Some more writ(h)ing

A long while ago, now, it somehow became an overriding theme for the media to approach everything as critically and negatively as possible. The reason for this was because the US government had been outright deceiving the voting public about a great many things during the Vietnam War, and this sort of "there is no doubt the government is lying, it is just how much" kind of approach was actually very informative and important. People really learned about the extent to which the government would go in order to ensure the agenda of various interests.

At this point, however, that theme has been run into the ground. It is as if every single person who comes into the public eye must be thoroughly examined and their inevitable seedy agenda exposed. It us as if every positive person has to be deconstructed to the point where their flaws are revealed. In addition, it's like every seemingly positive person that comes into the public eye is also being set up to be revealed as a dark creature indeed.

You have to wonder, is it the notoriety that corrupts the person, that they are pumped up to the braking point by the feeling of power or invincibility? Or is it the pressure of the media attention, that causes them to amplify a shocking dark side in order to get that attention turned off once and for all?

Because anyone who has observed the trajectory of the once-media-darling now discredited stars, televangelists, athletes, coaches, product spokespeople, politicians etc. sees that once that seedy underside is exposed, they disappear to be left alone, mostly in anonymity.

I don't think we are entitled to know as much as were told about these people. We are entitled to know some things in cases where they are asking for donations, making claims about products or processes. If they claim to be particularly moral along the lines of done traditional sense, for example, then they should live up to those claims. But if they don't, then they shouldn't be held to some popular sense of morality.

The astonishing thing is that many of these public figures seem to make claims that they are the exact opposite of who they truly are. It is very strange. Again, is it the notoriety that gives them this sense that they will not be found out?

An even scarier thought is that this can happen to anyone who finds themselves in this position. That some kind of switch gets flipped, and they start testing the limits of the "public eye".

It is just really weird.

What is going on?

HYPERDYSTOPIA

So, some wild shit has gone on. My phone went missing. I have not posted for a long time.

A bunch of bad/weird things. I think some !/+=###//==# has gotten hold of some of credit card info, because some weird crap showed up. My phone got stolen also yes.

But, I continue the word electronic music.

On Sunday nights, every third week, I play music. Mostly to an empty room, it is a restaurant and bar downtown.

I have laboured lo these many years and continue to do so. Someday I will be dead, but that has not occurred.

My thought is today the United States is being dismantled. It is very sad. Long term, the remaining population will be used for medical experimentation under the guise of "battling cancer" and other crap.

The various military equipment is being "recycled", that is, key components ate being removed so these are no longer working. New equipment under construction is being sabotaged, while the actual, viable designs for this new gear are being siphoned off elsewhere.

It is bad. Very bad.

De facto, at this point, the world can be sectioned into three new Orwellian "super blocs" that vie for control, but will never achieve it.  EuroNorAmWestPac, SinoMoscvastan, and IndoAfricaSudAm.

The key insight that brings the mind to th is conclusion is the appropriate de emphasis of the middle east. The middle east is part of IndoAfricaSudAm.l, the "resources bloc".

I am using a cell phone. It has auto complete. I have wished with it, and will no longer struggle worth it. Whatever it spotlights,b is right. It knows Howe typo spell better than I, so why not? App have your way you little protect of ship. This is encoding rust over could only Jupiter for.

So the world is not veering sliced up, and the last Rothschild had been given a taste for ecological woofers. Radiological woofers can only've be found in um spotless areas, where Baroda governments gave preserved there. There are being used as COLLATERAL. This was not supposed to be allowed. Bit, various DiCK heads permitted outit, one in particular.

The north important thing: the Indians, the native nations, become guarantors off the land and it's peoples by haVing signed their treaties worth peoples.  With THOSE peoples, not the banks or anyone else. Do you see? Triad is why so much history has been against three INDIANS, the Native Nations. Because they signed agreements with PEOPLE, not Banks.

So this is why one should escapade t top tribal lands.m, to be close to THE Indians.  My pHone will not allow net typo risk tippy add quicker as I need, doo you must doggie poor the works. The woofers that room am writing can be deCided, and them you will know.

The last hands of poker are being played. Various people have other purple under Control, and them there is a trail to the bank. Each one is anchored in the bank arty the end of the chain.

We don't have good without pull, we don't have pull without the bank. No food, no purple. New legions of purple, stupid people, super stupid, ate being pulled into three places once held by learning, growing people. Went? Because they ate used to serving dictators. Europe is being flooded with stupidites, who will gladly serve whomever butters their bread.

That is all. I am sitting and dying.

Poetry and poverty

You can't spell poverty without poetry...

Beautiful broken arches paper thin soles
Of my feet aching with every step
The world sucks, sucks me down with gravity
To the grave, gravity pulls down down
Over and over again the message repeats:
Will you take the challenge, the hollow challenge
Posed by talking ashtrays and open noses
Posing, losing tossing away the entire mess
Of a life most wasted, wasted living?
Do you have a living room?
A rhetorical question most well rounded,
Massive open lungs sucking air
Sucking hard, the mud and the stench
Covered by sweet blue ooze.
Dare we consider it, the future the past
At last we fast, nay eating another way to suck.
Broken broken, aching soles: feet in a nother dimension.
Slow moving, witless yet with just the right amount of fat.
Seven different nutrients all with deadly intent, still making
Meaning, greening, keening like a hawk on the roof the tiny
Birds are my food, with which to feed my brood.
One can be certified insane, but never certified cured.
Inured to the moment, pressing on to belong, for a song the odd intent.
Motion, lotion, consume the potion: inside an ocean of lament.
Where is the dignity? Where is the trust?
We see ineptitude and consume it with lust-- superior feelings,
Feeling superior like the giant lake: so much fresh water!
And so deep! Filled with wrecks and the corpses therein.
The Rex of Lakes, so potent are we! Moving like ligers on trampolines.
The mind numbing boredom of it all, an awl for the ears, keeping them open,
Painfully conceiving with every detected vibration some new strange being.
The ontology of monotony, providing nothing but a bolus of empty solace,
Solace! The cup of bleck, dark schmeck the dreck is endless. Feckless.
Recklessly he plods ahead, instead. Gravity sucks, does it suck to be dead?
It may suck less, yes: I'd guess, but why leap that chasm? some stupid last spasm
It never occurs.
A drifting off, more like. I held my mother's dying hand.
She lay so quiet, but whispering with each breath "I'm here".
Here, so dear, so near and still so far far away please fly.
I know you had to die, but now?
It was such a stupid time.
To think, that
they'd never leave.
Love,
My love.
The mourning dove each morning mourns,
Sorrows borne anew with every passing day
The paper thin soles, pain in stepping,
My instep instead intends to reach, to overarch,
But the balls! The Heels! The painful aching hurt,
It really sucks, this gravity. The force, not the weight of words.
Not the fetid lump of thought flow trapped in icy letters, characters all.
Strings of them, involved in feats of deliberate magnitude!
I helped move the lifeless body to the stretcher, with it's clever cover.
A vessel emptied, a life lived. But to the full? I can hope only that life
Lasts after life, my father's wife deserves this.
What a stupid time.
Young
Dumb
Man
Without a plan! Roamed the earth, sought refuge, refuge from that storm
To Which each and every one is subjected! Idiocy! Rather so.
Why would that one wave from the curb, from the curb on a street in a dream?
Waving and smiling, silently like that, dumb yet brilliant, my brave teacher.
Strange choice: it's said that all in a dream is from within you.
Of course it is, how could it be otherwise?
Playing a role, to control, the fear within. The storm without, raging.
Clattering against the side of the house,
Nuts loosed from the trees.
Walnuts, chestnuts: horse chestnuts these, simmering sounds, slamming hard like bullets
Into the whitewashed stone.
What a storm!
Trees uprooted. Made the news.
So much suffering.
Sells good soap, good news. Strage soap: Dove. Take the challenge.
See if film, that sinking stinking wretched type of film will apply,
Then dissolve. Soap scum, they call it. Soapy scum, tainted with lye.
With lies, swift abandon.
She lay there,
empty.
The vessel, so light! She'd finally lost all that weight.
stupid time. All the time is stupid time: you know that I know it,
And you know that you live it, we live it all the time.
The moment unfolds before our eyes.
What is it?
Connections are attempted then fail, the holy grail, we've now set sail again.
To distant shores, where snores abound. We've run aground, but the silly soldiers wait with spears.
Too many times I've ignored this way, these crimes of passion.
Too many times the lines are jagged, blurred. In a word: broken.
Unspoken and unfettered the fleeting thoughts will wander where they will.
I will, when I will it, it will become as one with the son in the Sun of summertime we manage peace.
Yet a piece of it remains, right here: in this son of one who was a son of one who...
Endless on and on. Stupendously stupid on and on.
Where are your friends?
Where is that light?
Friends are treacherous things, they lie.
Surprise you when you least expect it!
I'm engaged! I'm enraged! Turn the page, this stupid arrgh.
Arrgh! How stupid, lost for words?
They float, like fetid turds in bluest goo.
Was it her perfume? No, it was dinners doom, bought from food trucks,
Meters deep. To sleep, perchance to scream!
My wife hates it when I do that.
No solace there, hah. The cupboards bare. The mouse's lair,
Crumbs in piles abandoned.
For the cat's away, but even still the poison did its trick!
He embedded himself instead in the radiator, there to stink: that empty vessel.
Fucker. What a dick, to stink up the place like that. What the hell? Really.
You eat my food, you drink the morning dew and then leave a fucking putrid corpse you sack of shit!
Now, *that* sucks.
What a pain,
My paper soles. Paper thin, with dried leaf veins. So you say it, so it is.
Wish it were otherwise, that it were no so:
So sewing into one's final shroud, oneself.
With words,
Stitching quickly. No real reason.
I hate this season with it's wicked rain,
Cold like a bitch? No, I'm just bitching. Stupid saying, stupid times. Bitches are hot, like glowing irons.
Irons, glowing: now isn't that ironic?
Supersonic, superhypertronic stereophonic hijinks. With an ancient Bogen way.
Not the 42 Bogon, but the one with the golden hue. So true! My ancient box, glowing tubes.
Those things are silly, stupid things again. So much in here!
Like a shitty attic, full of just crap, really.
Stupid crap. What the hell?
What's that smell?
Oh yeah: that fucking mouse, jeez.
How lame.
Rain is sorrow, rain is the tears of the departed: it's a saying among the indians of the southwest.
They're the best, those ones: bright jewelry, so pure like morning sun over the mountains. Beauty all around.
Walking in beauty, erasing the dew, that simpering slippery sorrow of bygone souls.
I slipped on a toad, once. In the grass, slick with morning dew. Delivering papers.
I stepped down, hard, to toss the paper in its plastic sack,
Over the backyard fence.
That's when I stepped on the toad, and slipped. Caught my balance, but...
It was awful! Oh it crunched and yuck, eck: yeesh, etc..
Now that sucked. Especially for the toad.
"Thanks for that, you huge bastard!"
"I had a day planned, and everything"
And everything.
My... wow. Goodness.
Is there any left? I mean, to call it mine?
Who knows.
What a load, it pulls me down. Pressing on my paper soles, my bones,
In a sack. Relax, it's only a toad.
Now I've done it,
Slipped the track, lost the trail. Fail. No holy grail here, dear. My mom again?
I have no friends, like Deputy Dan.
Firesign Theatre, I was a fan. Now there's a bunch of bawdy bards!
Repackaged now, momentum lost, tossed to the wind. "A murmur in the heart of Philadelphia"
Their words, not mine: the only good ones on this page I think.
You're all over the place, a disgrace. Without a trace I wander, tasteless, mindless. Soul-less?
Goodness gracious, not at all like that. Please, why for? Wherefore? no more.
Rotten to the core.
Bore.
Hah, a label I will wear, you make it: I will wear it.
"Hello, my name is..."
Who gives a fuck? You have been forced to wear that label, I know it.
Like everyone else here at this fucking seminar.
"Hello, your name is..." some stupid dickhead forced to wear a fucking nametag, you dumbshit.
"But there was a door prize!"
Is that what it's come to?
A doorprize?
You emblazon yourself with your huge stupid nametag,
Practically forcing me to read it?
You are a fascist,
And that's all there is to it.
Put that on your stupid nametag,
Better yet, let me put it there: I will carve it in with a knife!
Hold still you bastard!
Ok: that wasn't fair.
Ok: there was a door prize. We all wanted it.
A dark paneled oaken door, with burnished brass accoutrements!
Who wouldn't want such a door?
What wonders must lay behind it.
I saw that door in a dream, I wanted it: I must have it.
In the dream it was a double door.
Stately, oaken, sturdy yet swinging open to reveal...
Clouds.
Just clouds?
What do you mean "just clouds"?
Clouds are vapor, water vapor. Icy, and superior, just like the aforementioned lake.
Feel them, can't you? Before the plague, you could see them from a plane, close up.
A dog barked. I heard it.
Time to let him in.

Ukraine, BRICS, future, end. Crazy talk, right?

The last blog post covered the importance of Ukraine. This one unfolds the plan that the Putinic Circle has for all of mankind. This will seem crazy, until you reflect on what has happened since 1991.

In the nineties, we in the US and Europe anticipated decades of unprecedented peace. The Soviet Union, slavering devourer of half of Europe, contributing to the delinquency of fledgling third world countries and scheming evil empire, had fallen apart like one of its many hastily poured concrete apartment blocks.

But, like many of the previously anticipated strings of peace decades, the first one was squandered. Rather than look forward, we sighed and started to wind down. The Cold War is done. No more Mutually Assured Destruction hanging over us. In the U.S., the biggest news that decade was the President receiving some extramarital genital stimulation while on the clock.

Meanwhile, Russia was forming the ex-Soviet states into a loose confederation, and seeing actual capitalist activity starting to occur. However, this activity was oddly "carpetbagger" in its nature, where people like the robber barons of Soviet anti-Western rhetoric came to life. This wasn't apparent at the time: we perceived what we wanted to.

People of means, who may have acquired those means in an unsavory way but maybe not, were collecting industrial assets. That's the way it should work, right?

But the acquisition of these assets was roped off for a select few. Oil and gas, steel, paper, mining, aerospace... all of these things that had been built with the intention of outpacing the West were being bundled into portfolios for exclusive investors. This was discussed in the previous post.

That activity created the oligarchy that we see today. Now, in the first years of the 21st century, we saw what we thought was a Russia finally entering into the economic compact of nations, to take a proper place therein. We weren't paying attention much, of course, at that time.

That was not happening. At the same time that we were heavily preoccupied with a semi-fictional war on terror, Vladimir Putin was planning the future of Russia, and using Russia's military in key places across western Central Asia in order to secure pipeline routes.  These were required in order to bring oil and gas from that region to European customers that could pay with hard currency. Industry and government working hand in hand to serve the purposes of a few... hmm, what's that called?

We were lulled into complacency by the mild Mr. Medvedev, seeing reforms slowly moving across Russia. We knew Mr. Putin was the real power holder, but we were seeing what wanted to. However, as we see now, all of these reforms could be rolled back almost overnight.

Back to the Russian "robber barons": most of the shell holding companies owned by the billionaires of Russia were created "offshore" through western banks and legal mechanisms. These holding companies are like empty shopping carts. The Russian assets they were filled with were secured by aforementioned dubious means, to the sound of grumbling, squawking smerds in Russia, some of more articulate of which were silenced for good. Only "smerds", this was becoming crystal clear: not a population whose will should be represented. Again, we in the west saw what we preferred.

Then, in the last few years, in the twinkling of an historical eye, we see the autocratic totalitarian streak that ran through the Soviet era reconstituted full force. People being murdered here and there in KGB-ish style. We see a large part of the Russian people embrace the long missing strong leadership embodied by Mr. Putin. We see the gas fields of Asia under fascist Russian control. We see a mechanized land army destroying chunks of European cities in Ukraine, changing borders.

Now, in the present: Putin has discarded any and all pretense, driven by the inspiration of nationalist thinkers who see Russia rightfully at the center the world as a dominant power. A plan had arisen from this.

And now, the plan is accelerating.

First, the BRICS bank will be created. Ukraine is a real pain at the moment, a problem, but will be brought to some "workable" arrangement with sufficient control.

This bank will allow the Oligarchate as well as shady elements within the Chinese establishment to launder any monies as needed. This network of capitalist reserves will fund various "projects", including those that deliver arms and other assets into the most capable anti-Western hands. Also, this is likely a bank without true audits.

Iran will assist in identifying and fortifying those elements in the Middle East that will best lead to the establishment of a Caliphate strong enough to impose borders that assemble the assorted squabbling ethnicities into more amenable bins. Iran will cover all with their newly built nuclear umbrella. Israel well shriek, but it won't matter, because it's all held in a state of "next move is final checkmate".

Russia economically subjugates northern Europe with a combination of energy deals and military demonstrations, along with promises of security. Europe sees how quickly Russia could move in militarily. The cities of Europe are valuable, valuable economic clockwork engines that can't be smashed even a little. Yeah, all that hands across the ocean stuff is romantic, but it doesn't stop speeding tanks with systems that blind pilots.

Europe ditches NATO, looking to Russia to supply security. The wolf is guarding the henhouse.

Now, Ukraine is a problem because it is a mechanized force's magic carpet into the soft belly of Europe. This is an important point. But it's also a demonstration area that will show how much of a European city just a little of the mechanized army can destroy.

Meanwhile, note how each of the oil producing  countries outside of the Middle East that the U.S. depends on are "infected" with an insurgency or rogue element of some sort. Nigeria has Islamist fanatics. Venezuela it's pro-Cuban factions. So all of these oil centers have receptacles for BRICS backing funds that will help them neutralize pro-American factions.

Then, suddenly,  the unified Islamist contingent will bring southern Europe under its military control, as the wolf holds open the door for the foxes, at the same time the wolf militarily subjugates any remaining European regimes that require it.

Security agreement? What security agreement?

Russia, the allied Caliphate, India and China now have de-facto control of all of Europe, and all of Asia. Brazil has de-facto control of South America.  China has also chipped away at Africa and Oceania, establishing de-facto dominance there.

European books and historical records are destroyed to make way for a new, improved history and culture. People are taught a new reality.

This is the plan of the "New Axis" for the next three decades. Ambitious? Yes. Science fiction? Maybe. Read a little about "Eurasianism", it worked out splendidly for Genghis Khan.

Dramatic? I will not say. Why I worry about this should be clear: should it happen, it is the end of artistic freedom, of human expression, of freedom of belief and the beginning an endless era where vast majority of humanity is reduced to utter slavery.

Possible? You decide.

Ukraine's Multi-Dimensional Importance

There are many things that are clear about the nature of Ukraine prior to the ouster of their President Yanukovych. One of the clearest is the extent to which the government economically sapped the people, requiring bribes and kickbacks at every stage of any business deal of significance, and the other is the extent to which the Yanukovych and Putin regimes were identical.

It's extraordinary how quickly we're learning all of this: the billions of dollars spent on the Sochi Olympics, with the obvious errors and cost overruns being something a source of humor, but also an indicator of how deep the corruption runs.

Then, the well documented rise of dubious oligarchs who somehow procured portfolios of Russian businesses despite living in a society where investment capital was nonexistent was mirrored in Ukraine, and even amplified.

Almost incredibly, these people seem to have no sense of duty to their foreign customer base, their local customer base or, with minor exceptions, any sense that they need give back at all to the society that they stripped of its commercial value.

We don't understand what it is like to live under a totally corrupt government. The police coming up and demanding money because you are in a public place. If you have a job, you need to bribe landlords to keep your place, along with extortion level rents-- and if your address is in a nicer neighborhood, you just might be visited by goons and asked to leave. If you own a business, the rules have been crafted so that every single transaction has some bribe or kickback involved. There is no judicial branch to appeal to: they're all in on it. There is no "congressman", "councilman" or news outlet to write to. They're all in on it.

This is the situation that precipitated the revolution in Ukraine, and it explains the behavior of all the people involved. If you were one of the thieves, you saw the jig was up and you ran. If you were one of the victims, you couldn't take it anymore. If you were retired, getting a pension, you were maybe upset by the upheaval.

This sort of revolution in Russia is what Putin fears most: that the Russian people that have been fleeced just can't take it anymore. They start to protest en masse, and the minor, then major, regime functionaries see that the jig is up: they stop following orders and go with the tide.

The grab of Crimea raised Russian's hopes for a while: at least someone else was getting fleeced, even better to the surprise and embarrassment of the snooty and foppish EU, and especially the arrogant and conniving anti-Russian US.

Over it all, their President commanding a podium on the world stage, confident and forceful: not like the clowning Obama or the flustered Merkel!

But with that grab, Putin wrote off Ukraine. If he could cause the rebellious country to fall apart, so much the better--  volunteer mercenaries wanting adventure might assist with that, they would be equipped. So, some eager beavers were given the opportunity to field such a force, and equipment staged near the border with Ukraine for their ready use.

This is what happened: it was planned well in advance, the core units were trained, more recruited. As an garnish, an inspiring story involving historical precedent and privilege was spun and wrapped around the whole plot.

People in Ukraine have experienced some real hardships. Many of the people in the East above 40 are not highly educated. Farmers, factory workers, miners. They were trained under Soviet rule not to expect much, but to expect at least something along the lines of welfare no matter what, and this runs through that demographic.

This is the key, you see: in the Soviet "workers paradise", everyone was supposed to own the means of production. If that was so, then their 'slice' was auctioned off at a bargain price, or maybe not even auctioned but simply "transferred" through corrupt clerical sleight of hand to a cunning oligarch.

Putin has identified the US as having the purpose of thwarting Russia: the U.S. wants Russia to have zero advantages in his view, and the U.S. strives to ensure Russia is marginalized, inconvenienced and disrespected.

It seems this way because Russia is a corrupt state and acts as one, where the U.S. is much less so. The U.S. prefers to work with countries that share the same sort of notions of reciprocal regulation, open investment and commerce, where Putin's Russia will put up with what they have to, but not because  they think it's a good idea. For example, foreign investors in Russia being arbitrarily dispossessed of their businesses through specific machinations of the bureaucracy is ok, if that's what the leadership wants and thinks they can get away with it.

What has happened iin Russia and Ukraine is truly frightening: people have been bribed, threatened, violently injured and worse so that a cadre of billionaires, are mentioned in the sanctions, could have their businesses for cheap and expand their portfolios. This is the way they operate, it is what they know and they want the whole world to be that way. No anti-trust mumbo jumbo, no FINRA, no SEC: just straight ahead ultra hostile no bounds set acquisition. They have amassed the wealth to be able to operate that way with impunity in Russia, and irritates them it's not like that everywhere!

So of course they see  U.S. as making up rules that make it hard for them to do what they want, just to irritate them. This is what an egomaniac would think.

Understand, then, that Ukraine is currently a battleground where this amoral, self-serving clique of billionaires wants a cozy pocket of corruption to operate in. Thanks to these Russian military adventurers, the attempt is is being made to carve this out of the eastern portion of the country. At the best, they will achieve their aim. At the worst, they will be a constant source of disruption for the government in Kiev unless they're completely defeated.

Russian arms and fighters will continue to be pumped into this situation unless the Ukrainian army can close off the border securely. Then, without resistance from the people actually living there in Donetsk and Luhansk --poor people, battered people, people who stand to lose everything-- the billionaires' henchmen will continue to have their way.

It doesn't seem hopeful: the city of Donetsk is built to hold a million people. It is an valuable economic asset. Even if all the non-combatants leave the city, the occupiers will force the Ukrainian army to destroy portions of it, which they already have. The night fighting equipment, stealth aircraft, the armed drones, the laser guided munitions that the U.S. is able to bring to bear in narrowly targeted strikes are not in Ukraine's arsenal.

Instead, both sides are using "Grad" (Hail) systems, aptly named multiple rocket launching systems, artillery, and air ground rockets that saturate an area with explosives. The sorts of things you aim the best you can and hope you don't hit the wrong things. The most useful platforms are those in the air, but the Russian occupiers now have support from sophisticated anti aircraft missiles.

Russia is acting as much "within the rules" as it thinks it has to-- that is, as much outside the rules as can away with. All the other countries involved are acting within the rules because they are the "keepers" of the rules, but also because it's comfortable.

It's coming down to this battle being fought in the hearts and minds of each Ukrainian involved: will they take arms and which side? Will they hide, and if so can they report intelligence on social media-- but for which side? Or will they leave, and for where?

Each decision inches the vector of history this way and that.

Flight 370 Scenarios

First of all, it is a very somber thing, that has happened to the people aboard that flight. I think of this situation and my thoughts become quiet: this appears to be a very awful thing, no matter how it happened. I'm not writing this as some sort of "sensationalism" because this blog is very much unsensational. There are few pictures, not a lot of interesting or useful info outside of a very narrow scope, and even what is provided within a narrow scope is spurious at best.
ies
Before I start, one thing first: CNN is really more than a little asshole-ish. I was listening to CNN on SiriusXM radio, and their whole angle was "boy, now that the good ol' US of A has their equipment in place, boy, we really have found out some stuff right?" and they would ask that question in one form or another, overtly or less overtly, to the various people they had on. Which is really pretty... well: asshole-ish.

But, I'm writing these things down so I can tweet the link and then maybe some feedback, but most likely not. I enjoy reading conspiracy theories, all kinds, to make my imagination run wild.

So here my "not too crackpot but most likely fairly crackpot theories" about Flight 370.

SCENARIO ONE: Really, really, really horribly bad misfortune:

The pilots flew as planned, towards where the flight was scheduled to be flying, and everything was lined up for a smooth flight. But moments after they sign off, a catastrophic mid-air collision with something occurs, or something wholly unexpected and damaging to the plane occurs, and the cockpit is rendered instantly a) depressurized and b) un-enterable, as well as leaving the pilots mortally incapacitated.

Because of this, in their last moments, the pilots react as best they can, heroically pulling the plane up and turning towards the next nearest landing zone with all their strength, but then lose consciousness and slump forward, bringing the plane down and swinging it on a wild heading. This has the effect of decompressing the cabin, which causes the emergency oxygen masks to drop down for the passengers. But these only last for so long, after which the passengers also slip into unconsciousness and then, so very sadly, pass on.

The plane makes a wild looping turn, and as a result it, horrifically, enters a "seam" between two radar zones. In addition, a fire was raging in Indonesia, which may or may not may have limited radar effectiveness there. However, the bottom line is that the plane's diversion goes unnoticed.

One or both of the heroic pilots' now lifeless bodies now slumps against the controls. The cold high altitude air along with the process of death renders them rigid: horribly, the turn they intended to make is followed by a random one, now tragically "locked" into place.

Another variation on this is the plane being damaged somehow, either through sabotage or natural act, where the pilots lose key systems, but retain yet others. Again, they set on a heading that will take them to the nearest landing area, but circumstances prevent them from carrying out that contingency before their end.

Another variation is a huge mistake: a very incorrect heading is put into the computer, which takes them in a very wrong direction. Somehow, this goes unnoticed by the pilots, and they fly on until it's too late. This seems very farfetched.

Another variation is that a malicious crew member with access to the flght deck for some reason decides to sabotage the flight and set the wrong heading into the computer. Or that a virtuous crew member somehow tries to turn the plane back around after both pilots become unable to fly. The pilots guide them through a turn, but then succumb to their illness, nobody is able to operate the plane, then never can make contact with the ground given the heading they are on? Also very unlucky and farfetched, but if not again really sad and awful.

The plane continues on it's course, hugely off course over the most remote reaches of the ocean, runs out of fuel and falls into the sea.

So awful. Too awful for words, a horribly tragic story that will bring about all sorts of preventive measures.

Actually, regardless of what actually happened, if any of these variations are remotely plausible, it should bring about all sorts of preventive measures to address this question-- what should happen if both pilots are unable to fly the plane in the absence of any sort of criminal plot, and there is either nobody on board who can fly it or the cockpit cannot be entered?

SCENARIO TWO: Crew complicity in a mass murder and possibly suicide

This is the more straightforward one or the most complicated one, depending on the variations, and there are several variations of this scenario. The primary gist is that one or more of the crew decides that, for whatever reason, this planeload of people is going to be one where everyone deserves to die, with possibly a limited exceptions, or not. But, they cause all the passengers to die, after which they plug in a course that will take them over the most remote reaches of the ocean, where they run out of fuel.

If it is just one pilot, he has to kill or otherwise incapacitate the other, then barricade himself in the cockpit. He decompresses the main cabin, deploying the masks for the emergency O2 supply which, as in the first scenario, finally runs out and kills all the passengers. Maybe it is both pilots. Maybe it is multiple crew.

Then, the plane is brought to a lower altitude and the remaining human(s) on board either cruise[s] on into the night psychotically enjoying the quiet and waiting for the plane to run out of fuel. Or, the plan never included dying:

Once the passengers are dead, the conspirator(s) rob[s] the passengers, taking as much money, jewelry, and other small valuable belongings as possible in the time remaining until the plane is over a planned drop point.

The conspirator(s) break out jumpsuit(s) and parachute(s), then parachute[s] from the plane over a coordinate where a previously anchored a small boat awaits.

The plane flies on into the night, eventually crashing into the sea.


SCENARIO THREE: similar to two, but with passenger hijackers.

Hijackers demand that the plane turn around and goes to Australia. They have thought ahead enough to demand headings that will take them around radars, but not far ahead enough to know how far they can get at what altitude with the fuel on board. The pilots try to convince them that there is not enough fuel to do what they want, but of course the hijackers don't believe them.

When it turns out the pilots were correct, they attempt a landing in the ocean, which is far too rough to handle such a landing.


Any of these things ends equally horribly for the people on board, but those are my crackpot theories.

Ukraine/Russia, part two: the other side of the coin

If you do a Google search on "how did russian oligarchs get so rich" the results are interesting. One, there are a great many articles answering the question with a title almost identical to the question. Two, there are a lot of answers from relatively reputable sources, and some from less reputable sources.

But the answers are interesting, and they start with the failure of the Soviet Union. Did the Soviet Union really fail, and if so, why?

Yes it really failed. It was not a coup, it was not a foreign orchestrated collapse: it failed. It failed because the only way it could keep going was to borrow money from some of the very same concerns that it's founding philosophy reviled and threatened to tear apart. This is an important point: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Why did it need all that money? A simple answer is that the Soviet Union plowed billions of dollars worth of effort, that is man years and materiel, into building a modern society without providing increasingly valuable material incentives to the people doing the building. What does that mean?

What it means is that if one has a leaky roof and miserable food, and you give one a chance and say "hey, work for me and you can earn a fixed roof and better food", then they will work for you only if that actually happens. In many cases, that did actually happened in the Soviet Union: people got more than they had by working for the state apparatus.

But, once you have a fixed roof and better food, then the next stretch of work you do should earn you even more and better: a patio, or a bigger apartment, etc.. Thatt only makes sense: because if effort "X" pushes you five miles, then that same effort should push you another file miles, or at least close to that. If it doesn't, then you don't expend the effort. Why bother?

Once they saw that that next five to ten miles was going to be very hard, the Soviet state put huge amounts of effort into telling people that the things they had were enough, and not to look at the things people in the West had as desirable, while at the same time all Soviet plans revolved around making the Soviet state have everything and more than the West had. It couldn't, because it wasn't realistic, and things that are unrealistic become unreal. So the Soviet union collapsed.

I didn't mention anything about corruption, because it is a term that implies a certain context. The context is that there is a society which values rules based on the rules' intrinsic value: you are honest because it is a virtue, because truth is highly valued, because truth is what lies at the basis of all advancement and knowing. This is a belief system, you can ascribe to it or not. This particular society chose not to ascribe to it. There was no corruption because it was all corruption. Rules were written, there was a constitution and written documents describing rights, but there was a societal unspoken agreement that these things were meaningless: for show.  People couldn't leave the country, they simply were not allowed to unless they escaped.

Why was there such an agreement? Because people had been systematically murdered, imprisoned and banished based on being processed by state sanctioned miniature lynch mobs who decided that the accused had too many material possessions or were otherwise undesirable. So it had been established as a key tenet of the system that human life was not intrinsically valuable, therefore anything deriving from the notion that human life had intrinsic value was null and void. So the State could write these things in as flowery a language as they might like in order to impress Western idealogues, but everyone involved knew it was a fabrication: that some denouncements in the right ears could ruin a career or end a life. The only way to get ahead was to game the system, to build alliances. So people became very smart at doing that.

Back to the subject at hand: because the State did put a lot of money and effort into certain things, when it collapsed, those things still existed on a fairly large scale: paper mills, concrete plants, oil refineries, aircraft manufacturers. Because people also knew where the state started, and where it ended off. They were clever survivors, they were the industrious, they did build things, they were smart: people who wanted to accomplish things and found a way to do this despite everything else. Because they had some values that made then want to build a better world for their own pride and for their children. Because they were people who cared about learning, because truth could be found there.

But, at the time things collapsed, all of it was in disrepair, almost all of it had been mismanaged. Some factories produced aimlessly. Others were filled with betrayed and hostiled workforces.

Even so, these things were worth something. How much? and to whom?

Now, what SHOULD have happened? Wasn't all this now the property of the people? Shouldn't some sort of voucher or share system been put into place, where everyone got an equal number of shares? Then, shouldn't it have been sold off to the highest possible bidder, who would then fix it up and get it running again? Then shouldn't the people have been able to redeem their shares, or hold onto them?

Maybe. But who would make sure that would happen? Probably.But the government wasn't going to sprout a unified patrician wing overnight, if ever.

It seems like the absence of the notion of a socially active, philanthropic patrician class in Russian society is a product of its isolation. i'm not an expert, but it seems like the most notable projects to "improve the quality of Russian life" were undertaken, this was of the sort of scale and type that would further enrich the rich. Philanthropy is viewed skeptically, as a way to avoid taxes, launder money, or provide a project as means for an associate to snag a lucrative contract. It takes many years, maybe generations, of wealth and stability to produce such a patrician outlook, tempered with pragmatism, and with a certain preference for a cherished cause. You have to focus on something.

But that didn't happen because of all that had gone before. To someone in the West, it was a huge gamble to invest. Some investment occurred, and some of that was gleefully gobbled up by ex-Soviets with a grudge. Very risky, very adventurous investment that would not pay off in the short term. But, for someone in Russia, there was no capital other than state owned, which meant borrowed or "liberated" capital.

How could anyone afford anything? Well, because Soviet society was corrupt, shrewd and connected people of course did have more than others and that was that. Because the remaining society continued to be corrupt, certain clerks could be handsomely bribed to record various transactions that transferred the ownership of any number of these things that had never had ledger sheets, or appraisals, or valuations. Who could blame them? All of a sudden you are in a position where you can finally leave this ailing country that was falling down around your ears: a nice bribe under your belt would do the trick. From the point of view of the would-be oligarch, a million dollar bribe that helps close the deal on a $100 million dollar business is a huge return on investment. Theoretically, if the government is corrupt all the way up, so much the better. It's just a matter of the right amount in the right pocket.

This same sort of things happened in the 1980s in Texas in the US, although somewhat in reverse, when real estate had been artificially elevated through the machinations of government assessors working hand in hand with real estate speculators with large "extended families".  Rural real estate near booming cities could be had cheaply. They would pick some of this up, flip the land between one another, sometimes within hours, back and forth, and with each transaction the value would go up. Use the equity to secure loans to build developments on that land: a game of hyper-Monopoly that was finally unraveled when the developments didn't sell as well as projected.

Nobody is unblemished by some kind of corruption, either handed down by history or directly. But how many revel in corruption, owe their existences to it?

So, the oligarchs are really the most advanced products of Soviet society: cunning in their ability to work the crumbling Soviet system, shrewd in their choices of business alliances, quick to learn the nuances of gaming the Western system: setting up offshore holding companies where they could hide their direct association with transactions, pragmatic in their acquisitions and willing to apply ruthless, violent force if needed.

There is a saying: "Earth's Security, Human Integrity". It is true: if large scale abandonment of integrity occurs, this includes the abandonment of the discernment of the valuation of truth and the lack of courage to state it, this results in the inabilty to be true witnesses to the evidence of the real consequences of our actions, and we lose the planet.

This is an electronic music blog, why the politics?

Sorry.

Because some really cool electronic music comes out of the region in question

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thlqGlP_XcE

There is also some very credible industrial music that is a bit foretelling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBL7yjvQ3E

The Russian sense of music syncretism is different, a different angle. Some purists might say inappropriate, but actually mostly very smart.

What I think Ukraine should do now.

The logistics involved in making Crimea part of Russia are not insignificant. Russia will require the cooperation of Ukraine, and it will take a long time to accomplish.

In the meantime, there will be all sorts of sponsored subversion of the government as it attempts to get things on the right path. So, the government should pre-empt the subversion: announce it will accept petitions calling for referendum in each Eastern Province that shares a border with Russia. The petitions will need to have 100,000 valid Ukrainian citizen signatures.Once the petitions are submitted, then arrangements will be made to hold and schedule these votes in each province, where the ballot is straightforward and not deceptive.

The government should announce strongly, compassionately, that its main interest is that the people of Ukraine puruse liberty and happiness in a brotherly and sisterly environment. If a province thinks they have a better chance of doing this with Russia, then so be it.

If Ukraine is going to move forward, it doesn't need the constant turmoil in the eastern provinces-- this turmoil will be bankrolled by the Putin government. The call for petitions will pre-empt and re-focus the notion of secession as a practical matter. Is this an issue that has been truly burning in people's hearts in the east? Or is it planted there by foreign interference? Establishing a process to determine this will subdue more radical actions that are aimed at supporting Russia's will, and then will allow the government to proceed with removing corruption and setting things right.

Vladimir Putin, a bystander's unwanted opinion...

Everybody has an opinion on Vladimir Putin since the Crimea Incursion has begun. Some are very learned, others are very sensationalistic, others are complimentary and yet others are scathing. So, because everyone seems to have an opinion, here is mine, which is probably both none and some of the above.

I'm writing this in very simple language, so a translation program should be able to effectively convey what is being said.

The Summary of the article is this:

More than anything, the situation in Crimea is an experiment, and an opportunity for increasing understanding. The integrity of the Ukrainian state is important, and the recognition that this is a violation of that integrity is important, but this is much less some kind of wild overture to WWIII than it is a very calculated re-set of borders drawn in Soviet times, in this case by a Soviet leader who happened to be an ethnic Ukrainian.

As always, Oil. It's about oil and natural gas. Russia has a lot of oil, and it surrounds countries with a lot of oil. The Russian Federation is truly a federation, it encompasses a great many different ethnic groups with which Americans are not familiar because we've rarely had a chance to encounter them: how would we? Since the invention of the airplane to the early 1990's, they were under the control of the Soviet Union and even so would be too poor to travel here, and since the 1990's most of them are still too poor to travel. It is not out of the question to see a Yakut tourist at the grand canyon, but it is unlikely. At any rate, this large number of ethnic groups is what makes the Russian Federation a federation. So, while the "outward face" of Russia are these dour, pale gentlemen we see on the news, the Russian Federation consists of a wide assortment of ethnic groups, many of whom are the majority in their respective historical geographic regions.

It seems that the goal of the Russian government is first to ensure complete control of oil emanating from the areas inhabited historically by non-Russian ethnicities, as well as to control the oil emanating from other countries in Central Asia. Enormous pipelines have been built with the aid of multi-national oil corporations, and Russia needs to secure these pipelines. Some questions are how much Russia should profit from this oil, how much of that should really be under Russian control, given that a lot of this oil does not actually emanate from within Russian Federation territory. But there are not questions mostly of politics, or military strategy. These are questions of commercial ethics and international trade. Surely, the Russian Federation should get some compensation based on oil coming through pipelines on its territory: it bears the burden of securing and hosting these pipelines. The question of how much should be fairly negotiated.

Now, as a part of the "tide of history", the remnants of what was once the Soviet amalgam are being undone, this amalgam which included countries and ethnic groups forced into that regime's control, and this has resulted in a great deal of tension reduction.

But, in the eyes of the Russian Federation's leadership, there are some things that remain to be undone, and one of these is the national assignment of sovereignty over Crimea. Because the area has a particular strategic importance, the rather brutal method of invading this area is a huge tension generator. It is a clear breach of international law. But what is more important is what happens next, not what is happening now. It may be that an "all clear" is sounded, the Crimean populous votes overwhelmingly to remain Ukrainian and Russia withdraws once Ukraine is stable and the status quo continues. This seems unlikely, but it should be a possible outcome given a true respect for the will, rights and safety of the people in Crimea. It is important that the Russian leadership indicate that they would honor such an outcome.

In my opinion, which of course is based on some intensive internet reading, a potential grain of innate intelligence and a sense of past vs. future, the question of the national assignment of responsibility for Crimea should be left up to the people who inhabit that place. That the Russians forced the issue is maybe not a horrible thing, although it was maybe a horribly done thing.

But it should also be the case that Crimeans who want to live in Ukraine should be able to relocate there freely, and that there would be guarantees that they'd be compensated at fair market value for the property they leave behind. Various bases within the region would be abandoned or held depending on this decision, and the Ukrainian armed services people therein free to go if the decision went that way, taking any and all equipment. Strategic importance aside, it is a more temperate area, much of it having the value of sea front property, and moving to back Ukraine proper would be seen as something of a downgrade, live moving from Florida or Puerto Rico to Iowa or Pennsylvania.

So: Yes, it is an invasion, a breach of sovereign borders and an attempted "land grab". Yes, it is against international law. Yes, it is both the culmination of a long term plan and rabid opportunism on the Russian leadership's part. It was also a somewhat arbitrary assignment in the first place, which once the Soviet Union dissolved, an international border caused a more rigid formalization of that assignment. Even so, locally in Crimea, there is corruption, a sense that the Russians ran the place much more than the Ukraine, and also there is the reality of the people of Crimea being provided some economic opportunities by the Russian naval presence. At the same time, there is a long term record of Russian disregard for Ukrainian regulations in several aspects.

The West had some benefit from the arrangement of Crimea being a part of Ukraine, where there was some sense of Ukrainian control over the premiere base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.  If Ukraine went to NATO, the Russians would be in the awkward position that the US is in with regards to Guantanamo, where that base's "landlord" is a hostile regime. However, Sevastopol is a much more substantial naval base, and having to rent that sort of facility from NATO would be a very odd conundrum for Russia.

This is key, then: Putin has gambled, but he has gambled based on a reasonable premise. That premise being that Ukraine will become more integrated with the EU, and that Ukraine will likely become a member of NATO. But in the meantime, there are some things to attend to, and some obvious realities to assert: Russia and Ukraine are economically, historically, culturally and linguistically linked. There are advantages to that for both countries.

In terms of the EU and US interests, they see the cards falling this way and that, but the larger trend is that Ukraine will be more aligned with the West than previously. At the same time, a shrewd and capable Ukrainian ruler would work both sides of the equation, to get the best of both worlds. Recently, this ruler has made some pointed and poignant observations about a possible hollowness in the promise held out by the west. This is all for the better, because acting with integrity is what is most important in this particular situation.

In addition, there is something interesting occurring not-so-behind the scenes. The notion of the BRICS bank (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that would be established along the lines of the IMF, and which would loan money to regimes in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere as an alternative to IMF controlling that same loan and the conditions thereof (in reality, it is likely six of one, half a dozen of the other: there must be conditions to a loan. At the same time, competition is supposed to be good for the consumer).

For BRICS to be solid, Russia must consolidate control over the materiel running through the pipelines across it's territory, and be solidly regarded as equivalent to NATO in order to negotiate most successfully.

In addition, there are layers to this that run deeper, with regards to large religious concerns and the control they exert throughout their various regions of the world.

But, mostly, right now: it is an experiment, and an opportunity for better mutual understanding. Because change happens, it happens in a way we'd prefer it not to, but even so it can surprisingly turn out for the best


In Depth

We are well aware of the colonial European powers having drawn arbitrary borders throughout the world, in Asia, Africa, North and South America. There have been battles between peoples within these borders to retain or even extend them, mostly in the 17th-20th centuries, and in very many cases the matter is settled.

It is also the case that some borders that were more or less arbitrarily drawn by the Soviet regime between the various political units in Central Asia and what is now the Russian Federation.

Included in this set of semi-artificial borders was the assignment of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. This was done by an ethnic Ukrainian Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev. True to form for a Soviet leader,he used his office to his personal advantage and to the advantage of his favored constituency. This can also said to hold true for any political leadership, and may be a measurable as a "matter of degrees" where at some point the needle on the gauge points into the "corrupt" zone, and in fact countries have been ranked based on the perceived level of corruption present.  This is not to condemn, but to illustrate the prevailing level of integrity throughout the world.

There is an interesting saying, and I don't recall where I saw it, but the saying is this:

EARTH'S SECURITY: HUMAN INTEGRITY

This is a very first world notion, that somehow just by being good people we ensure our future. The idea is this: one must be objective, selfless and weigh everything against a true measure, otherwise one is lost. If many are subjective, selfish and do not weigh by a true measure, then all are lost.

This notion is abstract and has a lot of dependencies. If one is starving and scrabbling for food, being selfless is a difficult thing to achieve. If one is oppressed, and integrity can only be exerted under pain of punishment, then this is likewise difficult.

Conversely, if one has the potential for a great payoff, one that will set them up for life at the cost of their integrity, then it is also difficult.

With regards to Crimea, as horrified observers, we are at risk of losing objectivity, and we grapple for a sense of the true measure to apply.

The true measure that is held out to us is the democratic will of the people in Crimea. But of course there is a finger on the scale of that true measure:  the election is being constructed in a way that doesn't seem to impose any notion of a minimum vote, and the ballots are being constructed in a way that favors the "unity with Russia" choice, then after it occurs and we don't like the outcome, we are reduced to squabbling about the fairness of the construction of the election.
 
Like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, like apartheid South Africa, operates a great deal in terms of ethnic groups, ethnic "homelands". So, the picture of the Russian Federation is something like this:

In a way that picture is very similar to the United States, where the early colonies that became states are bunched together in the east, and then the "frontier region" states are much larger and sparsely populated. The difference is that, in the Russian Federation, the people who traditionally lived in those frontier regions still exist and are the majority in many of those political units.

In addition, during the Soviet era, there was both incentive-based and forced Russian settlement in historically non-Russian areas. The theory was to ensure an ethnic Russian presence in the frontiers that was loyal to the Moscow regime. Whether or not this played out in practice and continues to play out is unclear. But when looking at the colored blotches on the map, one should view each blotch as having a central city as it's capitol, and more as a network of city states connected by roads, railways and air routes, than a quilt of densely populated regions.

Now, Vladimir Putin is the President of this federation, this network, which is extremely large and complex. When something is this large and complex, it helps to have important areas well defined and controlled. This control, and the impression of having this control, has been something of an historical obsession with Russian rulers. There is a reason. In many places, the winters are very difficult, you have to have food stored in order to make it through. You have to heat buildings and houses You have to have sewage treatment, roads and railroads that operate in harsh winter conditions.

In a more temperate region where winters are mild and resources more abundant, there is naturally a sense that things will tend to go well more often than not. In a harsher region, there is a sense that things will go wrong more often than not. When this is the sense of how things go, you want to have more control, to avoid more things going wrong. This seems utterly natural, then: not only does the government want to exert more control, but the governed want to make sure that things are in place to get through the winter. If this means some hardship, then that is borne with varying degrees of acceptance.

So this is a disadvantage, that much of the far flung federation is sparsely populated. People do tend to cluster in cities, connected with some logistical network for supply, which makes it easier.

However, the Russian Federation does have a great advantage: it has a lot of oil under it, and it surrounds neighbors that have a lot of oil, in such a way that their oil has to go through Russia-- through Russian based pipelines-- to get to market. These pipelines are the easy route from point A to point B. The pipelines have been built in concert with multi-national oil corporations, whose economic power operates in a separate realm from that of public funded works. This oil and gas is a big advantage, and they are trying to maximize that advantage, to ensure they can always get through the winter. This is maybe overly naive/simplistic, but my reading supports this view.

Now, imagine that after all that oil or natural gas goes through Russia, it has to go through one last neighbor to the West in order to get to market, to be sold, in order to have what's needed to get through the winter. At that point, it is out of Russian control. 

That neighbor is, for the most part, Ukraine. That is the one neighbor you really want to be able to depend on.  However, just recently, that neighbor has become unstable, and it can't pay it's bills, which include some really big bills owed to Russia.

So, what would you want to do if you were President of the Russian Federation? You'd want to make sure that instability was no longer an issue, that control was in place, and you'd also want to be able to recoup any losses from those unpaid bills, by getting something tangible in hand. Like, real estate.

That's pretty much what he did.

Simply put, Russia is sitting on a great deal of oil, and also sitting around a great deal of oil. Oil, natural gas, a whole bunch of it. And they want to sell it at a good price to people who can afford to buy it. 

There is one thing, which is an important thing, and that is getting it to the market. They need pipelines. Huge, immensely long pipelines. But these can afford to be built, because after all they pay for themselves in months. However, they also need to go across some other countries before they can get to the "tail end" of the distribution system where the paying customers are.

That is where Ukraine is very important. Ukraine is important because a great many pipelines run through it. Natural gas, a lot of it, and pipelines, so many they could almost lose track of where the gas is going, because there is so much.

The customers are the western economies that need it and can afford it. Russia is in a very good position in this regard, because their customers are well established and generally prosperous. However, Ukraine, where the pipelines run through, is not. 

Why is it not? It has rich farmland, it has a frontage to the Black Sea where ships can offload, it borders several other countries, all of which are members of the EU with the exception of Belarus. Bordering EU members include Poland, the sixth most populous member of the EU.

The Ukrainian pipelines, come in straight from Russia on its eastern border and fan out like the tines on a leaf rake on its western border. Ukraine's culture is historically entwined with Russia's, where in the late 800s AD the seeds of what became the Russian Empire were planted by the rule of a few Vikings, with a strong ethical and legal code, and who ruled over a vigorous population of Slavs who tended to quarrel but were also situated in some very prosperous farmland. It seems that the original Viking population was rapidly and totally assimilated during and after setting things in order, which included conquering the city that became Kyiv. This wide flung, loose confederation of the Kievan Rus found itself situated favorably around a valuable pipeline of that time, the eastern trade route known as the Silk Road. 

Now, whether the Rus were Viking mostly or Slavs mostly, or some of both; or whether or not what is now Russia proper was once all "Bulgars", or whether it was once all "Khazaria" or some of both, is something that maybe only a few people care about. But the point is that the richness of the trade routes required that somebody guard it from raiders, and that fortified cities be built along those routes where goods could be traded and preparations could be made for the next leg of the trader's journey. By the late 800s AD, the Khazars who build Kyiv were conquered by the Rus, which became the Kievan Rus, all in that area that we now call Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

What is more purely Russia, historically, is not the huge sprawling "bear atop the continent", but the area that extends east from the border of Ukraine, which is near the Don River, to the Urals in it's southernmost part, and east and from the borders of Belarus, Latvia and Estonia to the Urals in the northernmost part. 

I mention the Don River because it is considered somewhat a geographical boundary. To the west of the Don, there are some Turkic people, but mostly other peoples. To the east of the Urals, there are mostly nothing but Turkic peoples and Russians that were purposefully transplanted there in order to help cement the Soviet Union. Many of the subdivisions of the Russian Federation contain specific types of Turkic peoples, or Siberian peoples: ethnicities that few people in the US have ever even heard of. That is a generalization, but the current Russian Federation has 83 subdivisions ranging from single major cities to giant territories that span the federation from north to south, and there at least as many ethnic types encompassed by these subdivisions.

At any rate, speaking geographically, what is more purely Russia consists of a relatively small portion of the overall Federation, and it does not encompass the areas where the bulk of the oil is being found.

Now imagine that you're President of this place. Imagine you really, truly want this place to be the greatest it can be. You need to really know what all those ethnic types are, and you need to be able to help them out when they need it. This is important, because many of these places are very hard to reach, especially in winter.

Again, the winter can be very hard. Again, this kind of winter makes for a certain kind of thinking: you want to constantly maximize your advantages, and minimize your disadvantages, because a mistake can mean you don't have enough to get through the winter. So if you are a good governor, a ruler and a man of the people, you want to make sure all of your people can always make it through the winter at the very least. In a federation so large, just this is not simple.

Then, you want to trade. You need to compete with the rest of the world, because what some of the best advantages come from being able to operate in the global marketplace. You need good, desirable products at a good price, with high availability. But that which you can produce locally that brings high value internationally is good to have a lot of.

What better thing to have than oil? It will not last indefinitely, but that only makes having a lot of it a big advantage.

So, as the leader of the Russian Federation, you want to continually maximize and ensure that advantage. Vladimir Putin is doing this. There are civil rights, human rights problems that exist that the West doesn't agree with. He is popular some places, despised in others. Not too much different from any other world leader in that regard.

But to have laid in wait for Crimea to be picked like a plum, to have engineered the Georgian defeat and partitioning of its ethnic enclaves, this is very troubling to Western eyes.

Is it the further undoing, additional de-Sovietization? Setting things straight, tidying up? Of is it chess-board like skirmishing with Western interests. Or both? It manifests itself as being both irrespective of intent.

Imagining this through European eyes, you are troubled. You are dependent on this gas and oil from a neighbor that has proven to have a militaristic, intractable, greedy and opportunistic way of looking at things. You have some local production, but it is further away from many of the centers where gas is needed and it is not enough. You can bring it in on tankers from the US, which has an abundance of natural gas and which trades fairly, but this is costly and can be dangerous.

How can you ensure that this Russian trading partner always acts with integrity, and uses strength wisely? Mostly, you must negotiate from a position of power.

But this is a big question. It is a big question for Russia, it is important for Russia because it truly is in a place to be a long term, stable and valued trading partner that can truly be prosperous and peaceful, and it is a big question for the world. It must act with integrity. It must act with wisdom and as a predictable, peaceful presence.

So, again, more than anything, this is both an experiment, and an opportunity for better understanding.

Playing every third Sunday Night at the Black Squirrel in DC.

Yay!

Blow the dust off the blog, Some realizations

Just a brief note, the previous post had some things quoted and they ended up getting weird background/font colors applied. This was not some kind of auto-redaction applied by Google under order of the NSA or such. As far as I know anyway :).

This is to post something that I posted elsewhere in a discussion on a message board:

"...like everyone else there are some things the gov't has done here there and everywhere that I don't like. But I have come to the following realization about the world we live in:


You don't hear a great outcry of "it's not fair" from the masses in a way that intends to protect the rights of minority "b" where there's a majority of "a" anywhere else in the world but in the first world.

In most of the rest of the world in any given country it is the primary focus of majority "a" to get minority "b" to either die or go somewhere else, regardless of the label you want to insert for either a or b. In these countries, this condition is not regarded as some kind of inequity or deficiency. It is regarded as the way to be. In many cases, the governments of these countries will pretend it's otherwise in order to get aid money, and there are cases where once they get the aid money they apply it to getting rid of the minority opposition in their country.

So I guess if you look out on that political landscape and you find yourself having to operate in it, there would be a tendency[on the part of the first world] to adopt a viewpoint of  'well, those people are f'ed up no matter how you cut it, so maybe I should use that to my advantage'.

Every single first world country in one way or the other has used developing nations' dismal backwater racist ethnist political tensions to their advantage and reaped big economic benefits."

Now, this is kind of a different thought for me. I like to think of an idea world where everyone in some kind of position of influence is trying to reconcile issues between "majorities" and "minorities". People like music, everyone likes music, so eventually everyone can "sing along", rise above, dream and aspire and so on.

But if you think about it, not only is it not the case, but it is exception: most any country outside of the first world Europe and North America that countries have or are trying to reconcile their internal differences.  Instead, elites among the majority become the "haves" and the rest become "have nots". As long as the majority gets to identify with the "elite haves" they feel like they are haves as well, or at least they have a chance to become so. It works in a similar way with the elities in the minority-- the minority thinks "well, if we can only do this or that we could be there too." And in some cases they do, but most of those cases are in the "first world" where the laws and processes exist for people to invent, patent, create businesses and stay in business without having to pay extortionist bribes

You can be alarmist, or smug, or concerned, or shrug, but you pretty much have to say that is the reality.

 

Upcoming new song collection, and IronyFest

I will be putting out another collection of songs in that unified set once referred to as an "album".

My 11 year old daughter asked me "What's an album?" the other day, and I had to explain about records and record covers and how they were kind of like a photo album so they called them albums. I was about to look up the actual etymology of the word "album" when she sensed my intent and said "ok thanks" and ran from the room.

But because you, dear reader, cannot run screaming from the room, I offer the following from the most wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary:

album (n.)


1650s, from Latin album "white color, whiteness," neuter of albus "white" (see alb). In classical times "a blank tablet on which the Pontifex Maximus registered the principal events of the year; a list of names." Revived 16c. by German scholars whose custom was to keep an album amicorum of colleagues' signatures; meaning then expanded into "book to collect souvenirs." According to Johnson, "a book in which foreigners have long been accustomed to insert autographs of celebrated people." Photographic albums first recorded 1859. Meaning "long-playing gramophone record" is by 1951, because the sleeves they came in resembled large albums.

...and so we have it. So a digital blank tablet will be filled with the principal musical endeavors of the past while since I put out the last one that was resoundingly ignored, due to my marvelous marketing aplomb which consists of doing hardly any marketing at all. Because I refuse to sully my pursuits with such things, you see.   It's been so long since I've written anything, because I've been very busy with all kinds of things which appears to the be the condition that the world wishes all humans to be in.

 There is something interesting about the most recent revelations regarding the various security arms of the United States' of America collection of intelligence from within its' borders in a manner usually reserved for scheming foreigners.

 The revelations come from yet another whistleblower, conscientious leaker, attention seeking nobody, constitutional idealogue-patriot or hated and hateful treasonous leech (depending on one's point of view). It is very disturbing information, really, that all of the big companies that provide information and communication services are involved in turning over information about what goes on across those services to the Gum Mint, in a way very reminiscent of the way that the nefarious Chinese Communist Gum Mint monitors their population's online activities.

 So what the hell is going on nowadays?

My conclusion is that the 21st century so far has been nothing less than an IronyFest thus far. Let's recap:   

• In the first year of the new century, religious extremists who support a rollback to a medieval social structure break the lying, stealing and killing commandments and use high-technology jet airplanes to destroy modern architecture. Their green cards arrived in the mail shortly thereafter.    

•  In the first decade, we find out that the people who so carefully ensure that money is lent to people who reliably pay it back are in fact involved in a free-for-all mortgage application blowout where manicurists who claim that you make $300K get a loan that is "robo-signed". In response to that, the financial institutions crack down by raising credit card interest rates as high as possible.

•  Then, we found that the people who apply the sort of advanced mathematical calculations to package "derivatives" basically pay the people who are supposed to apply the same sort of mathematical calculations to rate the validity of those packages, and we find no real advanced math used at either end other than that applied to calculating what they might be able to get away with, and then that which is used to send signals to their Ivy League shoulders in order to elicit a shrug.    

•  THEN, we found out that our Gum Mint was doing all kinds of things that seemed like the sorts of things we wouldn't want honest, straight-shooting, fair dealing, God-trusting Americans to do because somebody gave a private in the Armed Forces the key to all of the information about everything sort of embarassing. OK, well: they are operating in a world full of sneaky, hateful people that can't be trusted, so they sometimes have to get their shirtsleeves a little dirty.    

•  Now, we find that the Gum Mint believes that we honest, straight-shooting, fair dealing, God-trusting Americans that live right here in U.S.A. are sneaky, hateful people that can't be trusted, and they need to collect a lot of information about the phone calls and emails they send, just like the Chinese Communist Gum Mint does.   We found this out because a guy who was hired as a contractor was apparently let in on the scheme, and he told everybody because he thought it was so not right...    

•  And then, he ran away to China.    

 IronyFest 2000-2100 !!!

[edit] Forgot something, In China, this week there is a holiday. The holiday is celebrated throughout the country and even throughout South East Asia, it has been celebrated for centuries. It is the Duanwu Festival also called the "Dragon Boat Festival", and the "Double Fifth" because it occurs on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese calendar. From Wikipedia:

"The sun is considered to be at its strongest around the time of summer solstice ("mid-summer" in traditional East Asia) when the daylight in the northern hemisphere is the longest. The sun, like the Chinese dragon, traditionally represents masculine energy, whereas the moon, like the phoenix, traditionally represents feminine energy. The summer solstice is considered the peak annual moment of male energy^[5] while the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, represents the peak annual moment of feminine energy. The masculine image of the dragon is thus naturally associated"

People get in really big canoe-type boats that are decorated as dragons and race them: it actually looks like it is pretty exciting, community-building holiday. People cooperating to paddle these boats as fast as possible.

There are some differing academic opinions as to the reason for the holiday, shrouded in antiquity as its origins are. The belief is that it was always practiced widely, possibly as an ancient celebration, and also that particular historical figures, both who died in water-related suicides, are associated with the holiday. The admiration for these figures caused villagers with boats to race to save the revered figure from the drowning, and then if too late they could at least recover the body to prevent the dishonorable devouring by river wildlife, so they could be buried with the respect they deserved..

The best  historical figure as a candidate for the subject of the celebration is:

Qu Yuan who was a scholar and  high ranking minister in the state of Chu who advocated an alliance of smaller states against the expanding Qin state, However, he was discredited in a false way by a scheming colleague, and was exiled, During his exile, he wrote one of China's most highly regarded collections of poetry. Long story short, Qu Yuan was very wary of the growing power of Qin and opposed any cozying up to this giant. His ruler and other advisers thought otherwise, and so Qu was out. In exile, he wrote the first collection of Chinese poetry with an author's name attached to it.

But while he pondered and wrote poetry in his exile, sure enough Qin had maneuvered politically and militarily to capture the capital of Chu.  His advice not to trust Qin was good, all along, and his exile while it was being ignored was all the more painful. Now that the worst case scenario had played out, his despair became unbearable, and he walked into a river carrying a large rock, drowning himself.

Popular legend has it that villagers carried their dumplings and boats to the middle of the river and desperately tried to save Qu Yuan after he immersed himself in the Miluo River, but were too late to do so. However, in order to keep fish and evil spirits away from his body, they beat drums and splashed the water with their paddles, and they also threw rice into the water both as a food offering to Qu Yuan's spirit and also to distract the fish away from his body. However, late one night, the spirit of Qu Yuan appeared before his friends and told them that he died because he had taken himself under the river. Then, he asked his friends to wrap their rice into three-cornered silk packages to ward off the dragon. 

These packages became a traditional food known as zòngzi, although the lumps of rice are now wrapped in reed leaves instead of silk. The act of racing to search for his body in boats gradually became the cultural tradition ofdragon boat racing, which is held on the anniversary of his death every year. Today, people still eat zòngzi and participate in dragon boat races to commemorate Qu Yuan's sacrifice on Duanwu, the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese calendar. 

Not exactly sure how dumplings came into the mix as they raced to save Qu Yuan, but this is the story. It is a very, very sad story. The "hero" is heroic not for what he did, or for what he said in his job as an adviser, but for the lasting poetic legacy that he was able to produce while in disfavor. Ultimately, while Qu Yuan's earthly existence was washed away by his river of sadness, and his beloved country was washed away by the tide of politics, his poetry endured and floated above all of it, remaining even into the current age.

This story is applicable in various contexts, but a sad point is that Qu Yuan in his age could do nothing with his clarity and purity of understanding of belief other than to fatally drown it. In our age we should ask, "What should have been different so that Qu Yuan might have convinced the king and saved his country?".

Very Important Things, thoughts, "Idle No More"

I've written in my blog about this fellow, Zizek, before. He has criticized, been criticized, analyzed, been analyzed, and seems to have consumed voractious learning as well as dispensed it. It usually takes a lot longer for him to get a point across, and part of this is mainly because to so many audiences he is new so he takes time to frame his context. But first watch the video if you would because it frames the context herein. Also, he is getting to that point of course where he's not quite "avante garde" but just "garde", and so pop-culturally dismissable and because he's pop-culturally dismissable you must pay that much more attention to the short things he formulates.

Because he is a person who is finding his way. Despite being steeped in some of the deepest thinking that the modern world has formulated, he is merely a person finding his way but to me his words beg to be heard.

There is a sort of movement going on, and the movement is called "Idle No More". It is a native American movement, which started in Canada in response to a bill that the current PM there was forcing through. It has resonated with many people because it is a concretization of some of the more cogent and less easily dismissed "conspiracy/truther think" which has become popular on the internet, which has formed a sort of hard "conceptual kernel" that is coloring all manner of things, from movies to TV shows to satirical faux twitter personas.

The conceptual kernel, in a nutshell (harhar) is this: there are people who are in power who want more power, and what they seek is to dispossess everyone they can of something that will add to that power. It might be your time, or labor, or financial equity, or your ability to mount a physical defense, but they will work insidously, patiently and continually to pry it out of your hands.

"They" will do this because it is "their" nature and training. And of course there is always the Pogoism of who they and us is, but the notion here is that this "they" really has a coordinated means to ensure their plans succeed. So there is also the notion of "just because you're irrationally afraid of a wild conspiracy doesn't mean there isn't something like what you're afraid of really going on".

At any rate, because of a great many things, there's been this drumbeat on the internet about the impending Orwellian reality that the world is converging towards, pushed along by the pop apocaplypse.movement and various "weirdo alternative thinking" that is normally on the fringe but has washed into the mainstream.

And the thing is this: suddently, it really isn't all that "weirdo". I mean, some of it really is, lizard people and all that but those things are almost kind of like "props" to facilitate the understanding of the concept, because some of it is really something that, like the dimly seen form emerging from the mist. is about to break into our cognitive space and it is our reflection in our own eyes.

Another "concept in a nutshell" is this: there are "the colonizers" and there are "the indians". The actual racial identity and ethnicity of these is not actually the issue at this point. It describes two modes of human operation. Both modes are human. This is what's hard to swallow, both modes are human. so they are related. The trick is to get them to relate in alignment, and not in opposition, on a true long term path.

It is the matter of each of us finding our way as one human among our relations. It is the matter of our purpose, as I mentioned before, and it helping us to find our way while at the same time it being our way.

It's getting where words fail, but like the Zizek says in this video, it's a matter of thinking, and good thinking, and thinking that sits well, and finding the time and space to think, and just think without worrying about whether the thought will cause doing, because it is not doing that has to happen after the thought, it is expression, real expression, that has a force.

There is a lot of bitterness, people wrapped it up in a cloak or a flag or a fur and they call it purpose but it is really not wholesome purpose, it is the snarling reflex resulting from a previous wounding. At the same time, that bitterness is not necessarily unaligned with that which can convert into clarity and bring about the complete dispersion of bitterness.

It is a Giant Thing, the implications of Idle No More. For my way, I find it very true to listen and think and think well, because it is the time for others to be busy and no longer idle, but we all have to find our ways as each of us among all of us. All of us forever have been grappling with the human condition, and we need some time to really think.

Averting the worst case consquences from violent actors

I read this today about bulletproof backpacks for children and arming teachers, and so I write this brief post.


Putting a crunchy shell around the little piggy should not be the first thing to think about if you are trying to thwart big bad wolves.

If you want to avoid a big bad wolf, you don't build a straw house then sit inside it holding a gun that you're not sure how to use, dressed in an outfit that makes you harder to chew.

Of course, first you build a brick house or a castle.

Then even better, you set up a perimeter around your house that will detect the presence of big bad wolves and inhibit their approach. On the brick house's lawn you have all manner of things that detect things that seem to be big bad wolves and alert you to their presence.

Then, once they approach the brick house, you make it more difficult to get in. Castles had a great security mechanism called a "bent entrance". Basically, it was a hallway that an attacker had to walk through with at least one turn in it. This meant that they wouldn't see what was beyond that turn, and also that the entrance could be instrumented with windows and angled archer's windows, and which closed remotely at the far end. But it wasn't so obstructive that significant traffic could not move in and out of the castle under normal circumstances.

So, if they get to that point, you have the big bad wolf in a bent entrance.

If the wolf has the wherewithal to break into the door at the end of the bent entrance, upon their first attempt the most urgent and alarming klaxon possible should sound, along with a silent alarm that would call help.

This allows everyone in the castle to get to battle positions or safety, depending on their role, and alerts the countryside.

But if the door is broken, then, on the other side of the door is another bent entrance! And then, when they went through the broken door, a door that would slide down on the other side of the broken door! You see?  Now you've trapped the wolf.

All during this time people inside the castle are manning the archer's windows that point into the bent entrances and the people who aren't archers have gotten into their safe positions.

Now the wolf is trapped and surrounded by arrows.

Also, these things needn't be medieval or prison-like in their function or aesthetic. In a bank lobby, there is significant security, and even more security between a person in the lobby and the vault, and bank lobbies can be pleasant enough. Surely a classroom full of children is worth more than what's in a bank vault.

If we think about the most recent tragedies perpetrated by wolves, we see that no alarms at all were triggered upon the initial illicit entry. Remember the video of the 9/11 hijacker strolling through airport security? Recall the description of the person entering the back entrance of the movie theatre? Think about how loud a firearm is and then realize that people inside a building whose door is being shot open either still can't hear it or understand the implication of the sound they are hearing?

Then, think about how the most recent shooter incident on the Virginia Tech campus after their initial tragedy was thwarted by a series of sightings of someone walking along with something that appeared to be a rifle, how these sightings were conveyed immediately to authorities and how the police swarmed over the campus while faculty locked down and students sheltered in place. Nobody was shot, no shots were fired. Was it a false alarm?

If it was or wasn't, who cares? It had a happy ending.