Ukraine Starting Over

Ukraine appears to have flown through the eye of the economic needle in recent restructuring of it's debt, and maybe there are signs that not only "all will be well" but that "things could be terrific " in their markets, but it takes an investor with a stomach for stress While people ask "how are they doing?" they aren't asking "how are they working" People in Ukraine work hard, despite their many days off and low pay, they get a job done. They are not whiners and complainers, they do their work with a smile. As Russia pushes some ambiguous rhetoric about the innate and entrenched corruption of their failed neighbor state, they don't want to admit that a lot of Russian  entities were actually using the Ukraine as their own private piggy bank. In Ukraine Today , it's not about whether or not people in politics and government stole money, it's about who stole too much money, where did they stash it and how are they spending it...

I guess it's easy to simplify issues,  I miss checking the mood on the Metro system in Kiev, despite the  reputation of FSU people to keep a close guard on the feelings they show outwardly, as a group in transit, they read somewhat easily enough. Most people I know here on the left Coast , want a simplified idea of things, but not all look for the most easy way to fit it in a nutshell What if Geopolitical conflicts could get solved with Therapeutic psychological counseling ? Most of us tend to squirm at the thought of a third party telling us how we need to reshape our thinking : These are people for whom psychology is a finely tuned art, it nearly feels like it is Genetically encoded, this instinct for psychology.  People ask me what is going on there in Ukraine, maybe I should take a Go_pro video of a shopping experience in a working class Grocery store ? Human behavior in a Grocery store, it is very revealing, how people gather their list of things, maneuver the aisle...

Frontline blues : it's random stuff ? the pay for the Ukraine Defenders is perhaps so little that they are all like volunteers, but they are motivated, you have to wonder what the people caught  on both sides of the Ukraine conflict are thinking, if it is going to slowly de-escalate or escalate suddenly. The fact remains, that Ukraine has all it's resources containing the conflict zones. If the Kremlin felt a need to make the Ukraine into it's own private colony, while it'd be expensive  they could have their army in Kiev in one or two days, they could virtually drive through the border check point in Sumy Oblast, (it would be the most direct , shortest distance to Kiev from the Russian border ) the Ukraine Border guard would only be able to fire some warning shots, and while they may have some defensive tricks under their sleeve, the Russian ground forces could be into Poltava before the Ukraine Army could formulate much of a response A simple act such as the US...

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...