Windows to Russia

Hello,

I have a hard time thinking that the two most powerful Presidents did not go home after the G-8 meeting and say to the family, (God what I just had to go through for world peace!) Sometimes even the “elite” has to play nice!

I find it interesting that Bush invited Putin to his Texas Ranch. Interesting to see if Putin will go.

I am glad it went well, Now Bush just needs to forget about those missiles in Europe!

Kyle

. .

The three pictures are of the three types of mosquitoes that live in Russia…

1st picture- normal Moscow variety, just slightly irritating…

2nd picture- this mosquito lives in normal cities and towns, people carry shotguns to kill them. This variety has been known to carry off cats and dogs when traveling in packs of 20 to 30 mosquitoes at a time…

3rd picture- This is the mosquito that lived in the Village I stayed at. The photo was taken at 100 meters and still could only get his head in the photo. This is a Giant Killer Village Mosquito. Bred in the Russian country side. (Now you know why the Villages are empty): Takes Army tanks and rocket launchers to kill them!!!

Other than Giant Killer Mosquitoes, The Villages are perfect!

Post by Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia…

1st picture- typical Russian byway.

2nd- road to our Village!

3rd- Village house that my Wife and I stay at, Her mother owns the house.

4th- Sunset at the Village (Sunrise to Freedom).

5th- The Village!

Hello,

This is some of what I love about Russia. I was raised a country boy in America. It is just natural that I love the Russian country.

Now about the roads! I got to get me a 4×4 van, Russian made. Then I can make my own roads.

Kyle

Picture of work being done to Monastery.

I just got back from The Village called, Sunrise to Freedom. As I drove home I thought about the 12 people that live there.

8 women and 4 men.

Now you would think that 12 people living in a Village, many km from society and road that only a mountain goat would love, would all live in peace and harmony.

Not so! There are two ladies that I call goat ladies,(they have goats). One lady is cow lady. (yes she has a Cow!) There is Well guy, (he operates the pump for the water). There is Orange car guy, (Yes orange Car). There is a lady I call Garden Lady ( great veggie garden). The rest of the people stay hidden. Most likely to stay out of trouble. 🙂

The two goat ladies where best friends for like 50 plus years, but now they wont talk to each other, something about grand kids fighting or something. But cow lady is friends with both goat ladies, so she has to be careful about who she converses out in the open with. Well guy loves anyone who has Vodka, So he wanders from home to home looking for vodka. Well guy agrees with all the ladies and likes everyone. Now we have a new comer to this community. (no not me).

We have a Pope as they call him in Russia. I call him Preacher Boy! He has decided to rebuild the Monastery. He has bought about 4 of the houses and brought in 6 to 8 workers. They live there now! What use to be a Monastery for women is now going to be for men only. So I guess you could say the Village is growing.

Preacher Boy, has brought several government officials and other people to his new found Monastery. He comes in about once a day for about 10 minutes. Then he blesses the world while talking on his cell phone and leaves, not to be seen until the next day. He also drives an new Audi. Preacher Boy is doing very well for himself.

So I say 12 people that live there all their lives and now about 8 that live there part time. 15 people that visit couple times of the year. A Pope who visits daily, now and one Cow!

Oh, yes! One American who goes and visits. 🙂

Then my Wife said, “This place is too crowded”

She is Right!!!!!!!

Kyle

Hi,

Going to be gone a week. Taking a trip to a Russian Village. About 350 km South from Moscow. I will take pictures of everything. Then I will let everyone know what I saw and found. I love spending time in Villages. So peaceful and quiet. Looking forward to goats milk, YUMMY!

Have a good week.

Kyle Keeton

This article gave me thoughts on the future. I realized that the two most powerful countries in the world have their presidents leaving office next year. Changing of the guard so to speak! What do you think will happen, Will relations get better or worse? Is the cold war going to start back up again? It is thought provoking at the very least.

I think with Bush leaving office, that it will help the relationship between the countries. Bush was one of those Presidents that should have had only one term. (Thats another story) American politics are corrupt! America likes to point fingers at other countries in hopes that no one will look at America. Sorta like crying Wolf!

Kyle keeton

Article Sponsored By
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 5, 2007

“”PRAGUE, June 4 — At a moment of rising tensions between Washington and Moscow, President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appear likely to use a meeting in Germany this week to focus on the one area where they appear to share a common interest: slowing Iran’s ability to produce nuclear fuel.

On virtually everything else — independence for Kosovo, missile defense and a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in Russia — Mr. Bush’s aides say they expect to have little leverage over Mr. Putin. Over the weekend, the Russian president threatened to once again point missiles at European targets if the United States went through with its plan to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“If part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States finds itself in Europe and, according to our military experts, threatens us, then we will have to take corresponding retaliatory steps,” Mr. Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of an interview with journalists from Group of 8 countries that took place on Friday. “What are these steps? Of course, we will have to have new targets in Europe.”

Asked about the cold war era of hair-trigger confrontation, Mr. Putin said, “We are, of course, returning to those times.”

In fact, with Mr. Bush headed here to speak at a democracy conference, the countries’ relations are at their lowest point since the end of the cold war, and with fears that the deteriorating relationship could rapidly worsen. Even an invitation to the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport, Me., next month appeared to do little to temper Mr. Putin’s public remarks.

The White House national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called Mr. Putin’s remarks “not helpful,” a phrase he has used many times in recent weeks in response to remarks from Russia’s leadership.

Last month, Mr. Putin issued a thinly veiled comparison of the foreign policy of the United States and the Third Reich, warning of “new threats” that amount to the “same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.”

Meanwhile, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, David Kramer, delivered a blistering assessment of the Kremlin last week, accusing it of bullying its neighbors and silencing political protest at home.

The question at the meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations in Heiligendamm, Germany, and the visit to Kennebunkport will be whether the two leaders can get past the verbal sparring to engage in genuine cooperation — and if they cannot, what the United States can do about it.

Similar questions were raised a year ago, as the two men prepared to meet at the last meeting of the Group of 8, on Mr. Putin’s home turf in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“It’s a long way from ‘I looked in his eyes and saw his soul,’ ” one member of the American national security staff said, referring to Mr. Bush’s assessment of Mr. Putin the first time they met, in June 2001. As they stood side by side, Mr. Bush said then, “More than a decade after the cold war ended, it is time to move beyond suspicion and towards straight talk.”

“I think there must have been peals of delirious laughter echoing around the ornate chambers of the Kremlin when the invitation to go to Kennebunkport arrived,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Carter. “Putin has been spitting at the United States for the last year, and what is the reaction? An invitation to a family gathering.”

Some experts say the Kennebunkport invitation was meant to defuse any potential blowups during the Heiligendamm meeting by enabling the two leaders to put off their substantive talks until July. Others say that whenever they expect fireworks between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin, the pair disappoint. Still, there are no guarantees.

“You can’t be sure,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Putin is on a tear. Day after day he is ramping up the rhetoric. He is in kind of a snarling frame of mind and it may be that he will pick a fight at the G-8, but that hasn’t been his habit. The G-8 mode is good fellowship and good manners.”

But that has not been the mood this past year. Mr. Putin made his biggest statement at a speech at a European defense forum, an indictment of American practices that brought a mild and humor-filled rebuttal from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

“There were a lot of negative parts to the Putin speech, a lot of harsh words,” said Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to Mr. Bush’s father and an early architect of the transition to the new relationship with Russia. “But it’s important to read the whole speech, especially the last part on nuclear issues, where Putin listed a lot of areas for cooperation.”

Indeed, both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Hadley, the national security adviser, have pointed in recent days to Russian cooperation on limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ms. Rice, speaking last week in Potsdam, Germany, described the American-Russian relationship as one of “cooperation and competition, of friendship and friction.”

But the limits of that cooperation have yet to be tested, because the United States has not yet tried to get mandatory sanctions in many parts of Iran’s financial network, as a penalty for Tehran’s continuing efforts to enrich uranium. As to the friction, Mr. Hadley seemed to throw up his hands at efforts to persuade Russia to accept the American missile defense plan.

“I cannot tell you, for the life of me, why they say no,” he said.

Clearly, the harsh words do not make things any easier, and the administration has been trying to tamp things down. Mr. Hadley said senior American officials raised Mr. Putin’s “Third Reich” reference directly with their Russian counterparts, “and they told us that they were not making any comparison between the United States and the Third Reich.”

Critics of the administration, including Mr. Brzezinski, say the decline in American-Russian relations is a byproduct of Mr. Bush’s heavy emphasis on building a personal relationship with Mr. Putin, instead of a strategic one.

Mr. Sestanovich, the Russia expert, said that Mr. Bush had hoped he could overcome the countries’ long-standing tensions, but that this became more difficult as Mr. Putin evolved from a leader who seemed like “a determined modernizer” into “an anti-Western autocrat.”

This will be Mr. Putin’s last G-8 meeting, and it will be Mr. Bush’s next to last. As to whether relations can improve, either between the men or their countries, Mr. Sestanovich responded, “Look to 2009.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Prague, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Moscow.””

Hi World,

I am a Grandpa

Little Jaydan, born in Springfield, Missouri. Just about a little more than a week ago.

I am a happy Grandpa!

Kyle Keeton

The nights this time of the year are very short. I am not use to such long days. I can still see outside at midnight and three thirty in the morning, I can see light again. That is strange to me. I noticed that the days were very short in the winter. That was just as strange to me. I come from much farther South in the world.

The weather has gotten much better and allot more comfortable. The heat was pretty bad here, now they tell me its more normal. 70 degrees F. day and 50 degrees F. nights. Very nice!

The air is very clear today, I can see from my 14Th floor about 4-5 km in the distance.

The birds are singing like crazy today, The doves are everywhere!

The rain is coming, I can feel it in my bones! When I hurt in all my old injuries, I know the rain is coming. I stopped listening to a weather man years ago. My grouchy bones are better at telling the weather. 🙂

The World Just keeps turning!

Kyle

Hi,

Today I was having my morning coffee, I could hear the kids playing, the dogs barking and the Moms discussing the world problems. 🙂 I thought to my self, This is normal. This is nice.

What I mean by saying that is, the world right now is at peace, at least in my neighborhood. I put in pictures that I just took. First one is typical Moscow housing. Called Flats. The second one is flats and the playground that is with the flats for kids to play on and in. The third is what flats look like from a distance, Lots of people living in a small area.

The point to all this is that the living accommodations in Moscow are not bad. The people all live the same. The kids have lots of play area off the streets, They always have forests near the flats. You can take long walks and have peace of mind. You can let your kids run and not worry about cars running over them. The designing of the flats and living areas show much planning and forsite. It shows intelligence. It shows care for people. Their needs and desires. This was all done in the Soviet era, Funny, I as am American and was told that Soviets were a cold, no heart, scourge, and hooligans. That Soviets could care less about the people.

What is bad, is that I have come over here and found a society that is being Raped by Capitalist processes. A society that is growing and doing better. But not because of Capitalism. Because the people and their leaders are working hard to be their own society. Not a dream from America or Britain. I see a country that has a stable money supply, A country that has a strong leader, a balanced budget, and people with desires to be stepping to the future. The one fault I see in Russia sometimes they can be a bit of a Bully!

I don’t see this any more in America. I see Americans with a huge World debt, no future, and sometimes they are a BIG BULLY. That is sad, I am from America and I see this as a problem!

The people here are content and happy.

Can you say the Same ???

Kyle

I went shopping today. To get food for the flat. I left the flat with my sweety and kissed her goodbye. I walked to my favorite store that has lots of food items. I shopped and went to pay. After the girl rang all items up, I asked for two plastic bags. In Russia you do not get free plastic bags. You must buy them.

I asked the girl in my broken Russian, Packet (bag) I pointed and she looked at me. I said English from America. I asked again for packet.

Then she said: Oh, you want a bag! (in English) I just stood there dumb. She gave me 4 bags and I paid.

Sometimes the English language comes from the weirdest places. It surprises me now when I hear English spoken.

I love this country!

Comments

Kyle