SAUCE FOR THE RUSSIAN GOOSE, SAUCE FOR THE AMERICAN GANDER: Comments on USA involvement in the Crimea Ukraine Crisis

THE VIEW FROM LONDON

Barack Obama warns Russia against any military intervention in Ukraine

• US president says armed action would lead to 'costs'
• Pro-Russian forces apparently in control of key Crimea sites
• Ukrainian minister accuses Putin of 'invasion and occupation'

Guardian of London
Paul Lewis in Washington, Ian Traynor in Brussels and Luke Harding   
theguardian.com, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/28/barack-obama-vladimir-putin-ukraine-russia/print
Friday 28 February 2014 18.46 EST   

The US president, Barack Obama, told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that "there will be costs" for any military intervention in Ukraine as Russian forces were deployed in Crimea on Friday.

With pro-Russian forces apparently in control of Crimea's key airport and parliament building, and Russian troops reportedly on the move across the peninsula, the White House warned against any further escalation in what has rapidly degenerated into the most tense regional crisis since the Russia-Georgia war six years ago.

In a stark message delivered after fresh US intelligence assessments of Russia's presence in the southern region, Obama said any Russian intervention would constitute a "clear violation" of international law.

"We are now deeply concerned by reports over Russian military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine," Obama said. "Any violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilising."

He added: "Just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic Games it would invite the condemnation of nations around the world. Indeed, the United States will stand with the international community in affirming there will be costs for any military intervention in the Ukraine."

The president took the unusual step of issuing the remarks from the White House late on Friday, after postponing a scheduled appearance at a Democratic national committee meeting in Washington DC.

His remarks came amid reports from Ukrainian officials in Kiev that hundreds of Russian troops were in Crimea. Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, accused Putin of "provocations" and urged him to pull back, while interior minister Arsen Avakov described the takeover of the airports as a "military invasion and occupation".

RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY

As I listened to President Obama’s remarks about The Crimea Ukraine Crisis, and as I read the remarks on-line, it occurs to me that Our President is the biggest hypocrite on this particular subject.

The United States of America has for centuries “influenced”,  interfered with, and meddled with  small nations bordering it and surrounding it.    It has military bases all over the planet, including Guantanamo on the east shore of Cuba.   It has intervened in all sorts of small close-by countries for all kinds of dubious reasons.  Those dubious reason rarely actually helped the natives in the long view. 

The USA has recently invaded countries that were technically closer to the Russian sphere of influence than the American sphere  – Iran, Afghanistan.   The results of that adventure on the local natives has not yet been completely positive. 

If the USA can intervene in small close-at-hand nations, then Russia obviously has the right to intervene in small bordering nations.      


THE CALL TO ACTION IN EUROPE

If the European Union wants Ukraine under its positive influence instead of the negative Putin Russia influence, the European Union will have to distribute more than just its weight in words. 

To Light the Fire Within – a study of the Sochi Olympics Medal Winners statistics

The government of the Russian Federation spent 51 billion dollars, a considerable chunk of it on graft, bribery, corruption, and pay backs, to build and host a Winter Olympics in a semi-tropical Black Seaside resort.    Some day it would be nice if Russia hosted a Winter Olympic games in an actual wintertime mountain community in or near the Ural Mountains.  Anyway, for its 51 billion dollar investment, the Russian athletes won the most medals of all the competitors.

This next list shows a comparison contrast of the top three nation winners of the last five Winter Olympic Games.   Certain countries keep turning up.

Medal totals past 5 Winter Olympics

1998     Nagano       
 Germany    29
   Norway    25
    Russia        18               
 Japan         10   

2002    Salt Lake City        
Germany    36 
USA        34
Norway    25

2006    Turin            
Germany    29
  USA        25
  Austria    23    1 
Italy        11   

2010    Vancouver       
 USA        37
  Germany    30    4
 Canada    26    1

2014    Sochi            
Russia      33    2
USA        28    4
Norway     26    3

The good news from the Sochi Olympics is that the big countries with all the money and lots of athletes did not entirely over-dominate the games, they hardly dominated at all.   This has been the case at the Winter Olympics since 1998.  

Note the totals in the following lists for comparison contrast.

Medal winners from Countries with populations over 80 million

1     Russian Federation         33
2     United States of America     28
6     Germany             19
11     People's Republic of China     9
15     Japan                 8   
 total  97


Medal winners from the small countries in population

3     Norway             26
4     Canada             25
5     Netherlands             24
7     Austria             17
8     France             15
9     Sweden             15
10     Switzerland             11
12     Republic of Korea         8
13     Czech Republic         8
14     Slovenia             8
16     Italy                 8    most medals won, none gold
17     Belarus             6
18     Poland             6
19     Finland             5
20     Great Britain             4
21     Latvia             4
22     Australia             3
23     Ukraine             2
24     Slovakia             1
25     Croatia             1
26     Kazakhstan             1    
grand total 198

The European Union eclipsed the Chinese empire, the Russian Empire, and the American Empire with enough and to spare.  E U athletes won 141 medals.

Medal winners by continent

Europe        214

Asia            59

North America    53

Australia        3

I keep hoping that someday athletes from India, Indonesia, Africa, South America, or Caribbean or Pacific Isles will win Winter Olympic medals.   That may happen someday, but it did not happen this year.

The Olympics remains a rich person’s sport and a rich country’s sport.   Medal winners from the 12 wealthiest countries defined by the United Nations list in Wikipedia  

1     Russian Federation         33
2     United States of America     28
4     Canada             25
6     Germany             19
8     France             15
11     People's Republic of China     9
12     Republic of Korea         8
15     Japan                 8   
16     Italy                 8
20     Great Britain             4
22     Australia             3    
garnered a total of no fewer than 160 medals.

The money angle still remains the biggest road block to getting talented athletes from all corners of the world to an Olympic games.  The Olympics has the best athletes money can buy, but that does not mean it has the best athletes there are. 

Stronger.   Faster.  Higher.   Richer. 

IN MEMORIAM -- SHIRLEY TEMPLE: a study of 4 of her 1940s films

Shirley Temple, born in 1928 and died in February 2014, had a life story that frankly reads like fiction – except it really did happen. 

In the early 1930s she made educational movies for tikes.   In the early 1930s, William Fox signed her to a contract.  Fox Studio and Twentieth Century Fox Studio turned her into a child superstar.  Her movies were heavy on optimism amid hard times and sometimes had musical elements.   She made a huge fortune for Twentieth Century Fox. 

In the 1950s, she became an early participant in television.   Her second marriage lasted a long time by any standards.

In the 1960s and 1970s she had a diplomatic career, serving in two countries as an ambassador and eventually as the chief of protocol.   Very few stars – John Gavin and Sidney Poitier come to mind – served as ambassadors, though at least three  – Irene Dunne [who was also a Knight of Malta], Danny Kaye, and Audrey Hepburn – served either as ambassadors or delegates associated with the United Nations. 

When she died, she was the senior living recipient of an Academy Award, an honorary award for the film work she did 80 years ago this year.  She was 6 when AMPAS bestowed it. 

Of the movies she made as a child, my personal favorite happens to be Walter Lang’s The Blue Bird  (20th Century Fox 1940), one of her few three-strip Technicolor films, Fox’s answer to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (MGM 1939).   It contains a vision of pre-mortal heaven that features boy spirits dressed in short blue togas and girl spirits dressed in shorter pink togas being sent to Earth in a spiritual galleon.  No kidding.    The Blue Bird is delightfully berserk, an eye-popping film fantasy based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play.  It was Shirley’s biggest flop of a child star vehicle: unlike Oz, it has not make grundles of money in re-release.

Little credible evidence suggests Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer really did try to borrow her for the role of “Dorothy” in Oz.   Producer Mervyn LeRoy and studio head Louis B Mayer were, practically from the beginning, sold on casting Judy Garland as Dorothy.  

Her father squandered the money she made at Fox, though her mother seems stable enough.

This bring me to Shirley’s career in the 1940s when she was a teenager / young adult.    She was not quite as big a superstar in this period, but she made four fascinating pictures.   They illustrate a number of points about film making in the 1940s and America in general. 

When Shirley left 20th Century Fox, MGM signed her to a contract, but could not decide what to do with a larger more-mature Shirley Temple.   David O Selznick signed her to a personal contract as well, and also found her problematic to cast.   He loaned her to a number of films, made only one movie with her, and eventually told her she should move to Europe and change her name for professional purposes.  Fortunately, she had the sense not to do that. 

In 1943, David O Selznick cast Shirley in his production of Since You Went Away, directed by John Cromwell.   The movie proposes to show the year 1943 as lived by an average American family trying to make due somewhere in Ohio during World War II while the father of house is conscripted to the United States military.   This average family consisted of Claudette Colbert as the mother, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as the teenage daughters, Monty Wooley as a boarder, Joseph Cotten as mother’s boyfriend, and Hattie McDaniel as the housekeeper.  If there were many average families like that in Ohio or anywhere else in 1943 USA, I would be darned surprised.   The oldest daughter falls in love with a soldier portrayed by Robert Walker, which only compounds the idealization – and Selznick fell in love with Jones which complicated his  home life. 

In 1947, Dore Shary cast Shirley in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, one of the most berserk comedies made in that period.   Try to top this as a story.   Cary Grant, very fit and very charming, portrays a bachelor artist who visits a high school to lecture and winds up attracting the attention of high-school student Shirley who develops a yen for him.  He somehow does something in relation to that student that winds him up before a municipal judge, who happens to be said girl student’s big sister.  Myrna Loy portrayed Big Sister.   

At this point the plot gets sort of farfetched.  Loy was old enough to be Temple’s mother and was older than Grant.  If big sister was indeed a female municipal judge [ very rare in 1947 ], how did someone supposedly that young credibly land such a position?   Well, never mind.  Chalk it up to willing suspension of disbelief.   Maybe we can overlook that.  Judge Big Sister sentences artist to community service involving little sister, which seems just too weird — even if Big Sister hopes that little sister will tire of him.   Who would tire of Cary Grant?  Not me – and not Big Sister who develops a yen for him, too.  The plot thickened like concrete.

Sidney Sheldon, of all people, helped write this elaborate piffle.  He was in his Hollywood days before he created and wrote I Dream of Jeannie for NBC-TV in 1965 and before he started churning out huge sexy romance novels that became megahits in book stores.   AMPAS even awarded him an Oscar for best writing that year.  
               
Also In 1947, Shirley starred in That Hagen Girl, which was her first film role as a young women –  not a kid.   Ronald Reagan portrayed her first adult boyfriend.  It is a fascinating combination given their later histories.   During World War II, Reagan did his military service in Hollywood making war education films and propaganda films.  No actors came out of The War with as complete an understanding of Hollywood’s political power structure as he did.  Only Robert Montgomery came close, and he eventually became the media consultant to President Eisenhower.  In this period, Reagan became the president of the Screen Actors Guild.  Reagan eventually became a governor and President of the United States.  Temple eventually had a diplomatic career.  Reagan was a natural choice to be Our Shirley’s first adult beau:   as one critic said of him at the time, “He has a cheery way of looking at dames.”

In 1948, John Ford and Merian C. Cooper cast Shirley in Ford’s big Monument Valley western Fort Apache.  Ford directed Shirley as a tike in the 1930s; but in the 1940s, given his eccentric personality, he seems an iffy choice to direct her.  Actually she did well by him; she turns out one of the memorable performances in that memorable film.   She never worked with Ford again –  though and she could have if either he or Shirley had wanted.  

John Wayne co-stars in this film with Henry Fonda, who portrays just about the most disreputable, unlikable villain of a United States army officer Ford ever created in a movie.   He comes Out West to a fort with injun troubles and starts running it into the ground.  Shirley portrays his almost-grown daughter who accompanies him.  He is a widower, or something.  One way or another, he has no wife.   He named this daughter “Philadelphia” which congers up all sorts of images of what type of person this man is.   Meanwhile, daughter gets herself in trouble with an enlisted soldier whose enlisted father and civilian-mother happen to live and work in this fort.   The Colonel is incensed that she would start a relationship with an enlisted man instead of a commissioned officer or someone associated with a commissioned officer.  The boy’s father is unhappy with the situation too; being a good Army sergeant, he knows his place.   

Philadelphia soon disappears from the film.  Her father leads troops on a mission that turns into something along the lines of Custer’s Last Stand.  It is his fault, and he dies with everyone else.  The movie ends with John Wayne spinning a yarn about him for the benefit of an Eastern newspaper reporter.   Ford’s view is factual evidence is not history; the story, not the facts,  counts in recounting America’s greatness.  It is one of the most unsettling ends to a Ford movie, but it says a lot about the sort of history we get in school.    It remains one of the most Fordian of Ford’s films. 

Shirley had an incredible career as a kid, but she found a way to improve with age.   Not every kid star can say that.   Will Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton ever become ambassadors?  Shirley Temple's 1940s films illustrate many points still useful to know even today. 

Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui: what we should learn from a known felon disaster waiting to happen.

Reading this morning in the news:


 Suspect in Utah County officer shooting has died

Thursday attacks » Police say they may never know the motive.
 
By Nate Carlisle, BROOKE Adams and Jessica Miller    | The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Jan 31 2014 11:12 am
 
Spanish Fork • The suspect in the shooting death of one Utah County Sheriff’s officer and the wounding of another died Friday as law enforcement provided more detail on four shootings that stretched through two counties.

Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui, 27, succumbed to his injuries at 2:20 p.m. Friday at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. He was shot in Juab County on Thursday after police say he shot and killed Sgt. Cory Wride, 44, and wounded Deputy Greg Sherwood, 38.

Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui.    

What to say?    He illustrates four things that we do not want to talk about in culture, but we need to discuss.

1.   He had a long criminal record.   He had bolted from his parole officer and was a wanted felon.   Why do Utah parole officers have so many cases?   More parole officers needed. 

2.  Garcia-Jauregui had killed a person by stabbing said person multiple times with a screw driver and then running the person over with a car.   In jail he earned contraband citations and got into a violent confrontation.    The parole board released him in less than 5 years.  Five years.   The legislature needs to hold hearings and do some rules adjusting.    The legislature needs to understand that funding prison programs will not come cheap.

3.   His is yet another story of the Second Amendment in action.    Someone was perfectly willing to either give or sell this man a weapon.   Or he stole a weapon from somebody whom did not keep a weapon secure.   I am tired of hearing Second Amendment Supporters talk about these sorts of incidents as if they cannot be helped and that the victims are unfortunate but collateral damage. 

4.   His sort of anger and violence management problems also illustrate that mental health always needs more funding for research and treatment.   


THE CALL TO ACTION

Incidents like Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui do not happen by accident.   The particular indicate the legislature needs to hold hearings and adjust certain regulations with weapons and prisoners.

The U S Constitution needs an amendment guaranteeing self defense.  The Second Amendment is not it.