Russian and Ukrainian Troop Movements

Crimea, Ukraine and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

The current crisis in Ukraine can easily be explained with historical maps

The pro European area was part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Basically that's all the old Russians (now referred to as Ukrainians) who got conquered by the Poles.

The bits that Poland owned speak Ukrainian, the other bits speak Russian. Ukrainian and Russian were once the same language. They diverged mainly because the people lived in different political entities.

All the protests and pro-EU stuff is from the part of the Country Poland used to own. Next look at the 2010 presidential election results. Yanukovych, pro-Russian president who had to flee for his life during the protests won the bits that speak Russian...

Ukranian land outside of the Polish borders was conquered & settled by Russia from the Ottoman Turks and their Crimean Tatar vassals. 

You get the gist

Ukrainian protests - Russia vs West

The main cause of the conflict in the Ukraine is a choice it has to make, does it join the European Union, or the Eurasian Union (Russian led customs union). The European union has declared that the Ukraine cannot join both. The protestors on the street want the Ukraine to join the European union.

Russia is worried about the integration of Ukraine into the European union for two reasons:

1) It would effectively kill its Eurasian Union, the Ukraine's membership is pivotal.

2) It could lead to Ukrainian membership in NATO. The US has been pushing for this. This would threaten Russia's security.


For most of its history, the Ukraine was not a country. It was divided among the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, Austrio-Hungarian Empire, Ottomans and Russians.


Crimea, a province of the Ukraine where ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych has fled to, contains a majority Russian population, and was gifted to the Ukraine in 1954. Remember the Ukraine was part of the USSR so this was more of a transfer of territory within sub-states, and no one ever conceived that the USSR would eventually break up, otherwise it would never have been gifted!

Will technology empower the individual or lead to our demise?

What does accelerating technological development mean for us as people? Will our voice still be heard? Or are we becoming mere drones in a civilisation sized hive mind?

On the one hand technology is freeing and allows us not to have to labour to do basic things and meet basic needs, it also reduces our individuality, hence our freedom and control over our own lives. Horkheimer and Adorno see this dialectic clearly:

Technology has changed human beings from children into persons. But all such progress of individuation has been at the expense of the individuality in whose name it took place, leaving behind nothing except individuals' determination to pursue their own purposes alone (Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 125). 

Cody Wilson created a blueprint for the first 3-D gun. He claims the project is aimed at reclaiming some sense of individual autonomy.

Cody Wilson: Well there's a guy named Michel Foucault. And I'd recommend that you read him some time. Really I see the battle as one of just trying to remain human and against you know massive forces, anonymous forces of discipline and control that we can't really understand. I don't think there's a massive conspiracy. But I do think the self is under siege and I think liberty itself is under siege...

A lot of people have commented on these impersonal forces, including Kevin Kelly in his great book -What Technology Wants. I think these massive forces Cody is touching on come from the Kevin Kelly's technium

Kelly focuses on human-technology relations and argues for the existence of technology as the emerging seventh kingdom of life on earth. What Technology Wants offers the anthropomorphic conception that technology is one giant force —the technium — which Kelly describes as "...a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us

Here's a couple of quotes from the book:

Look what is coming: Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?

Technology amplifies the mind's urge toward the unity of all thought, it accelerates the connections among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite.

So not only is technology going to take your job, it could take your individuality as well.

In order to provent this, we need to clear understanding what individuality is. We need to understand what consciousness is and how it works.

Here's a great waking life excerpt on this from telescopic evolution:

So we can't just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that that entails; not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality.

Syrian crisis - hegemony via chaos

War Tard has put out another great article on what's going on in Syria.

Syria is being torn apart by civil war, western strikes will act to ensure the government is too weak to ever regain control over its own state.

Syria has already been fragmented into four states: Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and 'Syria', not to mention the bit Turkey took, plus I guess you could count the occupied territories as a fifth. Now we get Alawite, Kurdish and Sunni mini states. Don't forget Iraq while still nominally a state is effectively three mini states as well: Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish. The next logical step would be to break up Iran in to more manageable chunks of dirt. 

Divide and rule: The Greeks and Romans did it, the British in many ways mastered it and it is still alive and well today.


Noam Chomsky:
"I mean it reaches to the point that the former editor of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal, was able to say with a straight face and with no reaction from anyone that the United States had to destabilize Chile under Allende ... had to destabilize the government of Chile and overthrow it and establish a dictatorship in order to bring about stability. It sounds like a contradiction but it isn't when you understand that "stability" has a meaning. It means US control. So we had to destabilize the country that was out of US control in order to bring about stability, and it's the same problem with regard to Iran. It doesn't follow orders and, therefore, it is destabilizing the regional situation."

Google glasses and our future as Borg

This picture showed up on my Google+ feed the other day. I like it but It doesn't go far enough.  There's no Borg.

Allow me to present prediction number 6!

On the left we have Star Trek's Captain Picard who's been assimilated by the Borg hive mind. On the right we have the beautiful Diane von Fristenberg show casing Google glasses.


Combine The Matrix and The Borg and you have our future. We are all going to have an Internet connection plugged directly into our brains. Laptops, phones, and google glasses are stepping stones but they are still rather inefficient mechanisms for information transfer. Google glasses are simply the next baby step.

Think about it: you read text on a screen, your eyes convert the image to electrical signals and send it to your brain for processing. Same with your ears, and your fingers do the reverse. Why not just remove your senses from the equation and send the electrical signals directly to and from the brain? The Borge do, the matrix does and we will soon.

Don't worry it wont be that bad. The thing the Borg did wrong was its PR campaign. Going around threatening people and using violence to force people into the hive isn't the way you win hearts and minds. You get models and celebrities to wear the stuff and everyone else will follow... this is what Google is getting right!

If on first contact the Borg had rocked up to earth with a dolled up seven of nine telling everyone how great the collective is, earth wouldn't have been so anti-assimilation.

Resistance is futile!

German colonisation of Europe

I really like this 5th century map showing the settlement of Germanic tribes throughout the former western Roman empire, you can explain all of the major western nations from it. One of the points oft neglected in the history books is that the ruling elite of most nation states in Europe was german if you go back to when the roman empire fell apart.

The Franks (Franci) became the rulers of France, and the French still refer to Germans as the Alaman. The poor old Fresians (Frisi) lost half of the netherlands to the Franks. The Frankish language developed into what we would now refer to as Dutch. The franks who ruled France were assimilated. Louis and Ludwig both derive from the german name Clovis, the name of the first king to unite all the Frankish tribes.

The coloured borders are pretty much where the Germanic people end and the Slavic tribes start. The Germans managed to colonise quite a bit of slavic land in the intermittent centuries, however the russians reset the borders a bit when they single-handedly won world war II.

By and large I am not a huge fan of Thatcher, as neoliberal economics is one of the reasons the world economy is in the mess that it is. But, she did say something I find interesting in retrospect in 1989 when german reunification was being discussed: 

"We defeated the Germans twice! And now they're back!"

And right she was. The french realised this as well:

Mitterrand [president of france] recognized before Thatcher that reunification was inevitable and adjusted his views accordingly; unlike her, he was hopeful that participation in a single currency^[17] and other European institutions could control a united Germany.

Nice try france but thanks the the GFC Germany is having to take the reigns of Europe, to save it!