The Vladministration truly coming to the fore.
Looks like his Lord and Master got his copy of the unredacted Epstein files. I hope Ukraine gets one too.
It’s impossible to say what was going on in that video. I expected something very different from the inaccurate description the poster had given. It looks like someone trying to make something out of nothing.
THIS.
All those MAGA thrilled that Putin is getting an advantage in his invasion of Ukraine, obviously will never remotely realize that putting the entire world at the mercy of one questionably-stable oligarch is, possibly, NOT the best idea.
Are the MAGA types on Putin’s side in the war against Ukraine? I find that surprising because Ukraine is so clearly the side on the right here; they were attacked, they are a democracy, etc.
Trump hates Zelensky.
MAGA people do seem to imitate their Dear Leader in adoring dictators. And “strength”—territorial aggression would be defined as such by them. So, yeah: they revere Putin (and despise Ukraine).
I think that they are on the side of whatever direction Trump points.
And, as @bobot notes, Trump hates Zelenskyy; remember that Trump’s first impeachment was over his attempt to pressure Zelenskyy and Ukraine for dirt on Biden.
It’s a little bit sad that Ukraine has a better leader than we do.
It’s a lot sad that almost every country in the world does. (There are a handful of exceptions)
Yes. My own MAGA mother was posting no end of Russian propaganda when the war started a few years back. All about bio-labs we had in Ukraine, our promise not to expand NATO, and of course all the Ukranian Nazis which justified Putin’s invasion. Then we’ve got the more extreme MAGA adherents who moved to Russia to flee all the wokeness here. Unfortunately the MAGA types I know seem to either think Ukrainians are hte bad guys or they’ve forgotten Russia is our enemy.
You misspelled “America.”
Some of them are actually fighting for Russia against Ukraine.
? It all has something to do with Joe Biden’s son? Honestly I’ve wondered about the hate for Ukraine.
Welcome to the power of propaganda.
Those are some pretty small hands…
Here is the latest humiliation from the trenches of the Federal work force. The intro is a bit long so feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs to get to the meat.
We had an old system for performance reviews. Each of our jobs had a list of four elements that spelled out what our job entailed. We would do our job meeting with our supervisors mid year to check in that every thing was going OK, and then around year around mid January the next year we would write a list of our accomplishments for the past year, submit it to our supervisor, who would look it over have a meeting discussing it with us, and then produce a rating on a scale of 1 to 5 that would be used to determine how much of bonus we got, or if we needed discipline. There was a limit to the amount of bonus money that the branch had to hand out, so the supervisor couldn’t give everyone a 5 but. it wasn’t perfect by any means but at least is kinda worked.
Now this was of course unacceptable to the powers that be. Supervisors were generally saying that their underlings were overall hard working dedicated public servants when everyone knows that they were lazy incompetent wastrels leaching off the tax payers teat.
So they had to change all that. First they changed the performance review cycle from the calendar year to the fiscal year. The idea presumably being to put it in place before a new Congress has a chance to weigh in. This wouldn’t have been that big a deal but it meant that implementing all of the other changes was obviously rushed so that there was very little guidance as to how the new system would work and what the employees and supervisors need to do to comply. The first inkling of what the new system was to be came 2 days after the end of the fiscal year, and two weeks before the first deadline.
What is Standardized Distribution and Calibration?
Standardized distribution is a calibration-based approach that creates a performance management system that is fair, transparent, and consistently applied.
The purpose of standardized distribution is not to predetermine individual ratings or replace rigorous performance appraisal. Rather, it is intended to support consistent distinctions among levels of performance across the Department. OPM will allocate a fixed number of Level 5 summary ratings to HHS. The HHS calibration process will ensure that HHS does not exceed its allocation.
Calibration is a structured review process in which HHS leaders review preliminary ratings and evaluate them against organizational standards, workforce-wide outcomes, and distribution requirements. The review is conducted via Calibration Boards, across work units to promote consistent application of performance standards.
Our supervisors still have no idea what if anything they are supposed to do.
Each federal employee with write a narrative that is no more than 6,000 characters including spaces. In this you must indicate how you addressed each your original job elements plus a new mandatory element involving “customer service”, even if as a researcher like me you don’t really have any customers, and how each of these relates to the three factors of Organizational Value; Quality and Reliability; and Timeliness and efficiency of results).
Since this is a lot of specific confusing requirements employees are encouraged to use AI (sorry SI) to help write this. But please don’t lie about your accomplishments. Once this is submitted
- Rating Officials will complete preliminary performance ratings, assessments and rankings.
- Preliminary scores will undergo review and calibration at the Component and Department levels.
- Final ratings distribution will be reviewed and approved at the HHS level.
- Employees will receive their final approved rating.
You will note that no where in this list are our supervisors or anyone else who has in any knowledge at all about what we did during the last year. Further HHS has 70,000 employees, there is no way that a panel of “rating officials” can go through that many totally divergent employee narratives with any hope of coming up with an objective rating. So its obvious reading between the lines that the narratives are going to be rated by AI (sorry again SI).
So all of the work that we have done this year will finally come down to how well we wrote and AI (F’you Donald I’m not calling it SI) prompt, to match some entirely unknown criterion for evaluation by an AI reader which will calibrated according to the understanding that there is no possible way that the federal workforce is actually by and large composed of dedicated hard working public servants.
This kind of shit is, very generally, why my otherwise excellent old civil service job used to occasionally enrage me. And I never had to put up with anything near so stupid as this sounds. Whomever came up with this asinine rating system needs to wind up spending eternity in the 8th Circle of Hell with the rest of the fraudsters. You have my utmost sympathy.
Heh. County Government here. Never really a supervisor. I guess a lead. 33 yeyars. I wanted nothing more than to do my job.
At one point, we where told to come up with a new process. For anything. It was a contest of sorts (I wanted no part of it :sigh:)
Well, everyone absolutely hated the review process. Bosses, underlings, everyone.
I came up with a new process in about 20 minutes, including designing the spread sheet and everything.
Took about 20 minutes to fill out your form. It was an overwhelming success and is still used 15 years later.
It’s quite simple really, we, employees and supervisors are a team. Employees/workers, have their job, bosses have theirs.
Where the new diesel is coming from 
