Rule 34

I finally found out why the Americans are putting pressure on the Germans to give their tanks to Ukraine, while they themselves won’t give them their own Abrams tanks, with an excuse that they are too high-maintennance.

You see, the Americans told all countries who will give their Leopard II tanks to Ukraine that they will receive free Abrams tanks from America’s own stock. Apparently, being high-maintennance is not a problem in this context. The Germans are freaking out because this is removing them from the market for tank purchases and harming their industry.

As the 34th rule of acquisition clearly states, war is good for business.

Developments

The Russians are installing Pantsir-S air defense systems on roofs of the Defense Ministry and other buildings in Moscow. This is, apparently, in case some drone makes it that far; for anything serious, there’s the heavy anti-ballistic defense of Moscow.

The Russians are performing offensive ground actions along the Zaporozhye front, which means they managed to stretch the Ukrops very thin along the whole length of the front because they pulled everything into Bakhmut. The Russians, on the other hand, had serious reinforcements along the entire line. If the Ukrops try moving the troops from Bakhmut now, it will instantly fall and they will all be killed, as there is constant pressure from Wagner there. They will probably pull everything they have from the defense of Kiev and the Belorussian border to try to patch up the Donetsk front, and if they do, my high-probability projection is that the joint Russian-Belarussian army will go in from the North and Kiev will fall. If they keep the army in the North, however, the Russians will wipe out their entire Donetsk line. Since the ground is hardened almost everywhere, I would expect them to perform probing attacks in Donetsk first, where the Ukrops are being actively compromised, and then I guess keep striking the unbalanced enemy.

There is also a high probability of desperate moves from Ukraine and America, since they don’t think they have anything to lose at this point.

Parting of ways

“Vladimir Putin submitted to the State Duma a bill on the termination of international treaties of the Council of Europe with respect to the Russian Federation.”

(source: Telegram)

My interpretation: this is the point where Russia is starting to formalize the parting of ways with the West, and ceasing to see the future of Russia as part of the wider European community. Also, it might be that a problem arose when DPR and LPR joined the Russian Federation, and some foreign mercenaries that were sentenced to death according to the local laws can now no longer be executed, because Russia doesn’t have the death penalty because it signed treaties with Europe. There was internal pressure to remove such restrictions for several years already.

The price of being a bitch

Dr. Jordan Peterson, the famous Canadian clinical psychologist with perfectly normal opinions about basic things, that somehow manage to be controversial in this profoundly psychotic civilization, found himself in an unenviable position when some politcorrect state body threatened to revoke his clinical license unless he submits to what can only be called brainwashing and reprogramming to the “correct” leftist schedule.

My reaction to this was that he had that coming.

You see, one of the things that profoundly annoyed me about him is that he always recommends that, when you find yourself opposed to the majority, you have to assume that they are right and you are wrong. Basically, he assumes that the majority will always be “normal” by default, and any deviation from “normal” is probably for the worse. So, yeah; he’s having a taste of his own medicine now. The vast majority of psychologists, including the ones who are in the position to approve or revoke his license, are leftist idiots. The entire field is a cesspool of Marxist and postmodernist idiocy, but he would like to have his doctorate and a license to practice. So, he’s now in a position where he either has to practice his own doctrine and bend over to the majority, or understand that his doctrine was wrong.

I was once in a position where cca. 30 people were trying to tell me that I was obviously and stubbornly wrong because I stated that 2+3*5=17. I remained perfectly firm in my position regardless of their opinion, for one simple reason – I was much better at mathematics than any of them, and I knew about the priority of operations. They even pulled out several cheap calculators that calculate 25 as the result, and this, too, didn’t change my mind one least bit. The situation, however, was a major cornerstone in my thinking, because I realised that any number of people can have the same opinion because they are the same kind of stupid, and an individual can be smarter than all of them put together, because their mental capacities don’t add. If neither of the members of a group possess certain knowledge, the group doesn’t magically come to possess it regardless of its size. Also, the IQ of a group can never exceed the IQ of the smartest individual in the group, and arguably can’t even reach it, because if consensus is required, the result will gravitate towards the median. You can be right and any number of your opponents can be wrong, if you’re making correct conclusions, and they are all deluded in the same way. This realisation permanently changed something inside me, like feeling a pressure or a weight lift; I understood then that I subconsciously felt strain every time I deviated from commonly accepted “truths”, and this was the point where I profoundly and irrevocably stopped caring. This didn’t make me start accepting all kinds of idiotic beliefs that are not backed by evidence or experience of any kind, though; if anything, I became more careful, because I was left in a position where I couldn’t rely on anybody else to correct me, so I had to catch all of my mistakes myself.

I wonder whether Peterson will have the courage to do the same, and have a 2+3*5 moment. I somehow doubt it; he doesn’t look like someone who has that kind of courage.

Situation in Ukraine

The Russians have elevated the command over the Ukraine operation to the level of Gerasimov, who is the chief military commander of the Russian Federation (above him are only the defense minister Shoigu and President Putin), which means that, for all intents and purposes, this is elevated to full strategic level and the entire might of the Russian army is behind it now.

The warships and submarines departed from Novorossiysk, which probably indicates something significant.

There is a cold spell in Ukraine and the ground is frozen everywhere except on the Black Sea shore.

The Ukrainian equivalent of the Maginot line in Soledar and Bakhmut is broken. The last 500 Ukrainians who failed to evacuate from Soledar were killed by Wagner. I don’t know what’s the exact situation in Bakhmut, but the last I’ve heard sounded like complete disarray and its fall is imminent.

If I were commanding the Russian forces, I would use the momentum to completely demoralize and crush the Ukrainians, because this kind of a thing is contagious and you need to press the advantage once you achieve such a breakthrough. I expect they will use a synergy of energy denial, winter, demoralization and overwhelming force. I don’t know about the timing, but I would say that the breakthrough in the Bakhmut area looks like something that has been intentionally delayed in order to coordinate it with “something”, and too many preparations have been going on for that “something” to be anything less than a decisive blow.