I did a small good thing for #Ukraine today. Introduced an American journalist friend to local activists fighting corruption. Win-win.

You know those toxic “green” lightbulbs which the enviro-fascists have been promoting until recently? The ones filled with mercury?

There seems to be no proper infrastructure for disposing them in Lviv.

I even asked in a lightbulb/lamp store. They said “throw it in a dumpster, but as far away from our store as you can.”

Haven’t made a “wasteland” post in a while.

So, I go to pick up my laptop. They run the charge through the card reader three times and they get an error code each time. They call me today and say they have it fixed. I show up. It doesn’t work. I find out that they have charged me 12K because each transaction DID process, and is now being refunded.

I think we need to have refunds on errors issued immediately, with the merchant absorbing the risk. Where the hell is our consumer protection?

So I am out 12K, albeit for three days, and I have no new laptop [technical problem with it]. Sigh.

This kind of incompetence is rife here.

Sh_t doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Anywhere. It’s exasperating.

So yes, the people are wonderful, and yes, it’s beautiful and yes the food is good, and yes it’s inexpensive. But you have to put up with third world infrastructure and the all too pervasive remains of soviet bureaucratic incompetence – everywhere.

A friend’s observation:

“An awful lot of Ukraine is like mexico. Its tragic. All of this horrible post soviet decaying brick, concrete, and sheet metal.

No people were ever so poor with such nobility and grace. I love them.

Especially the old guys with bug russian hats. .

The middle of america is hollowing out. But the relative decline is being filled with the third world.

We do not decay as gracefully.”

Visited the VA while I’m in the US. There’s a new system called “My Health-E-Vet”.

I did manage to sign up, much to my surprise. Now, to make the system actually useful, I need to complete these three steps:

——————–
1. Download, print, and sign the VA Release of Information (ROI) form (10-5345a-MHV) (PDF)
2. Mail your signed form to the Release of Information Office at your local VA health care facility. You can use the Facility Locator to find the address
3. Select YES – UPGRADE MY ACCOUNT
Note: Please, allow up to 20 business days to complete the Online Authentication process.
——————–

I stand in utter awe of this level of incompetence and bureaucracy. I don’t think I could achieve it if I made an active effort.

One characteristic which distinguishes US bureaucracy is resource intensiveness.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2013/06/18/6992435/

It happened in the village of Chausove in the Mykolaiv Oblast. The owner of the raided agriculture business is an opposition politician.

It’s crazy that there seems to have been a definite “order of battle.”

It says guards and farm workers repelled the first attack. Then the attackers brought out pistols and shot guns and split into two groups — one continued pressing the front gate, and the other went around the side.

The owner wrote that he called the police, but they ignored the incident.

He wrote on his Facebook page that there were 80 attacked with pistols and shotguns. He accuses Mykolaiv region governor Mykola Kruglov and general attorney of Ukraine Viktor Pshonka of orchestrating the raid.

It says the arrived in buses.

No on was killed, but many were wounded, five seriously.

I hate injustice. It’s hard for me not to imagine the defenses I supervised in Afghanistan, and how easily we would have slaughtered these attackers.

Just one machine gun, hell, one rifle could have stopped this attack. The hooligans are usually poor guys who work out a lot. They’re not invested in their crime. So simple. One marksman on the roof of the factory, and everything would be fine.

Of course, I had different rules in Afghanistan. I’m only thinking tactically. That’s a very narrow view. Here, such a defense would likely prompt a repose from the Ukrainian military on behalf of the corporate raider.

Where the hell is that “Zbroya” organization? They should be promoting gun ownership as a solution to this problem instead of masturbating to pictures of uniformed soldiers.

Videos here

My contact at the archives isn’t answering the phone. I look their number on the internet.

The first number doesn’t work. The second rings and rings without an answer. An old woman answers the third number.

“Is this the archive?” I ask.

“Oh, no, she replies right away. Their number is 2-6 and you dialed 0-6.”

I’m surprised that she knows this, and glance again at their webpage.

“Do you know that your phone number is on your webpage?”

She says something I don’t understand. Her voice is old. Maybe she doesn’t know what a webpage is.

“They are advertising your phone number. They are saying it’s the phone number of the archive.”

“It doesn’t do any harm,” she says.

Her indifference makes me angry. “Maybe you should call them and tell them to change it so that people stop calling you.”

“Oh, I don’t get that many calls,” she says.

I thank her and hang up.

Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) – A service of the US State Department for U.S. Citizens traveling abroad

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https://step.state.gov/step/

First of all, please excuse the vulgarity of this post. I’m making a point. I took this picture a couple months ago at a bus station.

I had walked past an empty desk when a babushka came roaring out of some back room, gruffly demanding one hryvnia (12 cents) for the privilege of relieving myself amongst this sanitary beauty:

How is this travesty possible? Shouldn’t paid toilets be of better quality than the free toilets which businesses (McDonalds, among many others) make available throughout Ukraine?

Not so. Not at all. You see, the babushka is not a private owner. She’s not the innovative, risk-taking sanitation entrepreneur you might mistake her for. She is a bureaucrat squatting (no pun intended) on dilapidated, neglected Soviet era infra structure. What’s even more pathetic is the possibility that she paid a bribe to rise to her current position.

Oh, the humanity…

Thank you for the condolences I received on my previous post. I’m concerned, however, that this blog tends unfairly toward pessimism.

Ayn Rand wrote that the government makes us all criminals because criminals are easier to control. In the U.S., the federal tax code alone is more than 24 megabytes in length, and contains more than 3.4 million words; printed 60 lines to the page, it would fill more than 7500 letter-size pages. (The often cited figure of 80,000 pages seems to be an exaggeration.)

In any case, the vast quantity of laws, regulations and codes leaves every entrepreneur scared that he might have violated one of them. There’s no way to be sure. Hence, success should be enjoyed quietly. Entrepreneurs have good incentive to hide any triumph over bureaucracy. Failure doesn’t invite a bureaucrat’s scrutiny the way success does.

I’ve alluded to this before. I think I’ve come to understand thee reason for Ukraine’s psychopathic bureaucracy. Where western bureaucracies were created from nothing in pursuit of a goal — education, food safety, building safety. Perhaps the worst you could say, they were created with this public goal, while the private goal was the establishment of monopoly privilege. They had to at least appear to be working. Ukrainian bureaucracy is an *imitation* of these failed systems of the west built atop the lingering habits and moral depravity of Socialism.

There was no lustration as happened in central Europe. Ukraine inherited more Soviet bureaucrats and bureaucracies than did other post-Soviet states.