More about Russia

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but Stratfor.com has a "weekly intelligence briefing" at Bill O'Reilly's website. Yeah, struck me as weird too.

Anyway, the current one is an analysis of Russia's historical cycles, and where it is now, and what's likely to come. Interesting stuff, methinks.

Breaking: Boris Yeltsin, R.I.P.

From MSNBC:

Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, has died, a Kremlin official said Monday. He was 76.

Obviously, there's more there (apparently, heart failure). Considering his age, I guess it wasn't that unexpected.

Also, I have no real idea how to react to this. I mean, his record (at least from my [American] perspective) was pretty mixed.

Maybe I'll have more later, after it sinks in and I've caught up with what I meant to post yesteday. (I *may* have time later today, dunno. For this piece of breaking news, I made time.)

Update: Not getting a lot of traction in the blogosphere that I see; even with residual VTech and Blue Angels reporting, it's pretty slow news-wise today. Dunno. I mean, yeah, my reaction was kind of a shrug-- and I presume that that's many others' reaction as well-- but it should be at least noted, yes?