the better angels of our nature or Highway 61 revisited ?

 Oh , the morning Metro was filled with people with dour, suspicious expressions yesterday: people here just don't feel safe anymore, but most of  the children I met are warm and beautiful and open spirits, enjoying the feeling of being out in this frosty, blustery weather! The nice thing about last week, was that the purely working people were about, the elites were off doing all the cool, fun things rich people do in the dead of winter after New Year.

All of  these stories of random acts of terror, Odessa, Kherson : guess people here learned it faster than me, as I was at that moment oblivious
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/06/is-putin-turning-to-terrorism-in-ukraine.html
http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/putin-resolutely-condemns-terrorism-after-paris-attack_1526583.html
it's really cheap  ____,  Were these things in Ukraine Hooliganism,  organized tactics to make people nervous, or state sponsored terrorism ?
Certainly, there are a lot of rumors that the Yanukovych Clan funds this war in the East of Ukraine
I think that he is totally Baron Harkonnen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Harkonnen

Oliver Stone has certainly caught some attention for working on a documentary about ousted  President Victor Yanukovych and Ukraine. In the past he has done some great cinematography that resonated with me. I read an open letter written to him about concerns people in Ukraine harbor about what he is doing. Honestly, it's not a cut, yet He kind of does have a reputation for being drawn to sexy , busty Blond women. Maybe he got caught up in some FSB  psychological drag net ? For sure the FSB has a big Staff, with I suspect a  coterie of beautiful, interesting women who really understand psychology. I am sure the CIA has some ringers as well in their portfolio of sleeper agents. If there are beauty contests,  the results are classified. 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/05/oliver-stone-s-latest-dictator-suckup.html

 http://www.globalresearch.ca/oliver-stone-ukrainians-are-suffering-from-us-ideological-crusade-against-russia/5422709

 I am sure the Russians enjoyed  the rush and level of insight provided by Edward Snowden publicly or privately, and it would be interesting if he could get to a neutral third country and really say what he thinks about Russian Intelligence's handling of his trove of  nifty insight on the NSA.
http://www.whistleblower.org/multimedia/wired-magazine-snowden-%E2%80%93-i-left-nsa-clues-they-couldn%E2%80%99t-find-them?gclid=CPKC-KWGgcMCFfQatAodalYAkA
 They (Russian Federation security services ) also have to compartmentalize him (Snowden ),to  be sure he isn't reverse hacking their stuff : I don't envy the guy right now, seems like he's trapped in a null zone, all sorts of USA elements who want to nab him and bring him to Justice town, he is certainly in a grey area of the law, I wouldn't have done it, I'd have kept quiet, done my time and got the nice Condo in Boca Raton and a sail boat.

but the CIA 's own hacking of Senator Feinstein's  computers when they were looking at the CIA stuff in the Senate Intelligence committee, it just wasn't cool. But that is the beauty of my country, is that this stuff gets out, we aren't shy about talking about this _____.

I mean, how can the CIA not trust Senator Diane Feinstein ? What were they thinking?  Now I am like everyone else, I just want to make enough money, that I have a path of survival. My friends often say, if your heart feels the left, it's just better to vote right for economic reasons, it's just about what group gains greater benefits, ideology versus some pragmatic
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/newswatch/031314
Bernie is a nice man, I am sympathetic toward  him, but would probably not vote for his Presidential bid.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/video-audio/sanders-on-ukraine
I think he's saying it as he sees it and it's a fairly rational perspective he has about it.

But the fact is that Ukraine is so tied in to Crimea, the umbilical cords of water and power, roads, railways, trade and social ties, families business and so forth. Would the US providing Warthog planes and other types of armament help Ukraine take control of the Lugansk, Donetsk, or just intensify the back door war with Russia ? I don't know.

WHat of  Ukraine Communist party leader Pyotor Simonenko? The recent elections showed they have next to no support, although there was perhaps some support in the East, where the elections were not held in a normal peace time environment.  For the moment such nostalgic embrace of old school communist perspective appears to be dead, although some young people may still feel they want to support those ideals.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMb3Umw_wc

In my view,  this whole situation in Ukraine seems to be blown way out of proportion. Even now, as Belarus becomes a pivot point, how they respond to Russia, Ukraine and the EU, like an Ace of Spades it will be interesting to see how it shakes out. For sure, they want to avoid the type of catastrophe that has befallen Ukraine in Belarus, they probably want autonomy without fear of retribution....Along with all the other FSU Nations, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic States.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos?pid=6080827343297659874&oid=108558293491896695660

I dare to say, what the net size of the Russian Federation economy looks like with the current situation, how they compare to the economic heft of say, Texas (and certainly Texas also must feel the cost of contraction in the price of oil, but they are diversified ) . Maybe it is reasonable enough for Oliver Stone to portray the Russian Federation as a bit of an underdog in this equation, being picked on by the super powers of the EU and USA. If Russian interests are being picked on, aren't they just then motivated to pick on Ukraine, inflict as much damage on their former brothers and now pet project of the Western interests ? The question might be that, if Russia fails, can Ukraine prevail ?

They (people in Ukraine ) are very fond of pointing out they were the source of Russian Orthodoxy, but it would probably be nearly unthinkable in this century for Ukraine/ Kyiv  to reassert itself  as an epicenter of Slavic power.
I certainly don't want the Russian people to be hurting, as so many of them are related to people I call friends. But I Hope they figure out what they want to do with all this pretty fast, so they can all return to some form of  business as usual. I have learned that a few Russian born Russians who live there, are quietly supporting Ukraine people's fight to protect their territory (financially.

I hope and trust Mister Stone was well treated by the folks around Mister Yanukovych, but it feels   almost like he is risking an outcome like  that Werrner Herzog movie "Grizzly Man " , where the guy making the documentation about wild bears in Alaska ultimately gets eaten by a bear. It is cool that he isn't afraid to inject some form of Left centric perspective, but will he veer into disinformation ?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9zixLoY5cQ
Are we risking irreversible decay in these machinations ?

Now I have been to this place, where this video opens, looked down from the high ridges of Kodiak Island, Alaska, and seen these wide paths the big Bears make as they cross the Island : they make their own roads, he is in their road going to the lake, they stand (some of them ) 17 feet as adult males on their hind legs, the largest land mammal in North America, and I have talked with these Native people of Kodiak, a great people, felt this feeling in their church, of keeping the Russian Christian Orthodox tradition alive, despite incredible bad history, that's not worthy of repeating inferential historical accounts. It is their spirituality. Their Native Alaskan spiritual values were blended with the Orthodox Christian, they are a mix of Slavic, Scandinavian and Native people.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saZhkZhU_w0

http://www.sthermanseminary.org/

/http://www.pinnacle-travel.org/kodiak/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLyyabfH8bQ

And the native man I was talking with, he said, "yeah, if I go in the nature, I carry a big gun, I don't want to use it, but I know if I must use it, how to kill the bear
 I certainly have a huge respect for the thinking of the left, and value all conversations with those people I feel are rational in their perspective. My mom was a guest of the Soviet Union during Glasnost,  as much as  I don't have tons of friends on the right, I do like to hang out with them sometimes and hear what they have to say about stuff. 

 Politics is frequently a buzz kill  drag, but lots of people like to talk about things affecting them directly, it's normal. The people in the middle, be they laconic, disdainful, independent minded, that's their thing too. Stone has earned some bones and shouldn't be overly castigated for poking around at the situation in Ukraine. I'd certainly enjoy a chance for a cup of coffee with the guy. 

The polarizing of the entertainment industry is  well known,  people like Bruce Willis and now John Voight, Clint Eastwood have made their Pro- Republican feelings clear. Entertainment has always been tied in with politics. As we joked at the time, Reagan conquered Grenada.

   My opinion, is that Ukraine is basically fighting for Democracy, the freedom to utilize modern hybridized economics, and a fair, equitable distribution of it's resources. whatever far right sentiment that exists here,  it seems fairly muted. As it is with all people, family is important to them, along with personal freedoms. 

They want to control their borders, maintain their territorial integrity, be a part of a regional economy, and live in Peace with the world.

     I have seen some examples of the video showing this thuggish stuff  of the far right in Ukraine . But they contained those sentiments and behaviors after Yanukovych fled rather quickly. If it doesn't look good on You tube, it's probably not good for Ukraine. And some times I hear people saying stuff in English, German sounding guy the other night in the bar was saying stuff like "If you give a black man more rights than white people..." and then there was something about how:  "you'd never find a red haired Somali or a red haired Jew," and at that juncture, I got uncomfortable but kept quiet : it wasn't some Ukraine guys saying it, it was foreign people. It has been a well known destination for people on the right , to come to Ukraine and enjoy being able to say the super conservative stuff. Like one girl I know said her girl friend who went to the USA was complaining that they have to pay all this money so those (N word) can have health care. And I told her that repeating something like that is racist : she got the point.  I have seen all sorts of strange behavior in Ukraine, from all sorts of people, but for the most part they are ethical, well dressed, well mannered, considerate, observant and hard working folks.

This stuff pointed out by the Russian media as extreme, some of it isn't nice and some of it isn't real.  While any form of threats, intimidation , bullying is reprehensible, one has to view the total backdrop of those people's lives at that particular moment. How they were starting to understand the scale of corruption inflicted on their country and it's impacts. Now it's an all out economic turf battle with small supermarkets advertising the country of origin for every brand of coffee, this is from a company in Ukraine, that is from a Russian company, that is from Georgia, Azerbaijan or whatever. The consumers can decide what brand they support either based on taste preference or politics, value of course still matters, but with higher duties on imports it will target a much more clear path of stimulating business in Ukraine, for Ukraine and for export into the EU, it can devolve into a nasty tariff war, or it has already. Of course Americans boycotted French wine and cheese after France refused to join the Iraq war coalition, but the French economy is not nearly so integrated with USA as Ukraine and Russia is or was.

People I heard about indirectly were hanging out in Donetsk recently and having some sort of a good time, they were singing some songs accompanied with an acoustic guitar, and some of the songs were in Ukrainian, and maybe of questionable allegiance. The neighbor guy yelled at them "Hey, I hear you guys singing in Ukranian, and maybe I am going to call some guys in to deal with you " His wife apparently pulled him off the balcony to the inside and apologized he was drunk or something, his friend had recently been killed fighting on the Separatist side, so nothing really happened there, it's just an illustration if how it is in the occupied zone. I hear street musicians singing in Russian quite a lot in Ukraine proper, and nobody really cares one way or the other. Maybe more so now of course, it's based on region. For us in the USA it would be like one of our major cities being occupied by armed to the teeth fanatics who were on the lookout for anybody not speaking English, taking aside people who weren't pledging allegiance to the Canadian Flag, or the Texas Republic, something like that > It is hard to imagine Canada carving out a Racist enclave in Oregon or Idaho, Or Texas blockading itself and declaring itself a non Spanish speaking state, or a Non English speaking state for that matter, or Texas State Prisons being surrounded by some desperado people and asking the Prison guards to surrender their weapons... and breaking out some of the Spanish speaking guys , or conversely breaking out the Aryans , but that is sort of what it is like here in the RU occupied / controlled zone of Ukraine. Of course they have tried to clean up the show a bit, but even that has generated some drama with the more direct reports of the torture of Prisoners in the Lugansk region coming out ,https://news.pn/en/RussiaInvadedUkraine/122617
 they (Russians ) are trying to take credit for cleaning up a problem they allowed to happen as I see it, and that seems to be the side our great film maker Oliver Stone seems to be siding with. In some ways all these things align weirdly, each side providing strange excuses for bad behavior as did Felix Rodriguez with what sounds to me like lame and rather fabricated reasoning for the killing of Che Guevara. It sound to me like he had operational control, that there was plenty of ways to keep CHe alive, trade him or something like that. THe CIA knew he was emblematic, and perhaps  it was just more linear to off him or something like that. TO say the Bolivian Army made that call is hard to imagine. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7027619.stm

But is Osama Bin Laden still alive? who really believes this story they buried him at sea? it's also nearly absurd!

People in the West (USA primarily it's being said lately) that few of them can conceive of what is going on here, it's a strange mix between the totally normal and the preposterous and spooky. I heard of a group trying to get from Starobilsk where the train service now ends and get into Donetsk by car or minibus. WHen they got to the primary check point that leads to the road straight to Donetsk (where it is about 40 kilometers by road, straight travel) they couldn't use that roadway, due to some activity between the opposed army forces. SO,  they had to take all kinds of circumlocution , farm roads, check points of both sides , and somewhere they ran out of gas and were like trying to use their phones, basically they got stuck somewhere in the freezing cold for half the night, but in the end they arrived safely and nothing really bad happened, it was just way too painfully difficult of a way to get there.

You would think , that  if they could just find the individuals responsible for MH17, that they could maybe start to resolve the whole conflict in East Ukraine, but at this point it's all gone pretty murky. Who ever did it has covered their tracks. 

Of course the CIA, the Russians, and for sure the Chinese all have psychic intelligence consultants, however much they take that with a grain of salt. Psychic readings don't amount to much in the United Nations assembly, but they can be a starting point for finding hard evidence.  I know a great psychic in Ukraine, she really knows stuff. You can make an appointment with your cell phone and go find her there in her eerie perch, she is well practiced and seems infallible (maybe you'd have to catch her on a good day. Yet such dark events have a lot of psychic masking around them, it takes talent to peel away the layers, sift through some sets of cards, maybe they have psychics like blood hounds, who need some article from the scene or perpetrator...complex stuff, but it's probably being done, it's too big a case to not use every tool available to solve.

well I hope Mister Stone has a nice time in Russia, and gets some positive attention from FSB gal who totally gets him and revs up his creative juices, maybe he'll make a special mini drama TV movie and utilize Steven Segal to do some mantras and cool wushu stuff. My friends from Donetsk did resonate with the idea that maybe all of this crazy stuff was just to distract people from all the corruption around financing the Olympics in Sochi and firm up Mister Putin's popularity. Maybe oil would have gone down under any circumstances if Ukraine had stayed in Peace? Clearly Mister Putin is here, he is not queer and we have to get used to him. If the US can keep Guantanamo Bay, why not Russia keeping it's Navy where they had it all along ? Ukraine was in no position to force them out of there. But there are economic benefits associated with de-militarization as well.

 In all this complex Geopolitical stuff,  it is hard to find a sense of moderation, what is the middle ground of Social Justice, where group prosperity becomes optimized and the individual is rewarded for hard work and innovation ? Has US policy messed with Ukraine ? How purposeful  was this agenda ?  Were there secret payoffs to get the police units protecting Yanukovych to melt away? No payments are mentioned so far,  as outlined in the New York Times article recently ?And  I haven't heard of anything like that. I tend to buy into the NYT story,  yet I don't trust it as complete. The fact that many many things get done via payoffs here doesn't demonstrate payoffs were made to key individuals, but I am sure there have been payoffs of all kinds by the players in this, some transparent and some murky. Payoffs were the mode of operation for the Yanukovych government.

 They should solve this and get back to normal as soon as possible. And if nobody is very happy with the results of fixing it, then maybe the Politicians will have done the job they were put there to do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgefX2sZRU