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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