Can Obama write the manuscript and conduct the debut of a diplomatic concerto on Ukraine?

In Chinese, we are told, the word for threat is the same as the word for opportunity.
While the deep and profound implications of that linguistic anomaly could and probably have  been mined by scholars of various cultures for centuries, illustrating the roots of the Asian culture's capacity for endurance, resilience, steadfastness and "unruffability" in the face of any kind of storm, unless and until pushed to the brink, it is now time for the west, and especially for the United States, and more precisely for the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, to demonstrate that, history has given him and his administration  both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity to leave a lasting and positive imprint on history.
If Obama believed, as he said in Grant Park in November 2008, on the night of his first election to the White House, that "this is our moment", and it clearly was the moment when the stars coalesced around a favourable galaxy for the first black man to live in the White House in U.S. history, then this moment, in the Ukraine and for the world, confronts the man, his presidency and the world's stability going forward.
Fareed Zakaria has called the crisis the most significant geopolitical crisis to face the world since the Second World War. If his assessment is credible, and while it trumps Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Bosnia and more recently Syria and other conflicts since the mid-twentieth century, and Zakaria himself is not prone to melodrama and exaggerations, then Obama's historic moment, on the world stage is now.
Foraging a path through the economic crisis of 2008, the housing bubble and the economic collapse that he inherited, bailing out the auto companies, passing the Health Care Affordability Act, helping to clean up after hurricane Sandy, steering the country through Sandy Hook and Aurora's bloodbaths, negotiating with Russia the removal of chemical weapons from Syria, and even negotiating an end to the Iranian hubristic ambition for nuclear weapons (both still a work in progress)...these pale in comparison to the potential for the world if a country's boundaries can be changed by an aggressor with barely a shot being fired in the "Caesarian" removal.
Putin's actions in reclaiming Crimea, after Kruschev openly "gifted Ukraine with its territory in 1954, must not become a model for future leaders in any hegemonic administration of any country, including the Chinese, the Japanese, and even the United States.
However, the task of bringing the "herd of cats" that is the European Union, the Kremlin, and the
United Nations, along with both the people of the Crimea and the Ukraine to a table, to forge a negotiated settlement of this open and potentially lethal geopolitical tumor will require the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the intellect of an Einstein, and the good humour of Bob Hope.
And it will require all of the libraries of the world to be deeply mined for their storehouse of evidence of leaders rising to the peek of their potential, demonstrating the best angels of humanity, for all of history both to remember and to summon as examples of courage, imagination and collaboration.
And it will have to happen amid the storm that is Gaza, Syria, Iran, the South China Sea disputed islands, the threat of cyber attack, and the growing threat from climate change and global warming, to which human beings are contributing at a rate that threatens humanity.
Can the moment be perceived by enough leaders with enough strength to be able to "give" and not to insist on the bullying approach of "taking" ( because national and individual hubris, emerging from a sense of desperation drive it) and can Obama both write the manuscript and conduct the orchestra in the world debut of his "diplomatic concerto" in the time remaining in his presidency?
That is a question for which the world is eagerly waiting for an answer...and the "perfect storm" has set the table with enough chairs and more than enough of an audience, that should Obama be successful, even partially successful, his name and reputation, along with that of the United States itself, will be so restored and refined for the next century.
Let us all pray that Obama is 'the man' for this critical moment in history, and offer not the kind of heel-biting, and more serious character assassination criticisms that will only hinder his progress on behalf of every human being on the planet. 

Are we normalizing those aspects of humanity that spell demise, and not shared survival?

The mystery of the missing MH370, Boeing 777, somewhere north of Malaysia, and somewhere south of Vietnam, is almost unbearable for families and friends of passengers and crew (some 239 human beings), not to mention the officials from the operating company, the national governments and the airline producer, Boeing. Even when debris and oil on the surface of the water are spotted, we soon learn, neither has come from the missing aircraft. Both Malaysia Airlines and the 777 have, according to reports, an excellent safety record, and the fifty-three-year-old pilot had literally hundreds of hours of flying in his resume. Something is seriously missing from this story, and the world watches.
At the same time, the BBC Science section reports, based on the Journal of Nature that scientists have discovered some highly significant evidence not only of blue diamond rocks deep under the surface of the planet, but also that with a 1% finding of water in the mineral, there could be more water deeply buried under the earth than in all the oceans above the surface.*
Individual lives, of passengers and crew, members of families from some dozen-plus countries, are missing and now presumed dead, while simultaneously, using their skills, their experience, their  collaborative ingenuity and their deep and profound learning and comprehension of their lives, scientists may have unlocked one of the deepest of the world's mysteries, that hydrogen plays as important a role deep within our planet as it does on the earth's surface.
The co-mingling of death with new prospects of life, while never a specific theme of any news story, seems to jump at us, upon reflection from the many experiences each of us have encountered in our lives. And yet, humans, for the most part, continue in a single-minded and seriously flawed world view, either categorized as romantic (unable and/or unwilling to see the snakes in the grass) or tragic (unable and/or unwilling to see the miracles that are poking their tiny shoots through our consciousness every day. Comedians will do "gigs"  pointing out that science has not discovered a cure for cancer, but have discovered  'botox' which removes our frown from the worry about contracting cancer. However, writers of all varieties have been telling stories of life and death, in poetic tapestries for centuries.
News reports daily outline human tragedy in the skies, in the water, on the roads, and in apartments and allies around the world, in which some human beings are being shot, killed, maimed and terminated by other human beings and by the ravages of storms of various kinds, temperatures and durations. These numbers of casualties roll past our eyes, nearly unconscious, as do the daily numbers that denote our current 'fiscal health' in the 'stock report'. For investors and their agents, these latter numbers have a meaning and an import. For the rest of humanity, they are merely noise.
Similarly, the death tolls in Syria, along with the mounting tribe of refugees of the starving and the displaced and the homeless almost serve as a glaze on our consciousness, not to mention our conscience. "That is a problem for others to solve...it's not for me," becomes a kind of escape route for any pangs of pity or compassion or guilt or powerlessness that we all feel when confronted by the human casualties of nature, war and human vengeance. And yet, those people were once loved and revered and important in the lives of their families, their neighbours and their towns and cities. Today, they are, as the passengers and crew of MH370 will be in a few weeks and months, merely pieces of data on some computer that stores airline "incidents" and help those who analyse these events, both to prevent future occurrences and, for some of a different and more nefarious mind-set, how to inflict pain and suffering in a similar manner in the future, in order to accomplish some contemptible human enterprise.
Our capacity for detachment, while making it possible to survive and to carry out our individual lives, serves simultaneously as a kind of early warning against emotional and civic and global escape from engagement, and from putting ourselves in the shoes of those who suffer, both as direct victims and as support for those victims of natural disasters and human conflicts.
And because we have new and imaginative technologies that provide hours of pseudo-engagement with action of all varieties on screens and through joy-sticks, involving pseudo action figures, we can escape the front page disasters into a world of power and influence, albeit over merely digital synapses.
And while collectively we focus on the minutiae of our survival, our jobs and our traffic jams and our winter storms, we carry with us a capacity for suffering and for empathy and for identifying with others in danger that is too often minimized or ignored or devalued, and periodically we need to refocus through some heart-warming story of human support and care and tenderness that many consider "not newsworthy" enough to be included in our water-fountain chats.
What would our world be like if, instead of demanding and devouring and growing dependent on the stories of disasters, casualties, human inhumanity and violence and estrangement because some part of our human appetite craves excitement and experience 'on the edge' thereby identifying all of us with the adrenalin of being on the edge, we developed and shared that part of our appetite and emotional/spiritual need for experiences and stories of human support, and human care and human needs, together and not exclusively on an individual, competitive and survivalist scale? What if the latter category of story were to become our norm, and the stories of violence, revenge and hatred and deception were to be the exception, would we see a shift in our appetite for a different kind of action, a different kind of art and a different kind of human accomplishment, not based on competitive conflict but rather on collaborative methods and their shared accomplishments?
Of course, dear reader, the concept is absurd, (you are saying to yourself) because we have centuries of empirical evidence that demonstrates the human need for conflict, violence, war, crime and bestiality, and that also demonstrates that compassion and empathy and support and engagement are important in our hospitals and our schools and our homes, but are not the stuff of a real and authentic life.
"Business, the new religion, depends on a competitive will to survive, to grow and to eliminate all the competition," goes the conventional argument. We inculcate that competitive spirit in and through our politics, in and through our professional athletic/entertainment theatre, in our profit-making from the theatre and the film industries (where the business dominates the artistic, while simultaneously making it possible to exist), in our hierarchical and competitive hiring and promotional practices and "values" and in our academic and research libraries and laboratories.
And we celebrate its success when we idolize those who have climbed and 'wormed' and fought their way to the 'top of their pyramid of whatever their chosen field. And then, as if to attempt to balance that competitive instinct, we create "ordinary heroes' to feature on special programs in all public media, as if to remind us of our capacity to encourage empathy. And, once again, these are the exceptions to our daily diet of disaster, and our daily consumption of information that hardens the heart and deadens the soul and shadows the light of hope that only the sharing of human empathy and compassion and suffering with those whose lives are permanently in danger, permanently on the edge between survival and death can release.
We have so effectively merged our worst appetites, in our most elaborate and seductive packaging, both in supermarkets where processed foods are killing us, and in our bureaucracies where phony political correctness stifles and eliminates human truth-telling, and in our "protective" establishments where the exercise of power and protection are so compromised by the pursuit of personal and organizational ambition, through competition and a different kind of "killing" of our opponents, and increasingly in our hardened and detached and competitive and, from this perspective, insulting acceptance of 'war' and the "way of the world" when we know we can do much better than that, and have demonstrated that so many times both individually and collectively in the past.
However, resisting and risking whatever it might take to push back against the "tide" of competition and survival and destruction that we can and do see playing out in all human endeavours, we fall into compliance, and indeed complicity with what is considered 'norm' and rationalize our myopia by telling ourselves that the world is a nasty place, and our children have to be prepared to be able to withstand all of its natural and human inflictions of pain and suffering. So we keep bowing as sycophants to a hollow god of power and money and winning and we permit the erosion of empathy, compassion and  caring in our individual lives, and through them to the culture as a whole.
Sad, but too true!

*By Simon Redfern, BBC, March 12, 2014
A research team led by Professor Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta, Canada, studied a diamond from a 100 million-year-old kimberlite found in Juina, Brazil, as part of a wider project.

They noticed that it contained a mineral, ringwoodite, that is only thought to form between 410km and 660km beneath the Earth's surface, showing just how deep some diamonds originate.
Buried oceans
While ringwoodite has previously been found in meteorites, this is the first time a terrestrial ringwoodite has been seen. But more extraordinarily, the researchers found that the mineral contains about 1% water.

While this sounds like very little, because ringwoodite makes up almost all of this immense portion of the deep Earth, it adds up to a huge amount of deep water.

Dr Sally Gibson from the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work, commented: "Finding water in such large concentrations is a hugely significant development in our understanding of the ultimate origin of water now present at Earth's surface."

Peladeau's candidacy for the Parti Quebecois could prove decisive in achieving a majority...and a referendum on separation

Pierre Karl Peladeau, formerly the union-busting head of Quebecor media, which includes the Sun Media holdings and Fox news Canada, and also more recently head of Quebec Hydro, is now a candidate for the Parti Quebecois in St. Jerome riding, for the upcoming April 7th provincial election.
Naturally pundits are observing that his signing on to the PQ is somewhat surprising, even ironic, given the party's history and tradition of labour support, and social democratic leanings. Some are wondering if M. Peladeau wants to become the premier of Quebec and others are pointing out that his candidacy lends credibility to the PQ's bid to bring a more fiscally conservative voter into the fold, generating conditions favourable to a YES result in another referendum on sovereignty.
Declaring, "I am a sovereignist!" Peladeau gives a kind of respectability among the business class, to the PQ's hopes and aspirations of taking Quebec out of Canada, and forming an independent state.
As one pundit on CTV's Question Period put it yesterday, "I'm from the Maritimes and frequently I hear from people there, 'If Quebec wants to go, then let it'....(because they are tired of attempting to pander to that province, are the words and resignation in her expression).
We have in this election, and in Peladeau's candidacy, the potential for a perfect storm favouring the PQ's hopes for sovereignty. First, the rest of Canada is apathetic about working hard to preserve the nation as we know it. Second, Harper's federal government, and Harper personally are both running very low in Quebec opinion polls, and third, with a new Liberal leader in Quebec, who is much less well known than Jean Charest, the former leader, and both the Liberals and the PQ eagerly wooing the votes of those who currently prefer the third party (CAQ, a much more fiscally conservative federal party with perhaps 15-20% of the popular vote), the outcome of that pull, whether those votes go to the PQ or the Liberals, or remain with the CAQ, could well determine the outcome of the April 7th vote.
Should the PQ gain a majority, not only will the Charter of Rights and Values, prohibiting religious garb from being worn by public servants at work, become the law of the province, but there is little doubt that a referendum will emerge as the culmination of thirty-five years of work by the Parti Quebecois to achieve what two previous referenda have failed to produce, a formal declaration with negotiations with Canada, for an separate independent state or nation.
It is Peladeau's endorsement of the sovereignty movement, bringing, one assumes, some of his 'conservative' and union busting business peers into the PQ, at a time when support for Quebec's federalist aspirations outside the province are running at an all-time low, that is especially troubling, even though formal support for sovereignty is running around 40% in Quebec, not adequate to win a referendum at this time. However, pushing that number over 50% would certainly not be an insurmountable challenge, given a majority government for the PQ on April 7th.
This space has spent some time opposing the establishment of Fox news in Canada, given our left-leaning views, and now that Peladeau is one of those, a prominent Quebecer where 'star' political leaders have always had more traction than in many other Canadian regions, who seeks to dismember my country, we will be watching carefully, and opposing every move taken by the PQ, and its new and potentially convincing candidate, in the hope and the belief that Canada remain as a country that embraces all provinces, regions and indigenous and immigrant cultures and languages.
There is a theme running through John Ralston Saul's book, Canada, Fair Country, that points to the three-legged stool on which Canada is based, English, French and First Nation; Saul also points out a significant difference between both Europe and the United States and Canada, that is best illustrated in the Canadian 'circle' that opens to welcome new-comers into the circle, and is must less hierarchical that the United States and Europe. Quebec may now be at a historic juncture, having to choose to follow its European roots, as the United States has done, and rejecting what Saul considers one of the most significant and valued traits of Canada, its inclusivity, and its flattened and non-hierarchical circle.
Clearly, the charismatic leader, one of which is clearly Peladeau, will play more dramatically and potentially both more endearingly and also more divisively in Quebec, and one can only hope that the majority of Quebecers will think seriously before throwing their lot in with the quickly becoming obsolete hierarchical, charismatic social and political structure, and the pursuit of sovereignty and independence.
We are not apathetic about Quebec remaining within Canada; we believe that Canada without Quebec not only changes but loses an essential part of our historic identity and risks even further absorption into the dollar-driven corral of the United States. And that would be a tragedy of a legacy to leave to our grandchildren, especially if it were to occur by default, and apathy, another of the many lesser qualities of Canadians, on which too many politicians can and do count.

Reflections on International Women's Day, 2014

International Women's Day, 2014, is celebrated around the world, even though many of the world's communities and cultures have yet to transform into something that looks like equality of the genders.
Of course, there are shining platinum examples of outstanding women in all sectors of most developed countries, including medicine, law, politics, corporate and government leadership, the military and most of the traditional "trades". And that could have and would have only been possible through a concentrated emphasis on closing the gender gap that began at least a half-century ago.
Most of our traditional professions, and the graduate schools that produce those entering the professions, are now demonstrating a majority of female practitioners and students respectively.
Fighter pilots, space explorers, bus drivers, heavy equipment operators, insurance sales and executives, researchers both inside the laboratories and on the street where the more practical and impactful findings are gathers, and also in the highest ranks of all our institutions, both private and public are women.
And for this large and growing cadre of ground-breaking women, the people of the world can and must be thankful and proud.
However, on this day, we learn of thousands of sexual assault complaints in the U.S. military, of hundreds of missing aboriginal women across Canada, for whom aboriginal people have taken to the streets and the rail lines in protest to draw attention to this tragedy about which the official political class does not want to speak or inquire. We also know that, millions of young girls are still being denied access to education in too many countries across the globe, and that those who attempt to acquire an education are expected to surmount obstacles not confronting their young male counterparts. Still, in the U.S. and Canada, and in most western countries, wages for similar work are considerably less for women than for men (in the U.S. it amounts to $.77 for every $1.00 earned by a male worker).
However, there are still many embedded and virulent, although almost imperceptible, indications that a male culture dominates everywhere. Just this week, in a funeral of a young, vibrant and accomplished professional mother of two, a Roman Catholic priest told his congregation that we are all in a race to eventually be with God, that this young thirty-six-year-old who succumbed to many cancerous tumours had won her race and was now with God.
While most mourners would be comforted by those words, there is an implicit kind of competition implied, if not actually asserted, in the metaphor of the "race", as if we have to compete with each other, or even with God, for his love, attention and eventual embrace upon our death. That notion, at the root of any faith, smells so masculine and yet remains so innocuous and imperceptible that there is little likelihood the priest will be even asked about his choice of words, certainly not confronted.
Acceptance of gender equality is not only a matter of sociology and statistics; it is also a matter of attitudes, vocabularies, metaphors that are "baked into the cake" of a culture's educational, political, economic and even religious diet.
Start with an exclusively male deity. No matter how that translates, into whatever language and culture, it is about power, authority, judgement and a kind of divide that includes those compliant with the "standards" and the "rules" and the "expectations" that men have attributed to a deity, and excludes those who bring scepticism, doubt, and even rebellious questioning of the premises, traditions and the practices that those who wrote the first words of dogma, and institutional development and continued for centuries among those who considered "control" of their wayward adherents of prime importance.
Even among the Christian 'right' there is a strong group known as "Real Women" whose rejection of gender equality is supported by their clinging to the scriptural notion that a ship can have only one captain, the husband, to whom the wife must look for decisions of the family, once again, as if family life is and can only be constructed on the principle of a hierarchy of power, with the male on top. Metaphors of "ships" on high seas, while evoking heroic images of competing with violent storms and images of Jesus calming the waters on the Sea of Galilee, see to serve a male-oriented culture that needs order, control and a firm hand at the helm. Families, we have learned, are more complex and more nuanced and need power to be both shared and exercised by both "parents" in a collaborative not a combative and competitive model. One of the most tragic things one can learn is that a spouse is and has been competing with another spouse for the affections of the children, a direct result of the embedded competition that subtly and dangerously underpins too many of our cultural norms. Competition too, while it recognizes one aspect of human nature, tends to minimize others equally and sometimes even more useful and needed aspects of that complexity that we know as human nature.
With competition come gender stereotypes which help to fixate a culture on gender models that limit and even restrict the full development of both genders, and those stereotypes spring primarily from a male-dominated premise that is based on fear, weakness and the need to dominate. Of course, those fears are not acknowledged, and are rather denied, in order to preserve the veneer of dominance that may have originated with a need for physical strength to survive, and a need for sexual prowess to procreate. However, we have long since passed out of a phase of meta-history that witnessed such dominance as either needed or acceptable. And yet, we are still "fighting" a competitive war between men and women on too many fronts. In fact, some of the worst aspects of the virulent feminism that has reared its ugly head in the last few decades has adopted the worst of male behaviours and attitudes as a sign that women are as "strong" as any man, and that, if men could and did dominate their women, then the reverse is also possible. And now, we face the spectre of a demise of masculinity, and those bodies and minds and spirits so genetically disposed, given that the "gene" of competition is so deeply integrated into the masculine identity and that a considerable amount of evidence mounts everyday that men are, rather than lose the competition, leaving the playing field, in those grad schools and those professions that once were the accomplishments of generations of male children.
A culture of rape on university campuses, along with a cataract of sexual assault cases in the American military, linked to an entertainment culture that makes billions from both illicit and "conforming" presentation of sexuality, including hard porn, soft porn and the now legitimized sexual objectification of the female body as a primary resource in the advertising industry, together and separately will do much to protract a culture in which men do not learn to control their libido and women increasingly emulate a form of male dominance that never served men well and will not serve its female acolytes either. When greed and power are permitted to dominate the cultural values agenda, then our gender and our sexuality become inevitably slaves to those "ironic" values. They are not, no matter whether pursued by men or by women, ethical or moral values. They are legitimized as surrogate "values" for the unleashed testosterone that is running rampant across the planet, mixed tragically with a deluge of carbon, in what appears to be a headlong stampede to our own demise.
Integration of both masculine and feminine traits, in both men and women, while an ideal worth both acceptance and the work that such "androgyny" requires, is nevertheless still a long way off, in most contemporary cultures. Similarly, schools that understand and appreciate the complexities and uniqueness of their male students and faculty to the same degree that they understand and appreciate the complexities and uniqueness of their female students and faculty, are a long way off. In fact, we have replaced male-dominated cultures with female-dominated cultures, as if that were pay-back for centuries of concerted and organized abuse of women by centuries of unconscious men. And on International Women's Day, we need to acknowledge that dominance by either gender creates a deficit of both.
The abuse of power, whether that abuse comes from a man or a woman, is invariably the expression of weakness, either real or perceived. And both men and women are capable of abusing power against the opposite gender, as they are of abusing power against their own gender. And all religions that use a deity to underscore and enforce their abuse of power, for whatever reason, are both implicitly and explicitly complicit in generating a culture in which power, status, control and dominance are the brass ring for which both young men and young women strive.
Even the Genesis wording giving man "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures is a male-infused cornerstone of a Christian culture that continues to view sex, gender and equality as somehow a reduction of the potential of one gender or the other, or both, depending on one's relationship with power, authority and identity. And that word "dominion" has been, and in some quarters continues to be, so sacralised, and thereby so influential, that it has seen unfortunate application to most, if not all our social and institutional structures, as if man's creations were an extension of masculinity over all of the rest of nature, including women.
Saying "no" to the abuse of power, no matter what the situation, nor no matter which gender is imposing the abuse, nor under what deity, is one of the universal goals to which all humans of all cultures, religions and geographies can aspire. And that goal is so needed and sustainable that it could revolutionise both our politics and the cultures of our institutions so radically that we might even see a ready acceptance and deployment of androgyny breaking out all over. From a personal perspective, I can honestly observe that to the degree that I have embraced both my masculinity strengths and weaknesses and my feminine strengths and weaknesses, I have opened doors to insights, emotions, and sharing with my life partner that were never available previously. And I give Michelle most of the credit for accepting my brokenness, and my failures as well as my gifts, earlier and more completely than I ever could.
And that would be something both men and women, especially those currently locked into some neurotic, obsessive preservation of a stereotype of masculinity and/or femininity, could and would celebrate. And we could all point to International Women's Day 2014 as the day that social transformation began. Our grandchildren would be so grateful!

Cacophony and heavy metal not the stuff of reflective resolution

With Putin's puppets in the Kremlin moving to approve the secession of the Crimea from Ukraine and its adoption by Russia, a move the west says is illegitimate, and Putin himself rebuffing Obama's call for negotiations including officials from Kiev, and publicly threatening reciprocal sanctions on the U.S. while changing the terms of the gas sale to Ukraine by removing the discount offered to Yanukovich, and the dialogue of the "deaf" continuing between Kerry and Lavrov, it is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, this morning, who calls for Ukraine not to become an outpost for either the west or Russia, but rather a bridge between the west and Russia.
The ninety-year-old academic-turned diplomat-turned-international consultant still merits serious listening, in the old "E.F. Hutton" mode (people listen when Hutton speaks). However, seeing the 'big picture' is unlikely by many, including both Obama and Putin, at this time, in the midst of a flurry of mixed reports, rumours, innuendo and threats, that amount to a kind of rock-concert cacophony in which no one really hears the words of any single song, but rather pulsates to the monster "beat", almost hypnotically, (and the beat here is one of a counterpoint of statements and counter-statements from Washington and Moscow, interrupted occasionally by a few milder riffs from Berlin and London, and the occasional trill from New York's United Nations.
There is a kind of unfolding, moveable theatre being staged by the chief diplomats, purportedly for the benefit of their respective theatre audiences back home, that seems to evoke echoes of the dysfunctional dialogue between the history professor and his college-president's daughter wife in Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, in which both protagonists were quickly becoming inebriated. Much anger, accusation, counter-accusation, charges of hypocrisy by both sides, without any sign that either side would prefer a resolution to the actual furor of verbal jousting.
It is drama that portrays a kind of hollow emptiness, both to the words and to the prospects for anything substantial to emerge, especially given all the old wounds and scars and pre-rehearsed rhetoric of combat, in which all sides are steeped, and perhaps even mired.
The core learning from the tobacco industry's fight to survive, given the compelling arguments against their products from science, we now learn, was "doubt"....sow doubt and the chaos that results will preserve our position to sell cigarettes.
Both Obama and Putin seem to have lifted a page from the legal manual of those tobacco companies, and thrown their "hypocrisy" and "doubt" rhetoric at each other; of course the respective media agents on both sides run with the latest salvo, and the more thoughtful and more insightful and the more reflective and less combative words of people like Kissinger get lost in the fray.
We have already crossed the proverbial threshold of war, in which the first casualty is "truth"....and who knows where this drama will finds its denoument, or its peaceful resolution...and when.
However, what we do know is that heavy metal rhythm and cacophonous arguments are not the stuff of calm, reflective and serious "getting-to-yes" processes. In fact, they are our guarantee that getting-to-yes is not the goal of either side. Kissinger's bridge seems only a mirage on a foggy oil painting hanging over the Maidan, noticed by no one walking by. Perhaps one day, it will hang in the very room where Kerry and Lavrov or perhaps Obama and Putin put this mess to a resolution, without firing a shot.

Putin: be careful what you wish for....

Earlier in this space, I compared the Russian 'incursion' into Crimea with Kruschev's installation of missiles in Cuba, from which position, through some high-level diplomatic manoeuvres with the Kennedy White House, Russia backed down. Kennedy in the west, is seen as successful in providing an honourable escape from the crisis for Kruschev, and agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, as part of the settlement. In that argument, I was nudging Obama to claim his "kennedy spine" by showing strength through diplomacy.
There are others today who consider the Russian 'incursion' (notice the avoidance of the word invasion in almost all reports, perhaps as a gesture to help in the de-escalation process itself, perhaps in recognition of the fact that so far, no shots have been fired) more analogous to Hitler's invasion of Austria, given the similarity of his words "to protect the German citizens living there" to Putin's words, "to protect Russian citizens living in Crimea". The argument is not, apparently, that Putin is behaving like, or should be expected to behave, as Hitler did, and begin the process of an all-out European conflict.
However, there are scholars whose view is that should Russia swallow Ukraine, then the EU is finished. In his nuanced and insightful piece on CNN, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, currently living in Vienna, expresses this thesis, and in his piece he references a Russian historian, Andrei Zubov, who because of his expressed views on the similarity of Putin's and Hitler's actions in Crimea and Austria respectively, has been fired from his post. It is the courage and the insight demonstrated by Zubov that especially demand our respect and our notice.
Here is a brief quote from the Snyder piece on the CNN website:
The Russian historian Andrei Zubov, for example, has published a sophisticated comparison between Putin's seizure of Crimea and Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria, seeing both as the beginning of a chain of events with fatal consequences not just for the subjects of the aggression but for the aggressors themselves. (From Timothy Snyder, If Russia swallows Ukraine, the European system is finished, special to CNN, March 5, 2014)
The world, and especially Putin's Kremlin, would do well to reflect on the ousted historian's premise of the potentially dangerous and explicitly ironic potential of the downside to the aggressor in both today's events and those in Austria in 1938-9.
If Putin is indeed attempting to shake the roots of the European Union, especially what he considers its values, and especially those values that he considers corrupt, including the human rights of the gay and lesbian population, and he persists in what could become an attempt to swallow Ukraine, he might one day wish he had not even considered his ambition to re-establish the glory that was once Russia. Even a peaceful 'incursion' that prefers "talk" to "war" could land Russia and the whole of Europe in a predicament that even the ambitious and cunning and czar-like Putin would regret. And firing the historian that expresses that view is a certain sign that someone somewhere inside Russia does not like Zubov's pungent pen and ink, and his incisive mind.

To what degree is the Ukraine conflict about access to oil and natural gas reserves under the Black Sea?

Pardon me for being more than a little sceptical about the theatre that is being played out over which direction Ukraine takes, toward Europe and the west, or more toward Russia. While the high-sounding idealistic phrases burping from the mouths of Putin and Kerry et al, about protection of human rights, democracy, the rule of law and the escape from a corrupt cleptocracy probably have some relevance to the fast-moving story, there is another spectre that has begun to raise its head from under the Black Sea.
And that is the spectre of billions of dollars of oil and gas that are allegedly resting, undisturbed deep under the water, like gold nuggets in the economy of whichever "developer(s)" get there first, with the deepest pockets for exploration and development.
The Russians already control a considerable portion of the European market for energy, by some estimates providing up to 40% of Germany's total energy needs. There is a natural gas pipeline running through the middle of Ukraine carrying Russian natural gas, and we all know that the world continues, and will continue for at least the foreseeable future, to need billions of gallons or cubic feet of oil and natural gas respectively. We already have too many "petro-dependent" economies, reducing their dependence on manufacturing while stoking their reserves and balancing their budgets on the profits from the sale of fossil fuels. And in some, including both Russia and Ukraine especially under Yanukovich, oligarchs have grown rich through their corrupt seizure of the levers of influence and thereby gaining access to those petro-profits.
It would seem to this outsider that the world needs to prevent a repeat of this kind of economic and fiscal "rape" of the natural resources by and for the few members of the inner circle, and find ways to distribute the profits in a more equitable, and yes idealistic, manner. so that all the people will have access to good education and health care for their children, jobs and decent incomes for the parents of those children, and freedom from a hostile and vengeful state through legitimate laws and an open and transparent legal system.
However, so long as we continue to demand the kind of lifestyle, dependent on the products that are produced by the machines that are themselves dependent on fossil fuels for their motive power, the discharges from which we all know are sucking the very oxygen we need to live out of the atmosphere and replacing it with carbon dioxide, it will  merely be a matter of who gets the mining rights to the black crude and the natural gas who also has the power and influence in too many states' economies and political system.
And, as in the past, there are those willing and able to go to war to secure access to those mining rights, and if they will go to war, they will also compromise many of the other minimal standards that can only develop and grow under a governance that is not so deep into political and economic and fiscal incest and greed and power-addiction, that it actually turns a blind eye to the needs of ordinary people, so blinded is it to its own narcissism.
Maybe, yes maybe (and this is going to raise hackles in many places) it is time for the world to examine and to accept, after considerable debate, that not all natural resources are up for sale, and open to corporate profit, greed and exploitation. Maybe it is time to examine the notion of a set of "common interests" like water, access to food, health care and education to which all people are entitled by birthright, and we would also argue, that there is reason to suggest that even fossil fuels could become part of that "common" inheritance, and not open to private rape pillage and the pursuit of either economic or political power generated by the sale of those common resources.
We are a very long way down the road to corrupt capitalism, and the world needs leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, who reigned in the trusts and the corporations when they became too greedy and too selfish and too narcissistic....and can anyone see such a leader on the horizon?