Ukraine Starting Over

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...

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 ...

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...

The good, the Bad and the Beautiful ? The Rich, the young, and the Poor ? The banal, the serious and the sensual ? the workers, the slackers and the artists ? the mood in the metro last night, there was a funny moment: a big guy was sitting next to a skinny guy, at the seats on the end suited for 3 people. and then this really big guy sat down, the guy in the end was really squeezed, but they were all friends and another guy who was a friend, he started to laugh and joke about it, the normal (not big guy got up and then tried to sit in the middle between the two big guys , they were all laughing and jolly : despite this strange news of Right sector Cigarette wars (which seems to be strangely simplified and  compressed in Western media) Life goes on. http://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-nationalists-standoff-security-forces-two-killed-183349593.html;_ylt=AwrC1C7wgaNVWQIAxzrQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByNXM5bzY5BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMzBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg-- but the last time I checked, if it is a co...

Or is it the other way around ? A fox in the hen house ........ I can only think that the mood on the metro in Kiev, the mood of the working people, it has to be dour. with the recent corruption bust of the Ukraine  Volodymyr Shapakinhas  deputy prosecutor in the headlines, accused of holding  hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribe money, it would appear the old system kept rolling. What sense of trust in the central and regional governments that was building up, has been torn apart. no doubt about that . And a hyper paranoid atmosphere about corruption in  all matters will also impede the business climate. No one wins here, we all lose. Of course , it's not Napoleanic justice, he has a chance to prove his case in court, somehow or another.... it seems impossible, human nature is hard to change. Upon separation of emotions from government, current affairs , comes this lackadaisical attitude in most matters of society : it is hard to sense people are motivat...

 yesterday, after a J-4 peek at the (my ) US Government's Disney style PR event in Kiev, and all other small things, thoughts noted, I had to reopen my blog and convey a less Diplomatic, San Francisco style post, I hope it's not too hard to follow. At least the Ukrainian youths appeared to be having fun ) ****** the mood on the Kiev Metro appears to shift in subtle fashion, week by week, from cautious, guarded optimism one week, to pensive, inward focused retrospection the next week. It seems certain that the elites have largely left on summer vacations, business trips. Cafes sit mostly or entirely empty, few shops have customers who buy much of anything, it is simply now, a place as I see it, of the real people, those who have few options other to get to their work every day, take their days off in the park and not spend too much. The well off folks aren't entirely gone, you can still see plenty of nice late model Range Rovers, Mercedes, Lexus and other luxury brand cars...

the mood on the Kiev Metro is ever changing,:  last night, I came in later on the shift 23:00 going across the river, it was alive with conversation, nobody was talking above the din (as we Americans do) all were sharing the buzz of the packed but not stuffed metro cars. the way the tail ends of the cars seem to bounce along, as opposed to the leading edge of the car you are in, it's slightly comical and maybe misleading, as you may be moving up and down more than you think. Early in the day as some people got on and some older gals found their place in the train, when the driver hit his buttons or switches and it lurched into motion, some nice older lady literally grabbed onto my waist belt to maintain her balance, like as if she was yanking my pants down, it was pretty funny, and they were laughing, as I was, it was funny. THe older Metro trains are totally analog, with staged switching of the power and speeds, if you ride in the very front car, you can hear the driver flipping h...