The Necessary Martyr Complex

The Russian backed destabilization of Ukraine represents the problem of autonomous regions trying to become nations. Analysts argue over what NATO is willing to do versus what Russia is willing to do to reabsorb the region. NATO, in typical fashion, marches up and down the field with the bagpipes harmonizing over the integrity of national sovereignty without being willing to give Russian re-expansion .a price tag. Putin's team plays spin the bottle in an attempt to reclaim parcels of its former empire. To what end? 

I remember the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a blurry cataclysm during the transition from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin. There was a Time essayist who emerged during all this heady turbulence to inject a note of caution. Authoritarian regimes could always come back. Al Qaeda and Isis may have emerged as the tumor festering out of Muslim Brotherhood emasculated inferiority, similar to the Khmer Rouge in Southeast Asia. The Communist Party in China remains united. The Castro brothers seem determined that Cuba too remains socialized (as if the US was powerless to change that outcome, because the Bay of Pigs was a blot on Camelot best left buried in JFK's splattered brain), and Putin wants restoration, and yet, this is not the Cold War heating up again. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, these are museum pieces, replaced by Russian war lords and cronies who have ties to Putin's administration, and we've swapped the ominous notion of prescriptive ideology with the gentler concept of state model, yet Ukrainians are dying, and Europeans see the shadow of a fierce some bear on the horizon, as if to distract from more border tensions with the Chinese.

Ukraines have viewed my posts, perhaps marveling that American liberalism is not what it seems, and that it isn't. Few people actually have the luxury of freedom to do as they wish, especially in terms of migration. I do not know what to tell you, and your leaders were perceptive on the issue of  giving up your nuclear arsenal. If you had kept it perhaps Putin would have trekked at a different pace. I do not think you can rely on the European Union, and even if a speculative Republican replaces Obama, that Republican has to acknowledge the reality of your border with your former motherland-- but your blood should not be being shed to restore an imperial mindset no longer applicable. President Nixon's call for a "free Kiev" was strategic. I doubt he envisioned the collateral damage in the embedded feed currently breaking our hearts. 

Swords of the convenient

Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood.-- William Dean Howells

I happen to be facing an extenuating moral crisis brought on by a nun who already has two thirds of my corpse in a coffin. Do I have a social worker? Do I have medical visits? Am I still able to wash? Have I made a list of long term care facilities? It is my extenuating moral crisis, but it points to an unpleasant truth that mainstream media outlets only grapple with as a family quarrel. Americans, and westerners more broadly, are as constricted as the average Chinese or Russian citizen. We just aren't imprisoned for complaining about it. Beneath the surface of our heralded free market, we are as corroded as the Cold War Soviets, just as the Russians and Chinese today are corrupt marketeers beneath their state models.

I cannot sit here and passively give way to end of life micro-management that could last over 20 years; I cannot.

Compliments to Jim Popkin

This is the type of journalism that I would live to be doing, except for the fact that I could not make a story on hearing loss come together, the last time I actually had an assignment. I would not even know where to begin to work sources like these, how to find them. But I put up with everything else The Washington Post does for learning from the high octane of such features.

Still, this is a very nuanced look at socialist ideology juxtaposed against the lions of free market economics, and is thus slated towards the juggernaut of American power derived from that free market, which is not always moral, to use Ana's sentiments.

I have always seen the Castro regime as a joke, so it is difficult for me to understand what drove Montes, despite her father. Not that I quibble with the construct Popkin creates, I just cannot see it in terms of a Marxist cause, since Ana herself is certainly intelligent enough to see that authoritarian socialist state models have failed, and Castro has only survived as long as he has due to our military inertia. Killing the squirrel makes us look bad, but I am as zealous as she, on the flip side of the coin. You may wonder how I can feel that way after the life I've led, but it is perhaps due to that life. If I had a way out of this living form of bondage, I'd renounce my citizenship, and leave the country.

Becoming an enemy of state would require too much effort, however. It only has anything to do with Barack Obama to this extent: Excellent movement candidate that he was, I expected to be able to get justice under his presidency. It probably won't happen-- in that context, the freedom to express my dissent doesn't mean all that much.