First, the belligerents:

–Russia: Led by Vlad Putin, a man whose rise to power was aided by the very weak post-cold war government that was allowing the usual suspects to loot the place. He is a giant on the world stage due to the fact that his competition consists of a collection of tyrannical, corrupt, debaucherous criminals that democracies are prone to select for. Although he has a modest fan club in some circles, he has been a petty man who engages in weird assassination attempts against those who have slighted him while violently making sure no one is messing around in his “sandbox”. Perhaps his most well known trick was supposedly getting Trump elected through the use of one Facebook ad. It must have been pretty good, though I’ve never seen it myself.

–GAE (Global American Empire): Led by a country whose elite prides itself on being the moral authority of the planet even though the nation over which they rule has become home to gulags, show trials, and a slow-motion genocide (picking up pace though) being waged by the rulers against the hated heritage population. For their most recent circus act, they paid to develop a biological agent that was released and then ran rampant around the planet. In quite the coincidence, they had also developed a snake-oil cure that turned out to be worse than the disease. It largely worked out though as the people most impacted were those that they hated anyway, and much profits were had. All of this was lied about of course.

2004 – Ukrainian pro-GAE presidential contender Viktor Yushchenko is supposedly poisoned, leading to an election being manhandled by the Ukrainian courts to GAE’s favor. I say “supposedly” since this article puts a different spin on the original narrative., It’s hard to feel sorry for Vlad being framed for such a crime, if that even was the case, since he had already made “assassination by falling piano” one of his MOs. It is also a reflection of the modern history of Ukraine since the borders gifted to it by the Soviets meant the population was half-ish Russian and half-ish Ukrainian with all the stability that can be had from such an arrangement. All arguments then turn into running hegemon battles in a hall of mirrors.

2013-2014 – The Euromaidan protests that resulted in the ousting of a pro-Russian/pro-regional government in favor of a GAE oriented government. Vlad, smelling a rat (I’ve never seen anyone make the case that Euromaidan was anything other than a CIA op), made moves with his little green men to secure Russian assets and territory before GAE could get their hands on it. This led to a de facto secession of Ukrainian territory that was mostly (sometimes entirely) occupied by Russian people. For what can only be a wide variety of reasons (ancient grudges held by the usual suspects, cold warriors who never learned a new trick, grifters who had gotten used to Ukraine being their playground, democracy zealots*, and probably many more) this not-partition got under the skin of GAE elites and it led to an eight year period of simmering violence.

2021-2022 – GAE begins seriously considering giving significant military aide to Ukraine if not outright asking it to join NATO, an organization that should have folded back in the Bush 1 years. The promise of that sweet GAE loot was too much for the GAE installed Jewish president and Jewish prime minister so they begin amping up the tension in the border regions, some of which are controlled by Ukrainian militias that are only tenuously attached to the central government. Vlad, again properly smelling a rat, mobilizes his border forces. Things appear to calm down, but then for a variety of not-very-good reasons the dubious militias begin shelling Russian areas to draw the Russians back in. Vlad says “eight years of this crap is enough” and invades the country. The Ukrainian president pre-films himself tending to defenses at the capital before fleeing and handing out rifles to old women so that they can fight in his stead.

Sure much of the last part is somewhat speculation, but lets review the options open to the Ukrainian people since independence from the Soviets:

1. Retrench into an Ethnic state with defensible territory and adopt a Israeli strategy where everyone is a soldier. Due to the location they would always be at the whims of some empire of perverts or aspiring Tsar so the goal would be to make the place as expensive as possible to get involved in.
2. Align with the local hegemon. This is basically Canada in a nutshell. Yeah being an atrium for Russia is no one’s ideal, especially since that time when they tried to kill everyone there, but they are right there, in the country. It’s not like the Russians are going to let the security for their largest naval base be set by a hostile power.
3. Align with a distant empire who’s main drivers are promoting degeneracy and third-world crime. The same empire whose bungling got Georgia permanently half-overrun by the Russian army.

The list isn’t complete, but it doesn’t matter how many are added as #3 will always be at the bottom. It makes the least sense, but that’s what the leaders of Ukraine went with. This is because, in the end, they were foreigners installed by a foreign power. Which brings me back to here:

The dog, is not very nice, but will just mind his own business when not being bothered. The rat is definitely not nice and has been actively trying to genocide animals like the cat for at least the past 80 years. The cat, well, the cat doesn’t actually deserve any of this.

*Democracy, as they say, is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Sheep outnumber the wolves? No problem, just import wolves until the sheep voting problem goes away.

Screenshotting because Karl inexplicably retires posts:

He’s been saying this since December and yet the Fed has done nothing. If they ever do “something” you can bank on the fact that it will be enough to cause some economic distress, but not enough to curb inflation. Left unmentioned in Karl’s take is that the Fed backing away from driving debt into the system would immediately put their banks underwater. So yes, they should do something, but won’t. He thinks this will result in some violent overthrow where the elites are put to the sword. We should all hope, but our elites did not get to where they are but caring one lick for anyone in the bottom 50 percent.

This fits in with Karl’s other ‘boomer’ takes. He’s a brilliant data analysis, technician, and aggregator but repeatedly flunks when it comes to application of knowledge. His takes are from another age where he both relishes the fact that voters will get what they have coming to them for their “poor choices” while acknowledging that the voting outcomes weren’t going to move the needle much one way or the other. He wants strong opposition leadership, while providing none, and decries the feckless attitudes of the masses while not factoring in that they’re living in what is at the very least a soft totalitarian society. He’s serious, but not nearly serious enough; much like the money managers that references in his post.

When I started out my career I always thought the demographics of human resources departments was interesting, typically just a big group of women who couldn’t hack it as school teachers. Instead of having their summers off with their kids they got to be cubicle slaves whose only interactions with their kids was through a picture, on their windowless desk, that would occasionally be updated. And the “kids” part was probably iffy anyways since only “college professor” would be a less attractive occupation for a woman’s dating profile than “H.R. Manager”.

H.R. might be towards the bottom of career paths for women, but like other women-centric fields such as accounting, education, medical, and computer programming, it is a “process” centric job. These jobs often have flowcharts (“employee manual”) that allow the worker bee to concentrate solely on the rules, and not necessarily what the rules might be geared to accomplish. This is why women tend to be good, but not great programmers; yes there are some logic issues to resolve, but a great deal of programming is syntax and structure, i.e., “process”.

What brought this to mind is this definitive post at Eratosthenes that examines the root of the current WuFlu mismanagement:

Process people engaged in a bad process headed toward a bad outcome, won’t care about the outcome. They’ll defend their adherence to the details of the process, nevermind the fact that the process, also, is bad. Their defense is that there’s some authority or weight invested in this bad process, and they’re adhering to it. Their hope is that whoever is in a position to adjudicate, will put all the emphasis on following process and ignore outcome, the way they did. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, they just appeal to a higher authority. So they never learn they did it the wrong way, because there’s no reason for them to learn this.

In the machining business all the rote tasks (part cleaning/assembly) are typically handled by women and the CNCs are programmed by men. I’m sure women machinists exist…umm, well not all that sure but it could happen. A big part of the issue there though is that part-machining is an “outcome” type of task. The machinist will get a print and material requirements, and…that’s it. It will be up to him to figure out what tooling is needed, what sequence is needed for the machining etc. There is no manual for him to pull up to tell him How to program the CNC to make ‘Generic Widget A’ that you’ve never seen before. What’s interesting here is that while IQ certainly plays a large role in the ability of the machinist, I am familiar enough with the field to know that I could be trained to be a mediocre machinist in a month or two while the many women-smarter-than-me that I’ve known couldn’t be trained to be a machinist in, I dunno, any amount of time:

Everybody likes to be thought of as intelligent, but intelligence is the ability and the willingness to learn. Learning is a non-instinctive behavioral change. You have to screw up and admit you did it wrong. Only outcome people can do this, because only they monitor the outcome, with a genuine potential for saying to themselves, if the situation calls for it: “Well, that sucks. Let’s do it differently next time.”

So then take the process obsession, and then add-in the rudderless existence of western white women and you get a mass of people whose maternal instincts have been warped to harm society rather than reinforce it, in other words, witches. From the Z Blog:

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief. All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

The infamous TikTok videos featuring chubby nurses in scrubs dancing around on empty hospital floors had a similar motivation. White women with mundane lives working in hospitals were suddenly “front line workers” in the war against the great plague threatening humanity. Most of the women working in hospitals just went about their lives but many suddenly saw themselves in a different role. They were no longer just faceless nurses doing menial work. They were heroes.

Put another way, the “process” people had found a way to role-play as “outcome” people. It was as if they said to themselves “if I follow the rules, the process, hard enough, that will be an ‘outcome’ all to it’s own!” Back to Eratosthenes :

When process people defend themselves this way, things get awkward fast because they’re bolstering a claim of premiere excellence, atop an accumulation of evidence that supports nothing better than adequacy. You can’t do an excellent job of following a process; that’s strictly pass-fail. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. Lookit me following the science! I’m following the CDC! They yell jump, I say how high? Clearly, I’m irreplaceable!

The observant may note that the subject in the above piece is in fact a dude, Gavin Newsome (yes, joking aside), but this gets to something Finn over at Gab noted. He’s a prolific poster so I’ll have to paraphrase but his message was basically “women make men lazy”. A man might have a natural tendency to be an “objective” person, but if he works under a woman he will only ever be rewarded for how hard he follows the process, and, why look at that, following a pre-written decision tree is way easier than actually trying to accomplish something! Geldlings like Newsome and Trudeau have emotionally unstable process-scolds as their primary constituency so there’s no point in being anything but a religious rule-follower.

The one thing I want to note is that since we’re in the age of the “process people” the gender roles are much more mushy than they would have been in a more sane age. My former woman-boss comes to mind as someone who would prefer to live in the process, but constantly found herself as the last person in the process chain and had to be “objective” out of necessity when the processes inevitably ran into a wall (even though people further up and behind in the process chain were men). It’s a similar situation for many front office women who are left to manage vendors and (primarily) customers whose existence is nothing more than a grift coded into a Woke rulebook. These people, no matter what sex, are left to caulk up the gaps that inevitably appear in a rigid process.

Something similar is in the works but on a global scale. This was recently seen in the U.K. with CO2 production. They were following the process to a ‘T’ but someone finally got to them and said “you’re about to starve people to death and hungry people tend not to like ‘rule books’ (or their enforcers) that have starvation as one of it’s rules”. We’re all about to find out that there’s a dangerous gap between what the hyper-process based Tech Oligarchy wants to accomplish (which is evil enough), and what they can actually accomplish (which is looking like what it is: intuitional incompetence).