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Showing posts from August, 2015

it takes a village....?

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If a village falls down in the Arctic, does anybody hear it do that? what if the Inuits just get fed up with the US Government , could Russia win back Alaska through coercion ? It sounds impossible, but this hybrid warfare is getting to be a finely tuned mechanism I was thinking about Ukraine all the day today, not so much about the whoosh and screeches of Kiev's Metro, but the minds of the people who use it... Modern Ukraine is essentially a conglomerate of people who found their lives there. True that the famines, Holodmir killed off huge numbers of people descended from the centuries of time in Ukraine. Soviets mixed people around, brought in people from here and there, took some away (as they did the Tatars) With President Poroshenko's mention of Mordor in his speech, it made me wonder of Led Zeppelin was going to do a surprise Kiev concert in the near future, maybe October ? The October surprise, https://youtu.be/UNVRIPgfRNE But I was really hoping Mick Jagger and the

The Better Angels of our Nature

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Friday night in San Francisco : our big public bus  rolling stock largely runs empty after 9:00. Like Kiev, our Metro/ BART rapid transit shuts down at Midnight/ 12:30. ASIDE from the Famous cable cars, there isn't a lot of soul in our public transit, we are moving at the speed of technology here. Ukraine keeps going the way it always has. They do know their maintenance. Even going to Lviv , Dnepropetrovsk, there's something so charming about the old cars grinding along on slightly misaligned track, great for soufflé music videos )) As much as Ms Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and it seems certain she'd have square off against Mister Putin in the general primary, it is certainly a question wether her contacts with Mister Pinchuk in Ukraine will be an asset or a limited liability. Her eager campaign workers seem generally oblivious to the tangled web of issues regarding steel export markets, domestic steel production in the USA, and our labor unions. People

The Lost Metro Muse

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Where did that warm, Slavic culture go with all this war ? Fierce intellectualism is certainly a trait that doesn't always help in sorting out differences. It's sort of an entire region on edge, from Budapest to Minsk, KIEV , where will the disruptive geopolitical maneuvers cease to mess with people's lives ? Can't we all just get along ? and when does the pipeline style of thinking end it's cyclical discourse? Perhaps my favorite memory of recent times was to see two older ladies get on the metro during the busy rush hour, only to find that the seats near the doorway had opened up, and they quickly sat down together enjoying the chance to chat with each other, they held each others hands lightly, their faces filled with a happy joy of an easy victory, finding the easy seats near the door just waiting for them. Seeing a burgeoning economic cauldron like my home city of San Francisco, how it moves people, what people's issues are : Ukraine is a long ways a