HALF-FULL REPORT 05/30/25
The Collapse of Russia’s Sacellum
Last week, on the Forum, TTP member spisskyhrad asked an interesting question, “Is TDS some kind of color revolution driven by forces I can barely understand? Vandalism, assassinations. Unhinged violence like we are experiencing simply defy logic. Older white women with no children or husbands stealing Trump hats off strangers. MK Ultra type crazy!! Why???”
Across cultures, Dr. Jack Wheeler taught us that the evil eye symbolizes a malevolent force: envy turned spiritual violence. In Russia, the evil eye is collective, externalized. In the West, it’s internalized as a corrosion of agency. Together, they form a dyad of dysfunction that explains a lot of the madness we’re seeing, from cultural collapse to ritualistic hatred of figures like Trump.
But first we have TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. Let’s not mince words. It’s real. It’s not just political disagreement. It’s visceral, cultic, and utterly irrational. We are not witnessing a debate. We are watching a form of secular exorcism, and it is failing.
Russia: Evil as the External Other
In Russian Orthodoxy, evil is not found within. It is the outsider. The foreign agent. The saboteur. The West, the liberal, the individualist, the heretic are all outsiders infecting the moral core of a Russkiy Mir (Russian World) that believes itself eternal, holy, and embattled.
That’s why Russian propaganda doesn’t waste time convincing you it’s right. It convinces you that everyone else is evil. The goal isn’t to win an argument. Russian propaganda’s purpose is to annihilate your moral frame of reference. Russia projects evil onto the Other, which justifies internal repression and external violence. It’s collectivist defense by demonization.
The West: Evil as the Loss of Personal Agency
Contrast that with the West, where evil isn’t always out there. It is the gnawing sense that I no longer control my life. This loss of personal agency breeds anxiety, then rage. COVID lockdowns. Job automation. AI displacing workers. “Experts” moving the goalposts. The collapse of shared truth. People feel hollowed out, not just by politics, but by meaninglessness.
That is what makes TDS so potent. Trump, whether you love him or hate him, represents agency. He says the quiet part out loud. He breaks the script. He refuses to be programmed. And that drives the technocratic class, the emotionally fragile elites, and the spiritually starved overeducated, yet deservedly under loved liberal women insane.
When she steals a Trump hat off a stranger in public and shrieks like a banshee while filming it on her iPhone, she is not protesting, she is performing a primitive exorcism. She is trying to rid the world of the last totem of free will, masculinity, and resistance to centralized control. It’s voodoo. It’s mass psychosis. It’s Orwell with better lighting.
COVID: The Initiation Ritual of a New Technocratic Priesthood
COVID was not an accident. By now, we all know this It was an initiation ritual. Think of it this way: every religion has a purification event. COVID was the blood baptism of the global managerial elite.
Gates, Fauci, Schwab; these weren’t public servants. They were high priests. Their robes were lab coats and lanyards. Their temples were TED Talks and Davos panels. Their sacred text was “The Science,” which conveniently changed week to week.
The goal wasn’t safety. It was compliance. Social distancing, masks, lockdowns. These were rituals of submission. And like all cults, they demanded sacrifice: small businesses, mental health, childhood development, freedom.
And now, the blowback is rolling in like a toxic tide. Excess deaths, fertility collapses, psychological breakage, and the realization that we were all lab rats in a planetary experiment no one signed up for.
TDS: A Color Revolution of the Mind?
Is TDS a color revolution? Damn right it is. But it’s not about flipping governments. It’s about flipping reality. It uses the same tools: information warfare, emotional contagion, symbolic violence, engineered chaos. But instead of toppling a regime, it topples the soul.
MK Ultra didn’t die in the 70s. It went viral. And today’s version doesn’t need LSD and electroshock. It has Twitter. It has Facebook. It has academia, late-night television, and TikTok witches hexing Supreme Court justices.
TDS turns ordinary people into ideological berserkers. They’re not thinking. They’re manifesting psychic trauma onto public figures. Trump is just the canvas. The real sickness is the hollowed-out cultural self that can no longer tolerate contradiction, masculinity, confidence, or independent thought.
Why Are Some Older White Women Crazy?
Because in many ways, they’re the final avatars of the broken matriarchy. No children. No family. No anchor to biological or cultural continuity. Raised in the wake of the feminist revolution, fed a steady diet of CNN, pharmaceutical coping, and NPR morality, they lash out like priestesses of a dying cult and are offended by the mere existence of the unapologetic.
They want to smash the totems. Steal the hat. Shame the unbroken. It’s not politics. It’s primal.
Evil today wears a lab coat or a hashtag. It speaks in consensus and cries “disinformation.” It hates the masculine, the rooted, the free. Whether in Moscow’s paranoia or San Francisco’s TikTok psychosis, it flows from the same source: the destruction of individual agency and moral clarity.
This is the age of mirrored demons. We’re all staring at each other through smoke and lies, each side certain the other is possessed. But only one side is trying to erase the concept of truth itself.
Stay rooted. Know your history. Find your tribe. This fight isn’t over.
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Russia’s Tragedy: A Modern Greek Drama of Hubris, War, and Geopolitics
The great power game of 2025 isn’t about who wins in Ukraine anymore. That war is a symptom. The real contest and the one that will shape the 21st century is about who gets to mold the carcass of Russia into something useful.
Russia is no longer a player. It has become the board. A shattered empire picked apart by vultures circling its bones.
Three predators stalk this kill: the United States under Trump, Europe’s core powers, and China. Each with their knives out, ready to carve the spoils.
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The Mechanism Taught Via Greek Tragedy
Greek tragedy moves hearts by evoking pity and fear. Tragic heroes like Oedipus and Antigone fall because of fatal flaws such as hubris, excessive pride that seal their fates. Aristotle taught us tragedy follows a strict arc: the protagonist rises, suffers reversal (peripeteia), recognizes their error (anagnorisis), then falls, bringing catharsis or a purging of societal tension.
These were more than entertainment, they were communal rituals. Through the suffering of heroes, audiences confronted fate, justice, and human limitations. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex showed a man undone by a self-inflicted prophecy; Antigone revealed the clash between personal morality and tyrannical law; The Oresteia resolved cycles of vengeance through justice.
This tragic structure offers a powerful lens to understand Russia’s modern downfall.
Hubris: The Arrogance of Empire
Russia’s fatal flaw? Hubris. Pure and simple. Like Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter or Oedipus ignoring warnings, Russia’s imperial pride blinded it. Putin’s “Great Russia” rhetoric is the echo of kings who defied limits, whether divine or geopolitical. The catastrophic invasion of Ukraine was no accident, but the inevitable consequence of overreach.
Russia sacrificed its economic future and global standing for territorial conquest, much like Agamemnon’s reckless ambition cost his own kin. Like Oedipus dismissing ominous signs, Russia underestimated NATO’s resolve and Western unity, fulfilling a prophecy of self-ruin.
Hamartia: The Fatal Miscalculations
Russia’s Achilles’ heel is its dependence on fossil fuels as both weapon and lifeline. Sanctions and shifting global energy markets have crippled its economy. Corruption akin to the plague in Oedipus Rex permeates its institutions, weakening adaptation and innovation.
Worse, Russia’s gambit to fracture NATO and dominate Ukraine was its hamartia, its fatal error, and it unified the West instead. The brute force Russia counted on became the very cause of its isolation.
Peripeteia: The Reversal of Fortune
The 2022 invasion was Russia’s peripeteia or in English, the catastrophic reversal. Instead of restoring imperial glory, it turned Ukraine into a global cause célèbre, reduced Russia to a pawn in the U.S.-China rivalry, and exposed military and economic fragility. Like Oedipus, Russia discovered it was both predator and prey. Its “victories” now fuel marginalization.
Ukraine’s Defense Valley: Innovation Under Fire
Engineering drawings move at internet speed to 3-D printers tucked away in basements and garages. This follows in the footsteps of the Gutenberg’s printing press, fax machines during the Polish Solidarity, the Blackberry during the 2004 Orange Revolution, Facebook during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and WhatsApp encrypted messaging during the 2019 Hong Kong uprising.
Through Brave1, the government’s state-run innovation platform, battlefield needs feed directly into the labs and workshops. Ideas aren’t locked away in dusty R&D departments for months or years. Instead, they’re tested in days. The battlefield becomes a real-time proving ground. What works? It scales instantly. Failures get discarded with brutal efficiency.
We’re talking about autonomous drones striking with surgical precision, AI systems that identify and prioritize targets in real time, UAV sensors that feed live intelligence, robotic de-mining land drones clearing the way, and mobile air defense units flexing where needed. Cyber defenses are hardened to withstand unrelenting Russian cyber assaults.
It’s no surprise that over €300 billion of frozen Russian assets are funneled here to not merely keep Ukraine standing, but to forge a new European security ecosystem. Think of Ukraine as spawning not one Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace but hundreds of smaller, faster, deadlier shops with Brave1 as the technology accelerator giving them scale and unstoppable momentum.
Russia may muster more soldiers, but Ukraine outpaces them in innovation and agility. It’s not just building more drones, it’s building a defense innovation system that Europe will depend on for decades. The future of war isn’t massed tanks; it’s smart machines and lightning-fast adaptation. Ukraine’s Defense Valley is a testament to that truth.
History won’t forget who bet on tomorrow.
Catharsis: The Feast on the Carcass
Global powers now seek catharsis through Russia’s dismemberment. The U.S. aims to force a pivot from imperial overstretch by weakening Russia to use as a tool against China. China plays the Greek Chorus while feigning neutrality but exploiting chaos like a modern Odysseus. Europe seeks a cleansing redemption from centuries of Russian intimidation by dismantling Moscow’s power militarily and economically.
But the tragic irony is brutal: the “cleansing” risks sparking new cycles of conflict. China’s rise may spawn a harsher global order. Europe’s vengeance could ignite future Russian revanchism. And American complacency might embolden Beijing to seize global dominance.
The Chorus: The World as Spectators and Participants
Neutral states like India and Türkiye oscillate between condemnation and opportunism. The Global South watches warily, seeing Western “justice” as hypocritical. They worldly chorus judges Russia’s fate as a cautionary tale on the limits of power and morality.
Are We Underestimating the United States?
Amid the noise of Trump, partisan gridlock, and chaos, the U.S. retains a strategic core. Institutions like RAND and the National Security Council have studied Russia and China for decades. They understand the battlefield is as much about logistics, energy flows, and psychological pressure as it is about tanks.
Recent Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia’s infrastructure that are targeting radar, ammunition, and logistics hubs are surgical and precise. They reflect Western intelligence’s silent hand. NATO is shoring up the Arctic front where Russia’s fleets are weakest.
The real question is not whether the U.S. thinks strategically, it does. The question is: Are we minding our sacellum?
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Hybrid War: The Battle for Reality
This war isn’t just about tanks. It’s a war of narratives. Russia’s deadliest weapon is doubt: doubt about who started the war, doubt about the truthfulness of Western leaders, doubt about Ukraine’s worthiness, doubt about anything at all.
This is not a side effect. It is strategy. When truth dissolves into a swamp of lies and confusion, propaganda wins. People who once respected democracy now echo Kremlin talking points as useful idiots unaware of their role in this psychological operation.
Nelson Mandela faced propaganda by holding to the truth. Today, the battlefield is social media and comment sections, where democracy must be defended fiercely.
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Realpolitik: Oil, Gas, and Power
Energy is never just economics. It’s power, food security, stability, freedom, and war. As long as the West cuts fossil fuel production before alternatives are ready, the vicious cycle repeats: Russia profits, Ukraine suffers, and China smiles.
Europe builds gas plants; food production depends on gas-based fertilizers; and no matter what the enviros preach, air travel won’t vanish by 2040. Zelensky insists Europe buy energy from democracies. Norway’s exports mean more than molecules and chemistry, they represent reliability and the rule of law.
Pull back on fossil fuels, and a vacuum forms that authoritarian regimes rush to fill. Trump seems to understand this.
Moral clarity isn’t enough in geopolitics.
When the U.S. president pressures OPEC+ to lower oil prices, the real-world results are undeniable: less revenue for Russia’s war, greater energy security for Europe, lower inflation, and more stability.
Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg overcame NATO’s TDS and secured $100 billion for Ukraine not by sentiment but by strategic alignment between militaries and the hydrocarbon producing states.
While many EU leaders fell prey to TDS, Stoltenberg played European realpolitik guided by moral clarity, not personalities.
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Why Peace is So Hard: The Game Theory of Ukraine
Four players with four different goals are at the table, and one thrives on conflict.
Putin wants war as power and survival. He needs the West as enemy. Peace shrinks him.
Trump wants “peace” as a branded deal likely forcing Ukraine to cede territory as a marketing move, not diplomacy.
Zelensky wants restoration of stolen lands not conquest and dignity and respect for international law.
Europe’s leaders want lasting peace that ends aggression, not freezes conflict.
The problem? Putin benefits from endless war. You cannot negotiate with someone who profits from chaos. Vladimir Putin often portrays Russia as “antifragile”—a state that grows stronger under pressure. He frames Western sanctions, NATO “encirclement,” and internal unrest not as vulnerabilities but as stressors that forge national unity and sharpen strategic resolve. By controlling scarce resources (oil and gas), weaponizing economic shocks, and stoking regional conflicts, his regime seeks to turn each crisis into political capital: rallying domestic support, sidelining dissent, and projecting power abroad.
In practice, this means deliberately courting volatility like pushing geopolitical flashpoints in Syria, Ukraine, and the Arctic to expose Western paralysis and highlight Russia’s “sovereign resilience.” He invests in reserve financial buffers, builds parallel trade networks (BRICS +), and cultivates a narrative of perpetual siege that justifies ever-tighter state control.
Yet true antifragility requires optionality and decentralized robustness which are qualities Russia lacks. While Putin’s Russia can survive shocks, its heavily centralized, kleptocratic system struggles to harvest genuine upside from disorder. What he calls antifragility is often mere sturdiness under fire, not the dynamic growth through chaos.
Taking down the Russian Sacellum is the key to exposing its sturdiness under fire. The key is crossing the critical point universally known as the Ductile-to-Brittle Transition Temperature (DBTT). Below this temperature or energy level, a normally tough (“robust”), ductile material suddenly behaves in a brittle fashion. In other words, fracturing with little plastic deformation.
Once the Ductile-to-Brittle transition is crossed, there will no longer be any confusion that Russian lads are merely absorbing fire and do not represent a population that grows stronger with increasing tension. The truth will emerge suddenly and catastrophically.
Then there will be peace.
A Modern Oresteia
The Greek Tragedies still apply in the modern world. Russia’s tragedy is archetypal: hubris leads to nemesis. The world watches as Russia becomes the fallen Agamemnon, its corpse contested. The West will act as the Furies, torn between justice and vengeance. China will maneuvers like Odysseus, exploiting disorder.
These lessons from the Greeks still hold: power is transient, hubris universal. Without mercy, wisdom, and institutions to break the cycle, today’s aggressors are soon devoured by scavengers.
The only way to break an aggressive, self-styled antifragile Russia is to shatter its sacellum and obliterate the sacred core that fuels its imperial delusions. Let it bleed out in full view to generate catharsis through collapse. History doesn’t lie: true victory demands shared sacrifice, unflinching clarity, and a ruthless rejection of nostalgia and false greatness. Russia forfeited that choice long ago. We cannot afford to follow.
The ancients knew this.
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Smoke from the Altar: Rome’s Eastern Gambit and the Coming Crisis in Moscow
There’s smoke rising in the Vatican and not just from incense, but from the slow-burn signaling of a potential geopolitical and ecclesiastical realignment. The recent papal inauguration of Leo III, a ceremony that echoed with Greek chants and Orthodox ritual, was not just a gesture of ecumenical outreach. It was a calculated maneuver. The inclusion of Eastern rites and Greek liturgy at the heart of Roman tradition signals that something long unthinkable is now under active consideration: a reconciliation and perhaps even reunification between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
The symbolic gestures seen in Leo’s inauguration weren’t for aesthetic effect. They were the Vatican’s version of a red flare over enemy waters. The message? Rome is looking east, and not just with nostalgia. It’s preparing the ground for something bigger, something strategic, something aimed squarely at the soft, clerical underbelly of the Russian state.
And here’s where the rubber hits the road: such a rapprochement isn’t viable under just any pope. It demands a specific theological scaffolding. Enter the Augustinians; a pre-Schism religious order with doctrinal DNA acceptable to both East and West. The order precedes the Great Schism of 1054 and carries none of the dogmatic baggage that has, for nearly a millennium, kept Constantinople and Rome estranged. More importantly, the Augustinian theological framework sidesteps the most contentious theological landmine of the divide: the Filioque.
The Filioque clause, Latin for “and the Son” was inserted into the Nicene Creed in the Latin West without ecumenical council approval. It declares that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, whereas the Eastern Church maintains the original formulation: the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. To Rome, it’s a clarification; to the East, it’s an innovation and a betrayal of conciliar consensus. That disagreement isn’t just academic as it helped rupture Christendom. An Augustinian pope offers a quiet off-ramp. Augustine’s Trinitarian theology emphasizes the unity of love and will between Father and Son without the procedural drama of double procession. In short, it allows both sides to save face, affirm orthodoxy, and keep the conversation going without cracking open dogma in the street.
Now, imagine a Vatican III. Yes, it’s a long shot. Yes, it will make traditionalists on both sides sweat. But the theological ice is already thawing. The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople has been long eclipsed in political relevance but is still first among equals in Orthodox hierarchy, is currently in active dialogue with Rome. It’s the same patriarchate that recognized Ukraine’s autocephaly, directly undercutting Moscow’s ecclesiastical empire. A third Vatican Council could tackle not only East-West reconciliation, but the moral disarmament of postmodern Europe, the hollowing of the liberal branches of Protestantism, and the need for a coherent Christian front against encroaching civilizational threats, be they jihadist, techno-nihilist, or neo-Marxist.
This is the nightmare scenario for Moscow. The Russian Orthodox Church is not merely a religious institution. It’s a division of the Russian state. Patriarch Kirill wears the robe of a cleric, but he breathes FSB air. The Kremlin has poured billions of rubles into building churches, training priests, and forging a spiritually legitimized Russian identity. From Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, gilded onion domes now rise as symbols of imperial rebirth. This church-building spree isn’t just piety. It’s statecraft. Putin has tied Russian destiny to Orthodoxy the way the tsars once did, using the Church to unite ethnic Russians, justify expansion, and resist the secular West.
But this massive investment is starting to backfire internally. Across Tatarstan, the North Caucasus, and pockets of Siberia, Muslim communities are growing increasingly resentful. They see the state’s hand funding Orthodox cathedrals while their own mosques struggle to get permits. Imams are monitored, while priests are exalted. The message is clear: in Putin’s Russia, Orthodoxy is not just the dominant faith, it is the only faith that matters. This is a recipe for slow-burn insurgency. Religious tension, suppressed for decades under Soviet atheism, is reemerging with teeth. If Moscow overreaches, and it already has, it risks lighting a fuse in its southern and eastern underbelly.
Back on the global chessboard, a Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation would rob Russia of one of its last uncontested instruments of influence. The ROC currently dominates Orthodox identity from the Arctic to the Aegean. That’s not just theology, it’s geostrategy. If Rome and Constantinople declare detente, Moscow loses its monopoly on the Orthodox brand. Already, Ukraine’s move toward ecclesiastical independence has fractured Orthodox solidarity. If that trend continues, Russia finds itself preaching only to itself, while the rest of the Slavic world pivots westward in both faith and politics.
And the ripple effects would be vast. A Rome-Constantinople axis would not only reframe Christian unity, but strengthen NATO’s soft-power flank. Religious diplomacy would reopen in Serbia, Georgia, and Armenia. Russia’s ideological claim to being the last bastion of true Christianity would collapse under the weight of a new ecumenical consensus. Even China, which has quietly cheered Russia’s religious nationalism as a model for its own ideological cohesion, would lose a partner in the global war of ideas.
So here’s the bottom line. When incense fills the Vatican and Greek echoes in the Sistine Chapel, it’s not liturgical nostalgia. It’s battlefield smoke. The Vatican is moving pieces with surgical precision. It’s reaching eastward, leveraging ancient orders like the Augustinians to create theological common ground, and preparing the table for something bigger, maybe even a Vatican III. Meanwhile, Moscow, bloated on its own ecclesiastical mythology, is facing the slow unraveling of its religious empire, with pressure building not just from the West, but from within.
This is not just about doctrine. This is about dominion.
The smoke has meaning. The Vatican is playing centuries, not cycles. And if you’re in Moscow or Beijing, you’d better start praying because this time, the altar is the battlefield.
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Plant Commissioning
I work on the higher order edge of the economy, the edge that RINOs, globalists and those dirty-dog democrats sought to destroy. There are not as many voters to pander to, not out here where the iron ore is mined, the fiber is harvested, or the potash and ammonia are produced.
Ore isn’t your everyday consumer trinket. It is a high-order good in Austrian Economics terms. In the time-structure view of production, first-order goods land straight on the dinner table; ore sits several layers upstream, bound for smelting, forging, machining and assembly before it ever reaches a consumer.
That “roundabout” chain of processes supercharges productivity but also makes the economy razor-sensitive to shifts in interest rates and time-preferences. In short, ore from the mine isn’t a lower-order convenience; it’s a strategic input whose cost, availability, and allocation dictate the strength and the vulnerabilities of every link in the production chain.
The United States and Canada can crank raw‐material mining into overdrive, but our real bottleneck is intermediate processing, and it lags by roughly 2,000 percent. We’re talking about the critical screening, sorting, grinding, and heat-and-pressure operations that turn ore into usable feedstock.
If we don’t design and build processing facilities at a pace surpassing even the Manhattan Project, there is no pathway to genuine reindustrialization and mass production of everyday consumer goods. Meanwhile, China has funneled state capital into sprawling processing complexes, while our own environmental regulators and politicians have been busily shuttering these vital plants to clear land for condos and higher-tax-base immigrants.
With university graduation season upon us, I’m reminded of the advice I’ve given to every cohort of chemical engineers: lean into the hard, foundational work, the kilns, kilotons, and kilowatts of intermediate materials processing, because that’s where our nation’s future industrial might will be forged. If you don’t build the backbone, nothing else holds together. This is part of the commencemnt speech I gave to the Chemical Engineering Department at Western Michigan University a few years ago:
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Listen up, kid. You’re fresh out of school, and maybe you think engineering is all about CAD drawings, Excel sheets, and meetings. You’re wrong. Real engineering happens on the ground, in steel-toed boots, with a notebook in one hand and a radio in the other.
If you want to build a career worth a damn, get on a team that starts up new industrial process lines. I’m talking about commissioning; the crucible where plans become operating plants, and engineers become battle-hardened professionals.
Commissioning isn’t just checking boxes. It’s a full-spectrum campaign; methodical, high-stakes, and rich in lessons no textbook can teach. It starts with verifying the design. You’ll tear through P&IDs, specs, and standards with a surgeon’s eye, catching mismatches before they become million-dollar mistakes. You’ll argue with vendors, troubleshoot miswired sensors, recalibrate instruments until every system speaks the same language.
Mechanical completion? That’s your first line of defense. You’ll inspect welds, torque bolts, align shafts, and crawl inside equipment you only saw in schematics. Pre-commissioning? That’s where the details matter like cleaning, flushing, testing valves and switches until the system hums with readiness. Safety systems? You’ll test ESDs and relief valves like your life depends on it because one day, someone’s might.
Then comes the meat of it: integrated testing. No shortcuts. Air runs, water runs, dry rotations. You’ll simulate real-world conditions and chase down every gremlin in the controls. You’ll work elbow-to-elbow with electrical, automation, and process specialists, learning how systems really behave when they move from cold steel to hot operation.
Performance testing with live process? That’s the moment of truth. Now you’re pushing limits: temperatures, flow rates, throughput. When something goes wrong—and it will—you won’t just observe. You’ll solve.
That’s where careers are forged.
You’ll document everything: test results, drawings, compliance records. You’ll train operators and explain systems to those who’ll run them after you’re gone. That’s leadership. That’s legacy.
Commissioning teaches what no classroom can: discipline, precision, and how to stay cool when the heat is on. It’s not easy. But it’ll make you the kind of engineer people trust with the hard problems.
You want to matter in this profession? Start things. Light the fire. Turn and burn. Commission the line.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant to heavy industry.