Box has been opened." The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting "some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership" to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted. "What if the West refuses?" they wrote. "In that instance I won't exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939." Elsewhere in the letter they said: "Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that's our starting position."

"A Russian gymnast has been placed under investigation for wearing a 'Z' symbol linked to support for President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on his leotard while sharing a podium with a Ukrainian rival...." Posted: 07 Mar 2022 03:59 AM PST "[Ivan] Kuliak wore it in place of the Russian flag, which had been banned by the governing body of gymnastics.... The symbol, which has been used as a designation on Russian military vehicles deployed in Ukraine, has become a symbol in Russia of support for Putin and the war.... The Russian Defence Ministry has previously issued a statement saying that 'Z' means victory." The London Times reports. If would be trivial and not worth saying, but because we are talking about symbols and victory, I will add that the Ukrainian gymnast, Kovtun Illia, won the gold. The Russian was on the podium to pick up the bronze.  Is "Z" supposed to be the Roman letter Z? It doesn't look any of the letters in the Russian alphabet. If you were using that shape to mean something other than a letter, what would you be trying to say. Perhaps it means "anti-Nazi" — half of a swastika. At the London Times link, there's a photo with the caption: "In Kazan, Russia, terminally ill children and their parents made a Z formation at their hospice to show support for the invasion."

"Hundreds of French châteaux for sale as owners cut and run." Posted: 07 Mar 2022 04:43 AM PST The London Times reports.  On the one hand environmental rules and other bureaucratic initiatives are driving up the cost of maintaining stately homes. On the other, "the younger generations are urban," [said Olivier de Lorgeril, chairman of La Demeure historique]. "They often want to have international careers and to live in towns and cities."... "A monument that is not lived in is a monument that is not looked after," he said. "We keep repeating that our national monuments are in danger."... And here's a conversation between the elderly owners of Château de Courson, whose family has owned the place since 1775 and whose children don't want it because it "consumes just about all your life": "We had that singer here once"... "Oh, what was his name?" "Sting"... Yes. The article makes it sound as though Sting just dropped by once, but it was the location for his excellent 1985 film, "Bring on the Night." We saw the band rehearsing in at the Château de Courson. Michael Apted directed.  From the contemporaneous NYT review: In addition to the performance footage, Mr. Apted also includes a few unexpected moments: a visit by a tourist group to the chateau where the musicians happen to be rehearsing (one woman keeps her fingers in her ears while walking through the room) and a disagreement between the costume designer Colleen Atwood and Miles Copeland, Sting's pushy manager. ''Well, I'm sorry, I'm just a peasant, man, but I'm telling you they look boring to me,'' Mr. Copeland complains noisily about the backup singers. It's a scene straight out of ''This Is Spinal Tap.'' Speaking of Sting, I was just thinking about his song — also from the mid 80s — "Russians": We share the same biology, regardless of ideology/But what might save us, me and you /Is if the Russians love their children too....

"Russia did not show up for a hearing at the United Nations’ top court on Monday, effectively boycotting Ukrainian efforts to seek an immediate end to the fighting." Posted: 07 Mar 2022 03:12 AM PST "The proceedings in front of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, went ahead without Russia's presence. The case centers on Russia's official explanation for its invasion of Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin has said is supposed to lead to the 'denazification' of Ukraine and end a 'genocide' in eastern Ukraine.... Ukraine seeks an emergency order that would require Russia to halt its invasion. Both countries have signed the 1948 treaty on the prevention of genocide, and Russia would in theory be mandated to follow the court decision.... [O]ne of its long-time lawyers, Alain Pellet, resigned last week, writing in an open letter that it 'has become impossible to represent in forums dedicated to the application of the law a country that so cynically despises it.'" WaPo reports.

At the Sunrise Café... Posted: 06 Mar 2022 04:43 PM PST ... you can talk about whatever you want. That photograph is from yesterday — 15 minutes earlier than the vivid orange photographs that many of you liked in last night's post. I didn't catch the sunrise today because it was too windy to go running safely in the woods. And let me give you one more. This one is from 6:42 — 2 minutes after the ones posted yesterday and significantly different, with a full view of the sun and a big reflection on the ice.

"Being deprived of seeing half of the face could be overcome precisely because of that brain plasticity. Babies and young children are far more adaptable to their changing conditions in the world than we are as adults." Posted: 06 Mar 2022 07:48 AM PST Said David Lewkowicz, who studies speech and language development in young children, quoted in "Do masks for young children impede their language development? Research is sparse on this issue. But the few studies that do exist suggest masks do not inhibit kids from learning how to communicate" (WaPo). There's an understandable effort to assure parents that there children are not being damaged by masks, but in amongst the reassurance, I'm reading: Research has shown babies who pay attention to people's mouths as they talk have better language skills when they're older. Plus, we know babies learn by modeling their caregivers' behaviors, such as smiling, laughing and talking...  And anecdotes like: Emily Langworthy's 2-year-old daughter, Rosalyn, also attends day care with masked caregivers, and was experiencing language delays. When Rosalyn and her parents contracted the coronavirus and had to isolate for two weeks in January, Rosalyn's language exploded, Langworthy says. She believes it's because her daughter was home with her unmasked parents all day. And advice like: Most babies and toddlers interact with their siblings, parents and other unmasked caregivers. If children attend day care with masked providers, getting face-to-face, unmasked interaction with their family members before and after will probably offset being around masked adults all day, says David Lewkowicz, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories.

"There can only be one conclusion: You also want us to be slowly killed." Posted: 06 Mar 2022 09:57 AM PST UPDATE: My post consisted of an embedded Reddit post that is now removed. It showed Zelensky, speaking in Ukrainian, and had subtitles that may or may not have been accurate. I don't know why Reddit removed the post.  AND: You can still see the Reddit post here, along with a note that it was removed by moderators. And: "Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose." The subreddit, r/nextfuckinglevel, is "A subreddit for gifs and videos that are next fucking level!" My guess is that they don't want that subreddit to be updates about Ukraine.

"It hadn't penetrated my think-tank that this was your hacienda when I came mavericking in." Posted: 06 Mar 2022 06:52 AM PST Wrote William MacLeod Raine in the Western novella "Bucky O'Connor" (1910).  The original meaning of "think tank" was brain. I learned that just now from the OED.  In 1964, the St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch quoted Harry Truman saying that he wants to live to be 90 "if the old think-tank is working."  I guess the skull is the container — the tank — and the brain the contents. I see that people also said "think box."  Does anyone still use the phrase "think tank" like that? It would be confusing, now that "think tank" has come to mean "A research institute or other organization providing advice and ideas on national or commercial problems" (OED).  The oldest published appearance of that usage is: 1958 Econ. Jrnl. 68 362 The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (known in some quarters as the Think Tank) at Palo Alto. The parenthetical was needed. Shortly thereafter, quotation marks eased the term into our vocabulary: 1962 N.Y. Times 3 Nov. in D. L. Larson Cuban Crisis 230 Robert Kennedy had stepped out of a 'Think Tank' meeting that morning to return a call from the President. 1967 Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 8 Oct. (1970) 577 Mt. Hope Farm..will be the site for the environmental planning center—a sort of a 'think tank' for city-planning experts.  By the time Nixon took over, the scare quotes were gone... or were moved over to a coinage of Nixon's, "brainwork": 1969 Hutchinson (Kansas) News 22 Jan. 1/4 He [sc. President Nixon] said he is going to..take over a smaller room across the street as a kind of think tank for what he called 'brainwork'. Brainwork — for thinking — that never caught on. Or did it already exist and its association with Nixon killed it?  I see an OED entry for "brainwork," and it appeared in print in 1606: "Oh Philocalia, in heauy sadnes & vnwanton phrase there lies all the braine worke, by what meanes I coulde fall into a miserable blanke verse presently."  And I like this (from 1703): "I am fully convinc'd that Brain-work infeebles the Body extreamly."

"How does Putin extract himself from this nightmare of his own making?" Posted: 06 Mar 2022 06:18 AM PST That's the headline at the London Times, asking precisely the question I had. I could not think of any answer. It seems there's nothing Putin can do but move forward into his calamity. Even if he wants out, there's no way out. This piece is by Mark Galeotti, an honorary professor at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the author of "The Weaponisation of Everything."  How does he get out of this mess? He probably cannot: there are several paths he could take, but they all lead to the same dead end.... Many are opportunists who would throw Putin under a metro train if they felt it was in their interests and was safe to do, but so long as he controls the Federal Security Service (FSB), any such conspiracy would be nipped in the bud — and everyone knows that. Perhaps the only institution that could oust Putin would be the army.... Any move by the military would be a bloody and contested affair. There are no indications to suggest that Putin is vulnerable.... Putin's assumption is presumably that once he has Ukraine in his grasp he will be able to negotiate a new relationship with the West from a position of strength. Yet according to a foreign policy specialist working for a Russian think tank, "no one in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the expert community shares that belief".... The passion and venom in Putin's recent public statements on Ukraine demonstrate that this is a personal crusade, not a mere geopolitical gambit.... This war has never been about territory, though, but Russia's status as a great power — and Putin's status as a great ruler. To him, a great power takes what it feels it deserves, it does not haggle for it. So Putin cannot back down.... Most Russians will, as in the Brezhnev era, retreat into sullen disaffection, and those who can, will leave. For the Kremlin, this will be good enough: authoritarian regimes tend to rely on fearful apathy more than genuine enthusiasm.... Just as Russian soldiers are proving often unwilling to fight Ukrainians, the security forces may tire of being stormtroopers of the Kremlin. It may sound trivial, but I remember a riot policeman in the final days of the Soviet Union saying he was thinking of handing in his badge because "none of the girls want to date an Omon"....

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