Ukraine Starting Over

Forget about the Metro everybody watches each other here the feelings that happen on the metro stays on the Metro we are maybe living in a sick time like some gargantuan wave that can loom un sus·pect ed·ly   in a calm sea Why do I find it weird that the young Eminem looks a lot like the Leland Stanford Junior ? did you know that when he was a baby, his parents brought him to the guest dinner table inside  a silver serving dish, like some prize for the guests ? The World is a ghetto_ maybe too bad he died young : it's a tidbit of education History in America. a case of mistaken Historical souls lost in anxiety ? What sort of a trade off is that ? to go from being the Scion of one of the most wealthy families in America to being a formerly scrappy rapper of the Modern Era ? I'd take it any day )' the beautiful  pain.... ************** I can feel the heat rising Everything is on fire Today is a painful reminder of why We can only get brighter The furth

I think that my read on the mood in the metro today was that no one wanted anybody checking their mood: It's really been far too long of a conflict and most of them are prepared for this to last years, to fight for their territory to the bitter ends of time, they feel ripped off by the EU, Russia, the USA, for talking them into giving up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and at the time then, for peanuts. This whole scenario might not have taken place if they kept the nukes, or at least a decent  set of them operational. Not that every guy or gal one meets on the street is thinking about it that way. It sets a bad precedent, no other nation on Earth will ever give up their nukes after what has happened to Ukraine. If people in your family were killed, wounded and disabled, tortured, or just radically displaced, if your money lost half it's value in a year, it is all a lot to think about. Are the working people in Russia happy now , that Putin has got his goat

 It has been a well known weakness of Ukraine's infrastructure that it's electrical and power industry depends on intermediate coal fired power generating plants, between the Hydroelectric, and Nuclear powered generating stations. Among the many advantages Moscow's strategists viewed in terms of fomenting war and political upheaval in the Donbass, was the strategic value of it's Industrial capacity, underpinned by significant energy resources such as coal and possibly fracking in the future. And of course, there is the potential trillion dollar stash of off shore oil and gas waiting to be developed in Crimea. And the Kremlin knows that the rules for joining NATO require a country to be not at war, so they may think it is more easy to maintain a perpetual  low level war, just to make their point that NATO on their border with Ukraine is unacceptable to them. As foreigners, most of us, we are not really able to understand the full whiteboard of Ukraine's economi

There are many variants of reality to the crisis in Ukraine: If one travels due East from Kiev and goes just a bit above the Kharkiv'ska Oblast, to the small towns, villages that skirt the border, one finds a taciturn, calm, easy going feeling. No local person who lives on the border is terribly worried about tanks, APC's  rolling into town :The background of this photo is Russia, the pile of fall squash, pumpkins and the smart brick house looking out across the lake, it's in Ukraine. Local people can come and go through the local border checkpoint if they are from that area on either side of the border, the border guards stay alert, but they are generally easy going and happy to facilitate a person's safe transit. Of course, they are all concerned about the trend of Geopolitics and how it might affect their work and lives. The border guards rotate into hazardous duty in the ATO zone. The families that share this region probably don't think a lot different on one

yeah, sure : I feel it too that feeling of being defensive. We all feel it, that we have to justify our game plan to friends, family, we have to hide or share our status as we see fit, honor our principles and work things to our best advantage, or not : as we see fit! What is the (ZOLOTI VOROTA Metro  ) escalator status of today ? It was clearly defense. Every face had some version of defense, self defense, group defense, defending the moment of their reality, pensive defensiveness. #greydesign Using this Metro, it really is a time warp. What Ukraine deserves tremendous credit for is the maintenance of their Soviet era transport systems, smartly designed, well engineered, perhaps an entirely new version of environmentally correct designation should emerge like GREY DESIGN. Grey Design, it would equal something like "what we did for all these years really was a super efficient, environmentally correct strategy, proven true in the long view" People might be like &q

As I was returning from a visit to Rivne, Ukraine > I alternated between napping and trying to get a mobile data stream from twitter, which is slightly addictive in a good way, a new style of learning current events, the road to Kiev is bumpy and the Mashrutka seemed to go off on a lot of side roads into the little towns off the main highway : bumpy ride and uncomfortable seats, guess I should have taken the express Mashrutka. I got in rather late , 8:40 despite leaving at 3:45 the map looked like it would be 3.5 hours, but it took 5. As I caught the Tuesday night Metro, there was an interesting mix of people's emotions, playful, conspiratorial, serious, thoughtful, quizzical. Ascending the escalator, I got an Alert about the European Space Agency's live coverage starting for the Philae Lander....' I went out with friends to get some cafeteria food, it wasn't great, but decent. Slept. But one of the things from last night, was worth the replay is from a fri

Hi Readers, It's been nearly 1 year since the momentous start of Ukraine's  Maidan Demonstrations, I arrived here last year on the 11th of December, with little advance knowledge of what was going on in the streets. I started hearing from the people what was obvious about this, (now) formerly corrupt society, and what a long, strange flip  it's been... Not taking the CIS deal, not going fully into the EU system, then War, armed conflict. Perhaps it's interesting that a Tweet from a popular journalist,  Mustafa Nayem  who is of Afghan Pashtun and Iranian Parentage, but spent majority of his life as a Soviet resident, then  as citizen of Post Independent Ukraine. Honestly, how would Americans really feel if a tweet by a similar individual who was a citizen / long term resident of Mexico had raised the beacon to prevail against corruption and entrenched elites of Mexican Society, thereby triggering a reanalysis of the Treaty of Gaudalupe Hidalgo, and sparking an armed t