Too great odds against magic , or say your prayers?
Unfortunately , it went there , even as much as the Russian separatists are using a flag nearly identical to the Confederate flag, symbolically associated with fighting for the right the right to hold slaves. The internal Tatar population of Crimea isn't enslaved, yet they are trapped in incredibly constrictive circumstance that restricts many freedoms of social expression , along with the burden of Russian State's ability to arbitrarily hinder economic success for those businesses and people who withhold their endorsement of the territorial takeover/ annexation.
Albeit, the war in Ukraine isn't on the scale of our American Civil war, it's still been really bad for them. To think that a large scale war, coupled with atrocities, mayhem , massive infrastructure destruction, coupled with the grim fact of shooting down a civilian airliner with advanced weaponry, killing 300 innocent people instantly. It is all akin to a dark crime. Ukraine is filled with peaceful tolerant people. I thought to reprise some details of my role, historically within the situation, how I came to be there, how I got drawn in by it. Mostly I was an accidental witness of it. I had bought my plane ticket , planning to stay for about 65 days before the EU agreement was cancelled. It just so happened that I managed to be there for the main show, the rock bands from Czechoslovakia , musicians, speakers from many places. I didn't catch John McCain's speech, I was out of town during that moment.
Since I am not there, I can not offer what his thoughts now are, unfortunately. But other hip, savvy, contemporary people I know, have been with, engaged in conversation with him. They laud him with praise for his insight, perspectives and wisdom. The apologists, who say that this was a mismanaged US State Department operation should ask this man what he thinks about that. he was there, all the time, part of the Cossack councils on the Maidan. He will call a spade a spade and knows the difference from a turnip and a potato. And yes, he is like a seer of things
These people judged Yanukovych as a petty bandit, bent on egotistical vanity and self interest, thieving vast sums from the National treasure of Ukraine. Plus he stole the image of stability and decency, at least the folks who ran government before him took small percentages, his percentage was said to be well over 50 % on a lot, or most government tenders. While there is a wealth of resources, this is a relatively poor Nation. Only a few enjoy a semblance of real comfort.
people pay small fees for their spots in the market like this, monies that channel in some way, upward into the Government, it took some time during the Yanukovych era for it to dawn on them how badly they were getting ripped off. They take pride in what they do, it may be just scraping by, making an honest living , but they care about the details. They often give you extras when you buy a few things from their stocks, they will round the price down to make the change more easy some times .
How did the Russian business interests work Ukraine to their favor and profit ? It has been well documented in Crimea , perhaps Odessa, and other areas, that as they bought A-list property using money possibly stolen deftly or outright from the Russian people, consumers and tax payers. '
Their often illicit, or shady dealings in the Russian Federation were in some ways quite easily projected into Ukraine. Once the property development was underway, they obtained sizable loans from Ukraine's banks during the Yanukovych era. It was both a money laundering and a money tapping scheme . During the seizure of Crimea, many members of the Crimean Parliament had huge outstanding loans for millions of dollars owed to Ukraine's banks, they walked away from those loans. Putin publicly encouraged Crimean people to ignore the payments on their car loans, if it was owed to a Ukrainian bank.
sending the Repo man became an impossible option. The economic disruption from war along with defaulting portions of Ukraine's Bank Industry only furthered the Kremlin's goal to destabilize the government , economy, weaken it. I remember in 2011/2012 and maybe 2013 the banks had deals offering up to 30% interest on your deposits of you kept it in for a year or something like that. Problem was, that you could put it in, but it was hard to get out.
Is it Ironic, or simply painful to think that millions of dollars stolen from the shop keepers and small business owners of Ukraine, channelled through the slush coffers of the Party of Regions into Paul Manafort's hands would then flow into the election campaign of a Pro-Russian billionaire presidential candidate in USA ?? I heard an acquaintance relate to efforts made by government officials to extort money from his small cheese making business .
At the time of the Maidan, the people on the street hadn't figured everything out, or thought through where things would go, but they knew their society was ruled by a corrupt mechanism. The President had jailed his primary political opponent, Julia. She was the one who understood the deeper aspects of the bigger picture of the equation. And as much as Madame Tymoshenko knew of it, she also had to participate in it, to maintain her base of power.
Kiev had a distinctive, luxury life style class in the Yanukovych era, closely aligned to vestiges of all the variant Communist era ministries. There was a Ministry of shoes, a Ministry of furniture, a Ministry for agriculture, Education and so forth. Much of the social elites who tended to favor this incestuously corrupt relationship with Russian business and Government were derived from these Communist era Ministerial positions at the time of Independence. People were fed up with it.
They were outraged by the callous imprisonment of the President's primary political opposition opponent, much like we worry today that the Trump administration will put on trial, imprison our former Secretary of State Clinton. I guess it won't happen, but we are in the era where the outrageous is totally possible. How will America react if an imprisoned Hillary Clinton is beaten by her jail guards ? There are things I know , heard about the Head of Ukraine's National University or something like that,t during Yanukovych, which I won't even repeat, it's too tawdry , the stuff of whispers and heart to heart talks best not brought up in polite conversation.
Revisiting my photos from the time, reflecting upon my many thoughts over this weekend of Protests about Donald Trump's Presidency.
I kept thinking about the last time I had seen Sergey Nihoyan : It was quite close to this barricade egress point where the man in the red jacket was walking. I didn't really know personally any, or many of the activists, though I have kept in touch with 1 or 2. Yet Sergey was a person hard to forget, his distinctive look, personal feeling. He was standing with three or 4 friends, comrades. One a girl. They were talking a little, but Sergey was watching everyone who was coming through, and we exchanged glances. I felt like I wanted to talk with him. It was probably 3 or 4 days before he was killed. Before, from the media , I had thought he was killed by a sniper, from a rooftop or something, but now I back checked to learn the autopsy says he was killed at relatively close range, maybe 9 meters by a hunting rifle. Why do I revisit this moment, my memory of him ? It is because I feel obligated to relate a specific aspect of the moment I saw him that afternoon. It was because just a few paces ahead of me, there were 2 or 3 men walking in a group, 1 or 2 wearing Khaki type pants and jacket. One man was quite stocky and broad shouldered, shorter guy. And they had radios, or a radio I could hear somehow: they were obviously security forces. And I could tell that Sergey Nihoyan was watching them , apprehensive. I could feel it, that these men were scoping him out. The moment is etched in my mind. I could not see the men's faces and I half paused, perhaps I even tried to engage in a brief hello or something with the group of people. I remember the look, exchange of glances with him at the time. I was a neutral observer to all this, I admired their courage and dedication.
Something in me wanted to say "Dude, this is really dangerous" , clearly those were Berkut in plain clothes getting a read on things. It seemed fairly obvious that during the long winter Holiday season starting at Catholic Christmas , going through the Orthodox Christmas and Old New Year, that things would be allowed to more or less continue on the Maidan. It was after that, when he was targeted , that the pressure would increase to shut the demonstrations down. They had done a stupendous feat of Public disobedience , yet everyone knew it couldn't last.
I remember 3 years ago my visit to Ukraine like it was yesterday, remember my feelings after my departure for California on or about January 26th, 2013. I had gone there for personal reasons, to stay with a girl I met off line some place far outside of Kiev. She had kids and at the time, was working nights as a taxi driver. I had been supporting her despite the lack of any serious interaction, romance, physical love. It was a conjectural affair, without substance. I found her moody, constantly smoking, she was coughing, sick from smoking and would go out at night, either to work in the Maidan Kitchens or to drive taxi, and she left me to baby-sit her kids. They slept with her and she did not snuggle up with me at night . There were cockroaches, coming up through openings in the common shaft of the toilet in the apartment . She seemed to maybe also be going out with men who had land cruisers, partying and having fun at times, with her girl friends. I could not concentrate on writing the fiction project , the theater piece I had established in my mind to write , before we ever had an intimate moment together, I left her, to travel and see other places besides Kiev, during that tempestuous winter of revolution and discontent.
Following a common tradition of mine, I had brought coffee with me, that I had hastily purchased and put it together just before my flight. I had found that it was an easy way to arrange gifts, since everybody pretty much likes coffee. I could buy 12 or 24 pounds of 12 different single origin coffees, and set them all out in 12 bowls, scoop from each bowl into a 13th bowl, and hand mix it to derive a single origin hand mixed coffee blend with something like a trip around the world in every sip. Yes , this was the ammunition I brought to Ukraine's revolution. On my first night, I met some folks who were simply camped out on the street , outside Kiev's city hall administration building. They gave me tea or something and seemed normal, friendly, the loudspeakers down at the square were blaring, there was a softly falling snow. They invited me into the City Hall, but I declined, I had just arrived with my roller bag.
Yet in the following days, I plucked up my courage and found my way into the city Hall building. I brought my rucksack and offered to make them my special coffee, using the little plastic cone, and the paper filter. I was meeting and talking with people from everywhere. Evgheniy Afineevsky was there with his camera, but we didn't talk, I had heard about him yet never caught up with him, I just saw him as some form of a man with a big movie filming camera, it was like he was an appurtenance to his camera, man and machine as one.
things got steadily worse in Kiev :
As Protesters lit massive fires in Kiev to thwart the riot police, I attended rallies and modest demonstrations in the Dnieper region, it was rather tame compared to Kiev. A group of 50 students marching with banners, signs , shouting slogans going down Karla Marx Boulevard to European square. I found a terribly tame and intellectual poetry reading at a cafe one afternoon. Christmas parties and the like were everywhere.
once I got down to Simferopol , one of my most favorite cities for how it flows as you walk it:
Someone was orchestrating Communist Era Nostalgia , Crimea. There was a pre-New Year's party at a popular bar there, they printed out a lot of USSR Nostalgia, this was something involving a graphic artist, approving layouts and sending an order off to a printing facility that did high quality reproductions. I'd say that planning the party for the local bar had to have taken weeks, since at least early December. If this hypothetical plan to attach people's sympathies started weeks, perhaps months earlier, then maybe all these machinations of withdrawing from the EU was mainly actually about setting the stage to seize Crimean territory ? Ukraine's military was incredibly hollowed out from corruption and neglect , tacitly encouraged by the Kremlin.
While I was out exploring and hanging out, somebody seemed to have got into my hotel room at the Simferopol Ukraina and took apart my cheap, heavy Gateway laptop, removed the little screws in the back of it, they were not all fully put back , some hasty disassembly job to access the hard drive : hey guys, it was mostly soft porn, personal photos and the errant aspects of my mostly unsuccessful business endeavors.
I returned to Kiev, shortly thereafter to witness small parting bits of the increasingly grimy Maidan protests. What do I think the Trump Presidency will result in, in terms of a new version of global security architecture ? For Ukraine and perhaps the rest of the world ? Honestly, call me crazy, but my gut tells me it is possible that some kind of deal will happen that is reminiscent of the Oaths of Strasbourg : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg
They were outraged by the callous imprisonment of the President's primary political opposition opponent, much like we worry today that the Trump administration will put on trial, imprison our former Secretary of State Clinton. I guess it won't happen, but we are in the era where the outrageous is totally possible. How will America react if an imprisoned Hillary Clinton is beaten by her jail guards ? There are things I know , heard about the Head of Ukraine's National University or something like that,t during Yanukovych, which I won't even repeat, it's too tawdry , the stuff of whispers and heart to heart talks best not brought up in polite conversation.
I kept thinking about the last time I had seen Sergey Nihoyan : It was quite close to this barricade egress point where the man in the red jacket was walking. I didn't really know personally any, or many of the activists, though I have kept in touch with 1 or 2. Yet Sergey was a person hard to forget, his distinctive look, personal feeling. He was standing with three or 4 friends, comrades. One a girl. They were talking a little, but Sergey was watching everyone who was coming through, and we exchanged glances. I felt like I wanted to talk with him. It was probably 3 or 4 days before he was killed. Before, from the media , I had thought he was killed by a sniper, from a rooftop or something, but now I back checked to learn the autopsy says he was killed at relatively close range, maybe 9 meters by a hunting rifle. Why do I revisit this moment, my memory of him ? It is because I feel obligated to relate a specific aspect of the moment I saw him that afternoon. It was because just a few paces ahead of me, there were 2 or 3 men walking in a group, 1 or 2 wearing Khaki type pants and jacket. One man was quite stocky and broad shouldered, shorter guy. And they had radios, or a radio I could hear somehow: they were obviously security forces. And I could tell that Sergey Nihoyan was watching them , apprehensive. I could feel it, that these men were scoping him out. The moment is etched in my mind. I could not see the men's faces and I half paused, perhaps I even tried to engage in a brief hello or something with the group of people. I remember the look, exchange of glances with him at the time. I was a neutral observer to all this, I admired their courage and dedication.
I remember 3 years ago my visit to Ukraine like it was yesterday, remember my feelings after my departure for California on or about January 26th, 2013. I had gone there for personal reasons, to stay with a girl I met off line some place far outside of Kiev. She had kids and at the time, was working nights as a taxi driver. I had been supporting her despite the lack of any serious interaction, romance, physical love. It was a conjectural affair, without substance. I found her moody, constantly smoking, she was coughing, sick from smoking and would go out at night, either to work in the Maidan Kitchens or to drive taxi, and she left me to baby-sit her kids. They slept with her and she did not snuggle up with me at night . There were cockroaches, coming up through openings in the common shaft of the toilet in the apartment . She seemed to maybe also be going out with men who had land cruisers, partying and having fun at times, with her girl friends. I could not concentrate on writing the fiction project , the theater piece I had established in my mind to write , before we ever had an intimate moment together, I left her, to travel and see other places besides Kiev, during that tempestuous winter of revolution and discontent.
Following a common tradition of mine, I had brought coffee with me, that I had hastily purchased and put it together just before my flight. I had found that it was an easy way to arrange gifts, since everybody pretty much likes coffee. I could buy 12 or 24 pounds of 12 different single origin coffees, and set them all out in 12 bowls, scoop from each bowl into a 13th bowl, and hand mix it to derive a single origin hand mixed coffee blend with something like a trip around the world in every sip. Yes , this was the ammunition I brought to Ukraine's revolution. On my first night, I met some folks who were simply camped out on the street , outside Kiev's city hall administration building. They gave me tea or something and seemed normal, friendly, the loudspeakers down at the square were blaring, there was a softly falling snow. They invited me into the City Hall, but I declined, I had just arrived with my roller bag.
Yet in the following days, I plucked up my courage and found my way into the city Hall building. I brought my rucksack and offered to make them my special coffee, using the little plastic cone, and the paper filter. I was meeting and talking with people from everywhere. Evgheniy Afineevsky was there with his camera, but we didn't talk, I had heard about him yet never caught up with him, I just saw him as some form of a man with a big movie filming camera, it was like he was an appurtenance to his camera, man and machine as one.
As Protesters lit massive fires in Kiev to thwart the riot police, I attended rallies and modest demonstrations in the Dnieper region, it was rather tame compared to Kiev. A group of 50 students marching with banners, signs , shouting slogans going down Karla Marx Boulevard to European square. I found a terribly tame and intellectual poetry reading at a cafe one afternoon. Christmas parties and the like were everywhere.
once I got down to Simferopol , one of my most favorite cities for how it flows as you walk it:
Someone was orchestrating Communist Era Nostalgia , Crimea. There was a pre-New Year's party at a popular bar there, they printed out a lot of USSR Nostalgia, this was something involving a graphic artist, approving layouts and sending an order off to a printing facility that did high quality reproductions. I'd say that planning the party for the local bar had to have taken weeks, since at least early December. If this hypothetical plan to attach people's sympathies started weeks, perhaps months earlier, then maybe all these machinations of withdrawing from the EU was mainly actually about setting the stage to seize Crimean territory ? Ukraine's military was incredibly hollowed out from corruption and neglect , tacitly encouraged by the Kremlin.
While I was out exploring and hanging out, somebody seemed to have got into my hotel room at the Simferopol Ukraina and took apart my cheap, heavy Gateway laptop, removed the little screws in the back of it, they were not all fully put back , some hasty disassembly job to access the hard drive : hey guys, it was mostly soft porn, personal photos and the errant aspects of my mostly unsuccessful business endeavors.
New Year's eve felt dark and chaotic, much fewer fireworks, than in Year's past that I had seen.
People wanted to talk about what was going on in Kiev, the demonstrations and issues, my friends spoke of their feelings of betrayal and ineffectiveness of the Central Government . There seemed to be a diverse mix of sentiments at play, rather than some unified perception.
Shortly after New Year, I hopped a train to the NorthEast Sumy region, I think it was a night train that is convenient as you can/ could sleep on it and show up rested the next morning. I wanted to rest up there, hang out with friends there, gauge the mood there.
I finished all this swath of travel inside EUrope's largest Geographical Nation with a visit to a remote section of icy river for the traditional plunge, as I arrived in Ukraine alone, without a plan, minder or guidance, I went alone into that ice, smashing an opening with a hard stick, thanks for the support of friends who warmed me with vodka and sat me near a heater afterwards. I was 40 kilometers from the Russian border proper, a gorgeous natural region. These people never thought the people who lived 8o kilometers away in the nearer Russian towns were any different or better than them. They moved freely, traded freely, there was no quarrel. As the conflict deepened, these regions remained free of squabbles due to their understanding that it simply wasn't worth it to make a fight, they have what they need, and need not take from their neighbors.
I returned to Kiev, shortly thereafter to witness small parting bits of the increasingly grimy Maidan protests. What do I think the Trump Presidency will result in, in terms of a new version of global security architecture ? For Ukraine and perhaps the rest of the world ? Honestly, call me crazy, but my gut tells me it is possible that some kind of deal will happen that is reminiscent of the Oaths of Strasbourg : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg
The several pledges were spoken at a strategic meeting on 12 February 842 at Strasbourg, with the brothers' assembled armies in attendance and participating in the ceremonies. In addition to their promised allegiance to each other, Louis and Charles pledged their solidarity to oppose their eldest brother Lothair, ruler of Middle Francia and, nominally, emperor of all the Carolingian Empire Frankish kingdoms as well as Holy Roman Emperor. Louis spoke his oath in the "Romance" language, while Charles spoke his oath in lingua teudisca, "Germanic".[3]
The historical nature of the meeting is made more remarkable by the additional, separate pledges that were scripted for the monarchs' armies – in their respective vernaculars – to the effect that, for each "soldier": should their own lord-king unilaterally break the oath just pledged (to the other king), then, each "soldier of the oath" promises not to help his master against the abused other monarch.
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How exactly something like that could occur, who the parties might be in it, I can't say just yet. Ukraine will never agree to such a deal amongst the Devils of power
if some movement towards a settlement of the Ukraine conflict were to happen this year, near the 12th of February, could such an oddly funky deal actually work out ? is that where the new Administration wants to take NATO ?
These are some old school forces that put Trump into play, for certain specific reasons. We are somewhat in the era now where Democracy mostly stops at the school board election.
These are some old school forces that put Trump into play, for certain specific reasons. We are somewhat in the era now where Democracy mostly stops at the school board election.
for the Tatar folks who just want to build a contact group http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1484261712
burning Moscow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_of_Moscow_(1571) continues to haunt the relations
as to our New President paraphrasing Bane in the Dark Knight Rising , it does worry me a bit
I am very uneasy about what exactly just did go down in our hacked election, but for now thankful that I have the freedoms to live a semi-normal life. I am hoping for a peaceful solution to all this madness. Now Crimea can only return to Ukraine via economic and social initiatives that will be complex and challenging , probably if successful, over the course of decades of strategic planning and statesmanship.
can they let the children play now ?
all the best wishes for Ukraine and Lots of Love.
This looks like enough money to save the orphanage !
It's incredible, after all this struggle, some people still try to steal so much?
I did a simple math calculation. Not that I see any connection that jumps off the page between MH370 and MH17's tragedy. It was 131 days transpired between the 2 incidents. 131 is a Sophie Germaine Prime number http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/xpage/SophieGermainPrime.html
which leads down the rabbit hole of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Taniyama-ShimuraConjecture.html
ultimately, the perception of proof, certainly in the MH370 incident, starts to become inaccessible. Certainly it could be perceived, that the large search swaths of Ocean surveyed , were performed surreptitiously, to derive data of undersea mineral deposits. How the micro/ macro data analysis will be handled for commercial purposes is still an open question, or is it cemented in the search entities agreements with the financing component of the operation? You have the 2 guys onboard MH370 who were part of this incredibly opaque furniture company based in Odessa with Zero social media profiles, the Diplomat from Irkutsk who was a master diver. Plus that particular model of plane flown MH370 being susceptible to faking of flight data if the avionics bay was accessible (which it was)
The Freescale semiconductor team going to Beijing, the AIDS researcher people going to the conference in Australia on flight MH17. My source indicates that there was a mastermind behind MH17 shoot down, but who, when, why and how, for what purpose? will they create a straw man scenario for MH17, just to make it more easy for it to go away ?
MH370 had a maintenance interval on November 4, 2013. Was it inflight, near the zone of the solar Eclipse on November 3rd, 2013 ? What could happen to an airplane flying near, or in the zone of a solar eclipse?
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