On Sunday, February 23rd, 2014, the smoke over Ukraine seemed to be clearing, after a wild week.

Some Ukrainians far off in Washington D.C. were apparently celebrating the revolution, in the typical manner people celebrate World Cup victories:

These (presumably-pro-revolution) Ukrainians were walking past one of those new "bikeshare" stands.

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News of the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014 continues to capture much of what free time I have these days.

To those who read my post-193 ("Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 1940s and 2010s") and doubted that they were actually looking at the flag of the WWII-era, anti-Soviet, wildly-anti-Communist, pro-German ["collaborationist"] nationalist-paramilitary group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA], see here:

I saw today a video put out by "Right Sector" which essentially names the UIA as a forerunner of its own group. Right Sector uses the UIA flag, actually, which explains why it showed up atop Kiev's anti-government barricades.

I'd never heard of "Right Sector" before last week. It is a Ukrainian street-gang-style nationalist group, and seems to be a kind of armed wing of a political party (Svoboda) that got 11% of the vote two years ago. Russian media, in their typical form, calls them "neo-Nazis" (a term that the Russian media also applies to the meek Estonians).

Reading between the lines, Right Sector does seem to have instigated the major fighting in Kiev last week. They charged the police lines, killed several police, took scores more "hostage"at one point, and provoked the huge counter-attack. Some of their units, meanwhile, had 'liberated' a large armory in Lvov (western Ukraine). The weapons began to move towards Kiev. Seeing a determined, disciplined, now-better-armed, fanatical foe, for whom fear of death was not a strong deterrent, the kleptocrats of the Ukrainian government folded; the kleptocrat-in-chief disappeared. As of this writing, headlines are saying that President Yanukovich's "whereabouts are unknown".

Here is the video released three days ago by Right Sector, featuring one of its "commanders" [2:19, w/English subtitles]. The video seems to be an introduction to Right Sector, explaining what its goals and views are.

As this video may likely one day disappear, here is my attempt to describe it and transcribe the provided subtitles:

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I feel more personally optimistic today than I did in the mid-2000s. The overall mood in the post-2008 world, though, is a lot more pessimistic.

It's all about falling expectations, isn't it. Ukraine is a case of this, I think. As of this writing (Saturday, Feb. 22nd, 2014), it seems that Ukraine has just undergone a nationalistic "revolution", with echoes of 1989. Ukraine wasn't doing so well in the 1980s, but, incredibly, in 2014 it has a substantially lower GDP-per-capita than it did in 1989! (See post-194).

I saw a poll showing that an incredible five-out-of-six White-Americans say that they are dissatisfied "with the way things are going" in the USA. Here is the breakdown by the various listed demographic groupings:

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We got bad news on Thursday.

I walked out of the elevator and into the institute at 8:50 AM, to find the main room deserted. Where is everybody? I put my bag down. Something felt "off". Down the hallway appeared A.F. (an effervescent veteran of musical theater, and one of the six CELTA candidates in our group). She said something that truly stunned me:

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These numbers are amazing to me:

          Ukraine, 1989 vs. 2013
            When 1989's figures are 100

            Ukraine's Population
             1989: 100
             2013: 88

            Ukraine's GDP [adjusted for inflation]
            1989: 100
            2013: 67

             Ukraine's Per-capita GDP [adjusted for inflation]
             1989: 100
             2013: 76
 
Ukrainians under age 35 have no memory of (sustained) good times, and even those in their 40s today have no experience of sustained good times during which they were in the labor market. Falling expectations lead to this:

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An anti-government barricade, in Kiev, in one the past few wild days in that city:

This is a still from the 2:05 mark in this video (graphic content), from the Russia Today world-news service. If you look closely at the video footage, you see a red-and-black flag, flying high and clear, at the center. A closer shot (top left):

What is this red-and-black flag? I wondered. I searched. I found it:

It belonged to the The Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA]. The UIA was a radically-anti-Communist, nationalistic paramilitary group in the 1940s, whose goal was the elimination of Communism and the overthrow of Soviet rule. The UIA was the "military wing" of a Ukrainian nationalist political party. They were actively pro-German in WWII.

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Today is the holiday commonly known as "Presidents' Day" (a confusing holiday). I still go in to "work".

A funny thing about Presidents' Day is that more than one presidential birthday is being celebrated, i.e. Washington's (Feb. 22) and Lincoln's (Feb. 12) -- formerly two separate holidays in many states.

However, states have all different names for this day, including the formerly-Southern state of Virginia. (Formerly because in the mid-2010s here, with Northern Virginia's millions of people, Virginia is tipping into being something else.)

Virginia calls it "George Washington Day", excluding old Honest Abe.

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The excellent Korean politics and history blog, Popular Gusts, found this image from 1990:

This attitude remains strong in South Korea even into the mid-2010s.

The entire Left and much of the Right (except its leadership) share this attitude. It may be the most-vigorous strand of Korean political thought that I noticed. It may "come from" the left-wing, but as its real appeal is on nationalistic-racialistic grounds, the right-wing "doth not protest too much". There thus being little opposition, conformism takes care of any stragglers who didn't get the memo (the apolitical, not-particularly-racialistic bloc).

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I'm happy to announce that you will be able to find this at Yuletyde.com, from now on. The cumbersome and clumsy URL of http://yuletide5142.weebly.com is hereby laid to rest.

Nobody had registered Yuletyde.com. A search reveals only 5,470 results for "Yuletyde", and none of any significance:

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It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the '80s was my most active day in life up to that point....as it was my very first.

I don't know how, but someone in the CELTA group found out that Thursday was my birthday. They insisted on having a 'party'. Pictured at left are J.F. (standing; going to Japan in March), A.F. (blue striped shirt), and S.R. (semi-hidden). In the center are bottles of orange and apple juice presented as gifts, which we shared. (In the background is the white board. Nametags of "practice students" are to the right of it. Lot of chairs, with those impossibly-small foldable-desks attached, are all around.)

The balloons were yet to come:

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February 13th, 2014's big snowstorm in Washington cancelled most things, but not my thing. Out I went.

I was delighted, in a way, to be able to walk along the roads (note the vantage point of the photo below).

The two human figures above are firefighters. One is using a snowblower. The other is by the door. I heard the snowblower tell the other guy that he could "go back in and watch the [Olympic] hockey".

I arrived around 8:30 AM and descended into an empty subway station:

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I found General Sherman's memoir in the library.

Here is what he says of his time at West Point (Summer 1836 to Spring 1840, graduating at age 20):

It was Sherman's campaigns in Tennessee and Georgia that were decisive in that war, I think, i.e. "Sherman won the war". Historians say that Sherman's capture of Atlanta ensured Lincoln's reelection (besides giving the setting to "Gone With the Wind"). A weak, ineffectual Union general commanding in the West in 1864, who had not gotten anything done, may have cost Lincoln the election. Lincoln's opponent was in favor of negotiating terms of peace with the CSA government.

Sherman -- one of the Civil War's greatest generals --  having had a non-stellar performance as a cadet at West Point ("I was not considered a good soldier"), suggests that it's hard to predict real-life performance based on academic performance. Consider the following West Point class rankings of Civil War generals:

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Executive Summary: Public transportation in the USA still can't get its act together. It took me 30 mins to get home from the bus' scheduled departure time. Plain-old walking would've taken under 20 mins.

You ascend out of the subway station at 6:04 PM. Back to the bus waiting area: Fenced in by towering buildings, a gaggle of loiterers, mostly appearing to be fuddy-duddy federal-government office-worker types, huddle under and around a bus shelter. They, like you, want to get home as soon as possible. Decision time: Do you walk the twenty-minutes home, or do you ride the bus, listed to leave at 6:05 PM? It has certainly not departed yet, as a lot of people are standing in its designated waiting area. It drops-off five minutes' walk from your home.

As you may guess, this is not a hypothetical, but the beginning of a personal anecdote, which continues right here:

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 February 2014 for me involves an intensive "CELTA certificate" course. Intensive does not mean "bad". I quite enjoy it.

CELTA is a TESOL ("Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages") certificate. It opens up doors for (better) jobs around the planet and in the USA, though not in public schools. It is the most "prestigious" of the TESOL certificates by reputation. It is designed  by Cambridge University.

The course takes place in downtown Washington DC, 9 AM to 5 PM weekdays every day this month. A great location. And that's not the only reason the course is great:

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As I previously mentioned, my Korean course in January was a success. I feel that my final project was especially successful. We had to come up with a five-minute "speech" to deliver to the class, and all in Korean of course. Some students used powerpoint slides. I did.

The speech and slides are below, in Korean (with an English translation I have done just now; it was not part of the assignment). Be not deceived by its simplicity! This speech took me many, many painstaking hours -- About eight hours in a coffee shop, then several more revisions, and helpful suggestions from many along the way. Others in the class told me that they enjoyed my presentation a lot. Here it is:

안녕하세요!
제 이름 피터입니다. 미국에서왔어요.

무슨 운동 좋아해요? 저는 등산을 좋아하는데요. 저는 오늘 한국 등산여행에 대해 이야기 할 거예요.
____________________________________________
Hello! My name is Peter. I am from the USA.

What kind of outdoor activities do you like? I like hiking. Today I will tell you about a hiking trip I did in Korea.

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The designation "one of the best decisions I've made in years"  is one I have happily applied, these last few weeks, to my decision to complete an intensive Korean course in Seoul. It's over now. It took place in January 2014.

I write this a week after I returned to the USA on "Chinese New Year's Day", Friday Jan. 31st 2014. (What I'm doing now -- I will explain in a future post -- is even more intensive and is another good decision, and for similar reasons.)

Why was the intensive Korean course a good decision?

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