nattiehoney

I am surprised that there aren't more people talking about the Budapest treaty memorandum. Obama has declared the crisis in Ukraine a threat to national (US) security but did not elaborate. John McCain is one of the few people I've seen who has discussed the treaty memorandum and that it must be upheld. I think the issue with Crimea might also be that the treaty memorandum considers it part of Ukrainian territory and it splitting off is in violation of the treaty memorandum. This is important because it deals with upholding non proliferation laws and affects much more than Ukraine. From this angle it seems like Putin really needed an excuse to invade Crimea so he's not just blatantly violating this international agreement. I saw that the Ukrainian parliament has asked the other countries for protection from Russia under the treaty memorandum but it was just a quick article and, again, I'm very surprised how little attention this aspect is getting.. at least here in the US. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Edit: as the comments below have pointed out, I was referring to the Budapest memorandum. Here's a release from a more official source regarding current state of US involvement: http://m.state.gov/md222949.htm.

Dan, I've wasted spent a good bit of time on Cracked. What are some of your favorite websites to peruse when you have time to kill?

Yeah exactly. I think that at the time that decision made sense because it was a new country and who knows what would've happened if Ukraine held on to the stock pile. Most likely some corrupt politician would have sold it to an interested party in exchange for a beach house with a zoo or something. But going forward I can see this having big negative impacts on non proliferation negotiations with other countries. They're already struggling and this makes matters much worse.

How did you meet your "equally crazy" friends, as you put it? Was it before or after leaving your corporate job?