Political Rants

Taking sides.

If anything, the crisis in Ukraine grew hotter this week, and it’s getting kind of scary. Through it all, though, there has been a persistent tendency in the media to support the maximalist position of the U.S. government and our European allies – namely, that the Ukrainian opposition is fully legitimate and essentially beyond any critical scrutiny, that the Russians are engaging in bald aggression of a kind not witnessed in decades (!), and that the violators of human rights in Ukraine are all on the pro-Russian side.

Okay, well … a few points that probably need addressing:

Coup or no coup. Russia calls what happened in Kiev a few weeks ago a coup; Washington does not. In the United States, labeling something a coup triggers legislation designed to impede the delivery of U.S. aid to coup regimes. Our administrations of both Sensitivity training, American style.parties typically do an end-run around this by simply avoiding the word when it’s inconvenient. We’ve done this with Egypt and with Honduras. When it’s someone we don’t like, it’s a coup, plain and simple. In Kiev, the elected leader of the country was ousted without due process, in the midst of a negotiation over rebalancing of political authority and early elections. It’s not outlandish to call that a coup, regardless of how kleptocratic the old regime may have been.

Who killed who? The killing of oppositionists by sniper fire on February 26 has often been cited as a primary rationale for the ouster of the Ukrainian leader. Those killings were chalked up to the regime. However, this past week, The Guardian and others have reported on claims by the Estonian Foreign Minister that the shooters were hired by the opposition. The new Ukrainian government is reluctant to open an investigation into this.

Atypical aggression. Really? This can be reported with a straight face from a country that invaded Iraq ten years ago? In this category, we haven’t a leg to stand on.

My point is, before we rush in to aid this new government, let’s be honest about what our interests are in that region. And let’s not paint one side virtuous and the other evil before we know the facts.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Pick a sphere.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 3, 2014
Planet #47 in NASA list, just south of Aldebaran

Okay, that was the planet of the dinosaurs. Check. Marvin? Be sure to put that one on the “do not visit” list. We should have known that from John Carradine’s experience back in the 1970s, but oh well.

Null set. Right, if you’re just joining us, Big Green is furiously working its way through the list of 715 new planets NASA recently put out, looking for halfway decent venues. We’re not picky, you know. It’s not like we need a proper dressing room with a row of lightbulbs arrayed above a long mirror and chilled Champagne in a bucket. Hell, we’ll settle for an unlocked fire door on one side of the stage. (I can just about hear some indie musician out there saying, “Big Green needs stages to perform on? What a bunch of prima donnas!”)

The first couple of planets on the list have been kind of a bust. Turns out, all NASA managed to do was catalog all of the seemingly habitable planets depicted in science fiction movies and television shows over the past 40 years. Not that that isn’t useful, but frankly, the Planet of the Dinosaurs has little to recommend it …. except for an outsized population of dinosaurs, and some bad-looking cave people with voices straight out of a Jay Ward cartoon. (And names like “Sookee”. Sookee? Really, space people – you can do better than that.)

Interstellar Tour Log: March 5, 2014
Planet #163 in NASA list, near Rigel

Big GreenMarvin (my personal robot assistant) volunteered (or was shoved out the door, one of the two) to go down to the surface of this rocky little world and see if there were any performance venues worth pissing in. The place looks a bit like west Texas, so songs from Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick should go over pretty well here. I know, it’s a little dicey using Marvin as an advance man, but Lincoln is kind of busy with his model ship building hobby and the man-sized tuber has his roots all tangled in something at the moment. (A couple of visits ago, Marvin was on the surface of a planet for six hours before he figured out it was Metaluna, the planet from “This Island Earth”. Talk about an oversight. How the hell many times do you have to watch that movie before you recognize the set?)

Looks like he’s encountered some kind of life form. Show him the contract, Marvin! Ask him if he needs a pen!

Political Rants

Persistent truths.

As I write this post, the parliament in Crimea has just voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, to which it belonged until the mid 1950s. The Russian parliament, in turn, is considering legislation to enable it to accept new provinces, an ominous turn to Where's America in this picture?be sure. There is a referendum on Crimean secession scheduled for later this month, and the new Ukrainian government is crying foul. So … are we on the brink of a new Crimean War? Charge of the Light Brigade, anyone?

The “Putin is Crazy” narrative is dominating the news cycle here in the United States. I can hear it right now, on the evening news. Even supposed activist liberal shows like Rachel Maddow are playing this as a crisis for which Russia is solely responsible, and strong evidence of Putin’s departure from reality. He’s living in another world, the German premier suggests, and that claim is being hammered home, day after day, on every network, every news channel, every media outlet. One would think no one had ever occupied a square mile of foreign territory before. (Ummm …. Afghanistan? Guam?)

I hate to be the lone dissenting voice on anything, but this thing is obviously spinning out of control, and the potential consequences are enormous. Despite his autocratic tendencies, Putin is not hard to figure out, friends. He doesn’t want another Syria as his next door neighbor. With the ouster of Yanukovych, he sees the potential for civil conflict, possible failure of the central government, etc. Putin sees the United States and Europe as having stoked the opposition, and in all frankness, it’s probably true that we did. We regularly support political movements in other countries to an extent that we would consider unacceptable should another country attempt the same on us. Now we openly support the revolution in Ukraine.

Is is about supporting democracy? Well, that’s certainly not a prerequisite for U.S. support. See Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc., etc. In all honesty, I think it would be a really good idea to work towards a diplomatic solution with greater energy. There is a tendency to fall into old cold war habits – a fact that reveals the bankruptcy of our obsession with communism back in the day. It’s really just about great power competition, and that should be considered illegitimate, particularly when so many lives are at stake.

Between us, we still have thousands of nuclear weapons. This is not something to fool around with.

luv u,

jp

Weird ass music since 1986