Haiku #378

In past downy youth

Certainty was ours to grasp 

Conquest lit the path

Haiku #377

Corn hung to adorn

Let the season's fey appear 

Flayed displays of pain 

Haiku #376

Knives don't glint at night 

Trading slashes and gashes

Blind man's advantage 

American Oligarchy

The now clichéd "of the people, by the people, for the people" mantra has been reduced to shitting ON the people. How? Just by the fact that, today, more people's lives are ultimately in the grip of some private company, not the government (tho reps can squeal, they can't act).

Haiku #375

Observe that small mouse 

It can't produce all it needs 

Much to its chagrin 

What is Russia? (External View)

Today Russia is trying to make themselves the defenders of the "ethnic Russian-speakers" who have lived for ages within what we understand to be the geopolitical area dubbed the Ukraine. But when you begin playing with/depending on history, you are on a slippery slope. 

Go back in time to well before the end of the first millennium C.E. and you will be looking at a large area centred on Kiev (old spelling; sorry) that was first ruled and then settled by a people known historically as the Kievan Rus. The situation rose out of what was first a trading relationship between the locals and those who we would end up calling Vikings. Even way back then the critically located Kiev was a major node on the trading map between east and west. This is but a crude sketch but if Putin wants to establish an historical hegemony over Ukraine, he would be acting more historically accurately if he handed the rule of western Russia and the Ukraine to Denmark.