Europe and the West might very well have an interest in encouraging Ukraine's western half to stick with its inclinations toward western alliances, but Crimea's half clearly has in interest in the unity of Ukraine rather than its prospective balkanization. Similarly lies Russia's interest, and the thing that makes this even more interesting is the emergence of that good-ole-days bunch of oldsters who believe that the Soviets will rise again, in the form of the military retired that occupy the Crimean half. And there's the matter of access to the warm-water port--there's that.
Yeah, Russia has its own version of "the south's gonna rise again" Civil War "historians"/re-enactors in the form of old Soviets, and my buddy in St. Petersburg, gri, has stood as posterboy for that. When I find some of that pro-Soviet poetry that was posted on his old site (okay, so he's had several of them, and been banned from each one, but when I used to run Hypercrites.org, I cross-posted them there, and so whereas I still have a copy of the old Hypercrites database, I still have a copy of those poems).
Every generation arises the question as to whether or not we should still cling to the past or move ahead with modernization including the modernization of attitudes toward old enmities. The young usually find such things as the requirement that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian Massacre as a condition for joining the EU trade group as utter nonsense. And yet when one regards the southeast Asia situation where China's tradition was to be anti-western and what used to be French Indochina, plus Japan tended to be western allies, one finds old bugbears like the old Japanese imperialism along with all those atrocities surfacing as barriers to actual alliance between, say, Japan and S. Korea, even in matters of ASEAN and TPP.
But S. Korea's looking at a hostile N. Korea and its ally, China, which makes its cling to history something of an unaffordable luxury, and perhaps it also causes China to pause, too, because it's more interested in trade than in conflict. Or is it? Aye, therein lies the rub.
The Ukraine affair has managed to push Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Israel, etc. completely off the news map. But they're still there, as is the turmoil that continues in Venezuela and Brazil (nothing--but NOTHING!--gets in the way of Carnival!), also affected by the prospects of the TPP even though Brazil in particular isn't a prospective party to that agreement. Win or lose, none of these trade agreement outcomes is going to evolve into something that the crafters of those agreements had in mind when they first thought they were good ideas.
(Another alarming development re: Israel)
Ummmmm....no. I do NOT give a snit who wins an Oscar.
Another good Facebook meme is making the rounds today. Veritas and a half!
One of the articles had a paragraph cut out of it at the end, and the other one didn't. Go figure.
Here's a glimpse of the Son of Snowmageddon in my neck of the woods, but I'm sure most of the nation is looking at nearly the same thing right now...
The temperature gauge says it's 9 degrees F outside, too. Brrrrr.
People who missed out on Fred Waterer's Radio Time Capsule on Facebook missed out on (among other gems) THIS. Enjoy. :)
...Yeah, I tried to embed that on this page and it was a refusenik. I found a different posting of the same thing, and that's what's next...
MONDAY MIN-UPDATE: I made an attempt to locate my favorite Russian, gri, to see if he managed to re-establish his SMF board on DotTK yet again, or elsewhere. Nope. Found him on other people's SMF boards, though, but that's not unusual. His usual is to register and get banned within just a few postings:
Yup, that's my gri. He's not banned on Boyah, but he's still not accommodated there, either, and he's avoided it, on and off. I'm still going over the Hypercrites database to locate that Soviet poetry that I know I have in there somewhere...but know ye that it will be posted in its original Russian, and leave it to you to hit the Translate button on this blog, with the caveat that you shouldn't expect smooth English from it. Just do your best.
Trust me--that ain't even the half of it, ha.
Well, I've checked a number of Hypercrites database backups and I haven't found gri's stuff yet. It'll be awhile. As to the Debate Both Sides logo--that's the board which sprang from Arianna Online, when Arianna Huffington launched Huffington Post and said we couldn't use her name on the board anymore. There's ya a bit of HuffPo history trivia.
TPP development---not good. Obama appoints SOPA lobbyist.
A rather accurate meme appeared on Facebook today. Yup, that's me alright...
UPDATE 2: Speak of the devil and in he walks.
Just as I was making my final Internet rounds before closing down for the day, I checks me emails and espy this:
HE'S ALIVE!!!!!! lol.
Guess I'm gonna have to go pay Boyah a visit, ha.
...and I'm back. In his tagline, he indicates that his account has been suspended (at Dot TK--what, AGAIN?! lol ) and he's continuing to grouse about the li'l gizmo that detects a person's operating system. He's got no where else to go, apparently. Welcome back, gri!
That pic at the bottom is the quintessential Clarakeet.
I'm sure that the following pic will show something that might alarm my readers...
...I actually understand what gri said. This is actually a request to translate gri-ese into English. And I actually know how do that.
Thursday UPDATE: I found the Soviet poetry but found that the original Cyrillic in UTF-8 code didn't make the translation into other text format, so that's lost unless and until gri gets his website up, this time (I guess) on notpublic.tk. Here's the Babelfish translation of one poem I found...
FINE WINTER SOLDIERS
Where are you now, lightning-children,
Who swore to their homeland?
No debt is higher in those years,
What to save our house from the "beasts".
Get up there fine soldiers!
Put on his overcoat and all fall into line!
All labor grandparents sailed into kickbacks,
Wave your same club together!
Get up there our commanders,
Arise farmer and blacksmith,
It's time we all wear uniforms,
Patience came to an end.
Get up there the soldiers of the Soviets!
And the general and a soldier,
Does not need any answers ...
It is time to give battle to the thieves!
Wake up the queen of the field;
Wake up from hibernation KGBist,
Crushed the enemy neustavaya,
And whether the people is clear.
And you, the student has already awakened?
The hour has come to think a head,
Diploma for taking bribes yours is not needed
Take the cloak and silently in the system!
There is no higher honor for a soldier
What Loyalty Oath to save,
Now only the roar of the machine,
Help clean up this honor.
Soviet citizen.
Kiev, 30 June 2009
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