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Ukraine

Now back to Dave’s original series of questions. I think that Ukraine was primed and ready for a shove into instability.

There’s a well known psychology experiment where two male rats can be placed in a cage where they will live somewhat happily as long as they have sufficient food. However, if painful electric shocks are applied to the floor of the cage in such a way that the rats cannot escape, the two males will begin fighting.

Keep up the shocks long enough and the fighting will be severe, even to the death.

What’s happening? The rats lack the context to know that the shocks are coming from outside somewhere. The only thing they can project their discomfort onto is the only other living thing in their sight – the other rat.

So they fight.

Similarly, the people of Ukraine lack the context to know just who is to blame for the unpleasant conditions in which they live and seemingly cannot escape. So they blame each other and fight each other. They blame the President and so he’s gone. But the next one, and the ones following, will be just as bad; and eventually they will each be in turn ousted, too.

The problem is the shocks are not being caused by players they can see and blame. We’ll get to more on that in a minute.

By the numbers, the …: