Orcan You Believe It

By Sheer Serendipity -

Your Humble Scribe came across a Youtube short that underlines, in metaphor, what I wanted to bloviate about in at least the Intro for this edition of BOOJUM!  Okay, Art, put down your bowl of coal and getting working.

How deliciously crunchy are Hom. Sap?

     Just to be clear, there are at least 5 orcas in the vicinity of this rather fragile plastic boat, and they keep 'spy hopping', or coming out of the water vertically to keep an inquisitive eye on the trespassing Hom. Sap.  

     Who is going to go swimming here?  Certainly not the people recording this.  If Conrad was one of them I'd be firing up the engine and headed back to base pronto; orcas off the Iberian peninsula have been attacking and sinking much larger, sturdier vessels than this one.  

     Which brings us back to Sarah Paine and the second order effects she describes of how Perfidious Albion has learned to destroy enemies over the past 300 years.  Art!

     Second Order effects:  1)  The war moves from a periphery to encroach on home enemy territory.  Perhaps the classic example of this is the British involvement in the Iberian peninsula, where they began fighting in Portugal, then moved to Spain and finally invaded the south of France.  Art!

Toulouse a battle

2)  The enemy economy begins to suffer serious consequences of 1) and the already-established near and distant blockade by the Royal Navy.  Who is going to go swimming with orcas?  This leads to -

3)  A decline in the living standard of the enemy's civilian population.  Oooops.

4)  Being able to see and hear the war at close hand, rather than having it distant, far away and of no consequence, affects the enemy's morale.  Art!

O come on, you knew this was coming

5)  The enemy's ability to wage war is severely impacted, as they are exhausted first.  

     Unlike trammelled Continental powers, This Sceptred Isle concentrates on economics, building it's own institutions and creating coalitions.  What our ability to sustain a war depends upon is maintaining institutional stability, which is only enhanced by being an island.  Invading an island the size of Britain - that also has a massive navy - is very difficult, so none of the irruptions suffered by such as France are inflicted upon our nation of (prosperous) shopkeepers; this is the embodiment of 'Sanctuary' as espoused by Sarah.  Art!

     That above illustrates one of the salient points of this collection of second order effects: access to the sea, or lack of it.  What you see above is the Royal Navy giving the French navy a right shoeing - stop me if I get too technical - during the Seven Years War, which ran from 1756 to 1763.  Any Continental power that opposed This Sceptred Isle was likely to suffer a disastrous loss of international commerce, yes even in the eighteenth century.  This prospect got even more powerful with the march of time and progress.  Art!

     This is the old Habsburg empire, which had an Adriatic coastline and which did 25% of the empire's overall trade through that sea, which dropped to 0% after the First Unpleasantness began, as the French and Italian fleets immediately blockaded them.  That was the near blockade; the Royal Navy had squadrons of ships loitering in the Med looking for the opportunity to sink things as a more distant blockade.

     Even today the most landlocked country in Europe, Switzerland, conducts about 48% of it's international trade via sea, although that's somewhat distorted by the dollar value of the gem and gold trade it carries out with the UAE.

     ANYWAY I thought you might appreciate an update on the Mordorvian misery that is life in Krim, as seen through a naval blockade.  SIT BACK DOWN!  Yes, we will recapitulate a few things, but will also add some as per 'Beefeater' over on Twitter.  Art!

     The orcs bodged together repairs on the Kerch Bridge but it can only handle a fraction of the traffic pre-truck bombing, so they resorted to a trio of large Roll-On Roll-Off ferries to carry supplies from Ruffia to Krim.  Art!

The 'Conro Trader' in better days

     The Conro could carry almost 4,000 tons of supplies, usually railway oil tankers and large vehicles, as well as containerised cargo.  Then there was the 'Slavyanin', cargo capacity of 6,000 tons freight, as well as a third RORO, the 'Avengard', cargo capacity 4,000 tons.  This trio formed a marine bridge to Krim, meaning beady Ukrainian eyes were upon them, brooding as to 'What would Nelson have done?'.  Art!

Horatio approves

     Well, they sunk the Conro, and to rub salt, lemon juice and battery acid into the wound, they did it at Port Kavkaz, the port in Ruffia.  The Slavyanin and Avengard were badly damaged and put out of action.  Art!

     'That reminds me of something,' thought the captains of the Slavyanin and Avengard in March and April of this year, as their ships were disabled by Kozaky drone strikes once again.  Ooops.

     What's a hungry, thirsty occupation garrison to do?  Why, resort to minnows when the pike are all gone.  Marine metaphor there.  You're welcome.  Art!

     The Ruffians brought in 5 much smaller ferries to keep Krim supplied: the Eysk, SKS-One, Panagia, Lavrentiy and Maria.  Art!

     Each of these could carry about 250 tons of cargo, meaning about 9% of the bigger RORO ferry capacity.  Er - that is, before the Eysk and SKS-One were both sunk, the Maria damaged to badly it is now out of service, and the remaining two being used as towed barges after also being hit, and their capacity reduced by half.  So they now have the awesome capacity of 2%.  

     Don't forget, the Kozaky don't have a navy.  THE IRONY IT BURNS!  

     I say, that's an awful lot of words.  Better crank Art up to provide a few illos.  Art!

Another What On Earth? Moment

Once again, what drives the algorithm to recommend bizarre items such as the following?  Art!

     I have not been bloviating about dryers or their drum belts and if ours did cease to function it would probably make more sense to purchase a new dryer.  Which would need a fully-recessed door to avoid Conrad dropping cooking items onto it whilst making the Sunday Stew.

More Ungentle Shoeing

I believe I've mentioned my purchase of a 'Just In Case' bottle of Prosecco, in order to be prepared if either or both of a certain pair get un-alived in the near future.  Given what I've just come across on Twitter after Searching for 'Gigantic human coprolite' one of them may be closer to the grave than I, or he, suspected.  Art!

     I don't think this is AI, and nobody on the Tweet commented thus either, so - sorry that you may not be unable to unsee it.  His Hair Helmet seems to be thinning out rather drastically.  Time for a syrup of fig, Donold, and a new trowel for your foundation cement.

More Of McKie

Angus The Arty One.  Art!

Once again, Conrad doesn't recognise this one as a magazine or book cover.  It has a rather melancholy air to it, as you realise that this is a future city fallen into decay, where ruins are preponderant and greenery is encroaching.  Art!

     The grounds-keeping service is pretty shocking.  Plus that skyscraper to starboard needs plenty of filler or there'll be trouble when it rains.

     No culture, however long gone or debased, can ever truly be forgotten or dismissed when they design major architectural projects inspired by the noble teapot.  Seriously, check it out.

Talking Of Same -

Wonder Wifey got me a Bodum teapot, in pristine condition, for £3, which is a steal, so - Art!

     Me preparing to use it without removing the label irked her, so she removed it herself.

     This means the Steel - Art!

      - was disposed of.  I've had it for at least a decade, and that's not shadow on the interior, it's tannin that is so deeply stained it cannot be removed.  Without a proper trivet to retain tea leaves it was getting difficult to keep clean and tidy.  RIP (Requiescat In Pekoe).

Finally -

Going out with another Biercism.

"Gambler,n: A man"

Move Right Along

If You're Not Interested In Conrad Doing Another Comparative Blather

                           CAUTION!  SINGLE SUBJECT BLOG!

     Because I'm going to be doing more comparisons between the First and Second Unpleasantnesses and what's going on in Ukraine now and for the past four years plus.  SIT BACK DOWN!  No, Conrad isn't going to be going over the changes in land warfare from mechanised <Mister Hand redacts a thousand-word screed out of mercy> Very Angry Birds.  We may cover what has cropped up on individual blogs, which is code for me saying I cannot be bothered checking.  Art!

     Here in This Sceptred Isle the civilian population has never had to fear the kind of indiscriminate slaughter so frequently found on the continent of Europe, thanks to our jolly decent nature, and also living on an island.  Hence the 'First Blitz' as it came to be called in retrospect, came as an hideous surprise, as Zeppelins dropped bombs galore across the land from 1914 onwards.  They were able to deliver a payload of many tons of bombs individually, which was impressive for the time.  Less impressive was their accuracy, or lack of it, which meant indiscriminate slaughter on the ground below, when they actually hit a town or city rather than scaring sheep in an empty field.  Art!

     Their effect was more psychological than anything else, generating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, requiring the recall of scout squadrons from the Western Front, the deployment of guns and searchlights, telephone networks  and barrages.  On average, it took 10 tons of bombs to kill a single civilian, whilst losing a single zep put the Teutons in the red to the tune of £300,000, one reason they gave up this practice.  In their place came Gotha and Giant biplane bombers, which were more numerous and cheaper, yet unable to deliver as much ordnance.  Art!

Sorry for lack of puny humans for scale

     In total, 103 raids by zeppelins and bombers killed about 2,000 people in Britain over the course of the war, and had a miniscule effect.  Well, this was the birth of strategic bombing.  Art!

     The second Blitz was of much shorter duration but was correspondingly far, far more intense.  It began on the 7th of September 1940, when Herr Schickelgruber had given up on winning the air war and invading Great Britain.  Teuton bombers targeted ports, cities - especially London - and manufacturing centres, bombing by night as it was too dangerous by day.  No part of the nation was safe or unattended by bombing, once again especially London.  It was hit successively for 57 nights.  Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, the Teuton bomber crews had all sorts of electronic gadgetry to help guide them to target, leading to what was called 'the battle of the beams' as the British tried to counter this technology.  Art!

     From very little in the way of defence, Perfidious Albion developed a sophisticated network of radars, both ground and airborne, and night fighters such as the brutish Beaufighter seen above, backed up by balloons, searchlights and anti-aircraft guns..  These latter were practically useless to begin with until they got radar-directors added, whereupon their hit rate went from 32,000 shells to bring down a bomber to 7,000.

     The Blitz inflicted 40,000 dead upon the British population, with at least as many injured.  It did not bring Britain to the negotiating table, cause the population to revolt, result in an armistice or surrender, and we were still able to sustain an army in the Middle East on active operations.  By the time Herr Schickelgruber called the whole thing off (11th May 1941) in preparation for an assault on the Sinister Union the loss rate for Teuton aircraft and aircrew was reaching unsustainable levels.  The British did not simply sit around wringing their hands and bleating, they got on with it and took the war to the enemy, bombing Berlin in August 1940 in retaliation for London being hit.  Art!

Ha!  Take that, Nazi tarmac!

      There you go, a potted background comparison of earlier events.

     What brought this on?  O I thought you'd never ask!  You see, Jake Broe of the Youtube channel 'Jake Broe' hasn't update said channel for a few days, because he's been in Kyiv delivering trucks raised by his subscribers, members and the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade*.  He teamed up with the Kyiv resident Caolan Robertson, of the Youtube channel 'Caolan Robertson' to take a look around the city, after a massive Ruffian missile attack the night before.  Art!

     Target: an apartment block.  Ho ho ho, that'll cripple the khokhol war effort and no mistake, the citizens of Kyiv will be - will be - Art!

     Going for a McDonalds, 'twould seem.  The lower glass windows are the armoured variety, as this establishment has been hit before.  The upper storey windows were blown out but have been quickly and neatly covered with plywood.  Gosh, what does this remind me of?  Art!

     O yes I remember.  The poster child for 'Keep Calm And Carry On'.

     The broken windows in McDonalds are one of the end results of the Ruffians expending 40 ballistic missiles, at a cost of at least $120 million, to hit civilian infrastructure that has no effect on the actual war itself.  The Ruffians do occasionally hit a military target; I remember back in 2022 the Ukrainians cordoned off and blocked access to a military depot the orcs had hit, and they hit a locomotive once, but these are the exceptions.  Art!

     The Kozaky are protesting!

     Except it's about the sacking of their Defence Minister, Federov, and not about Ruffian missile and drone attacks on them.  Some orcs are gloating about this, displaying a spectacular lack of self-awareness, since they can be arrested for having an 'illegal rally' if there are five of them present.  No I'm not joking, it just happened in Mordorvia.

     ANYWAY getting back on our grisly theme.  To date, there have been a little over 16,000 Ukrainian civilian casualties since the Special Idiotic Operation began, which we can say thus runs at about 4,000 per year.  Which is about 1/1,000th of the total population.  Heck, traffic accidents see off 3,000 Kozaky per annum.  Art!

     Caolan points out Kyiv - I keep using the native spelling as it annoys the orcs so, so much - is the size of Paris, to put the scale of events into perspective.  

     So far Mordorvia has spent at least an estimated $190 billion on it's missile and drone attacks on Ukraine since February 2022, repeating exactly the same tactics and strategy in that time.  In the earlier mentions in this Intro I explained how the British adapted to and challenged the Teuton threats, reducing their effectiveness over time.  This is what the Kozaky have done, too, creating their STING interceptor drone and deploying it en masse.  Art!

The waspish collection

     The Sting costs $2,000 a pop, or 1/10th the price of the cheapest Geran drone, which are now being downed at rates of at least 85%.  The Ruffians are completely ignoring this adaptation and thus blow $20 or $50 thousand per Geran intercepted, each of which uses up at least 20 gallons of fuel.  Which means the orcs whining about queuing for petrol are playing second fiddle to an 85% wastage rate.  I'm not sure if Perfidious Albion exported the 'Dowding System' of air defence as perfected in 1940 and 1941, but the Ukrainians are busy selling expertise to the Gulf states along with Stings by the crateload - excess capacity coming with scaled-up production.  Art!

'Stuffy' approves

     One can only foresee the Ruffians continuing their drone and missile barrages, expending tens of billions of dollars to inflict what are, in strategic terms, pinpricks on Ukraine, killing enough people to harden Kozaky hearts yet nothing near the amount needed to cause a collapse.  I shall end with a picture of Jake and Caolan in the Luyanivskaya marketplace and pay attention to what's going on in the background.  Art!

     Ordinary Ukrainians going about their business.  Once again we are minded of a previous response to being relentlessly bombed.  Art!

     Conrad is unsure if the Ukrainians drink quite as much tea as we British, but this is clearly the way to go.

     

* I have no idea.

The Choker's Wild

No!  I Am Not Traducing The Game Show

"Joker's Wild", mostly because I had o idea it existed before this very moment, although I had heard the phrase and imagined that it referred to a film.  Not a bit of it, JW was a game show that had a long lifespan and a couple of reboots.  Art!

One of these is not a light-hearted game show

     The concept being that the joker in a pack is normally treated as a WILD card.  Not to foreshadow too much.

     Now, what does that have to do with the South Canadian Air Force during the middle years of the Second Unpleasantness?  O I thought you'd never ask!  No, I shan't apologise for jumping around like that, it's splendid mental exercise.  Do keep up.  Art!

     The USAF (to be formal about them for once) had decided that the Teuton ball-bearing industry was a critical industrial choke point, since ball bearings (hmmm just tried that without the hyphen and no error underlining) were used in lots of end products such as planes, u-boats and tanks.  Destroying the ball bearing production plants would thus cripple industrial production, deliverables would be way down, the Third Reich would become hideously vulnerable, almost The End.  Art!

For want of a horseshoe nail and all that

     Exhibiting a fair amount of hubris, the USAF went after ball bearing plants in Germany in late 1943, sending fleets of B-17 bombers as pictured above.  In daylight.  Without a fighter escort.  They lost 60 out of 240 bombers in their last raid and realised swanning about unprotected in daylight was a losing strategy.  Nor did they affect ball bearing production very much, as the Teutons rapidly diversified production, imported more from Switzerland and Sweden, and had massive stockpiles anyway.  Ooops.  An example of cold hard reality impacting the pen-pushers back at HQ.

     So!  Rather than treating a physical product as the choke point, the USAF changed targets and went after the Teuton rail network and fuel supplies, what they called the 'Transportation Plan' and what do you know, it worked.  Art!

     Rather than a small number of heavily-defended targets, the USAF and RAF went tally-ho on innumerable undefended targets such as the above, wreaking havoc and completely messing up the Teuton plans to defend occupied Europe.

     Well now, going off at a tangent that I never intended, it's currently difficult for Mordorvia to get high-quality ball bearings since the Swedish firm SKF that - you may be ahead of me here - made ball bearings, departed Ruffia in 2022.  They  now have to source replacements from China, Kazakhstan, India and Turkey, as well as importing 'grey market' ball bearings that have sometimes been counterfeit rubbish.  Oooops.  Art!

Grounded

     Having introduced the Special Idiotic Operation and it's consequences, Conrad is going to continue with that theme, because things have been hotting-up as of late in Mordorvia.  Art!

     As of about May 2026, the situation above had arrived, whereby the Kozaky were able to hit anything of value on this motorway and the major roads off it.  You might compare this to the Allied 'Transportation Plan', whereby the target zone (northern France) was completely isolated from the rest of the occupied territories.  Here Krim has been isolated in similar manner, without Ukraine having to endure huge losses in preparation, or at least not human ones.  Art!

     Then the Ukrainians changed targets, as we have seen the USAF do, although in this case it was to further extend the range of mischief being caused rather than as a result of losses incurred.  What you see above is a marine traffic map of the Sea Of Azov, which has now become hideously dangerous for Ruffian ships to transit.  Art!

     Another shift in target lists, as the Kozaky are now hitting Ruffian ships in the Black Sea, meaning they either risk being badly damaged or sunk, or they move even further away towards Sochi or Turkey, meaning they cannot haul freight or fuel.  Another Oooops.

     These recent enlarging of the target list are hurting the Ruffian economy BUT they remain out of sight for most of the orcs; only those living in the occupied territories or Ruffia's Black Sea shore get to see the mobile marine bonfires.

     So! Prez Zed decided to get jiggy, kiggy and liggy with it, and expanded the target list to include Wildberries, the orc rip-off of Amazon.  Art!

     Ruffia never looked more like Mordorvia, sporting twin Mount Dooms in the vicinity of Barad Duh.  Various orcs have commented on seeing these gigantic pillars of smoke and fire, which are clearly visible to their naked eyes, yet the news makes absolutely no mention of them.  Gosh what a surprise, Mordorvia lying by omission.  Conrad is shocked, shocked, I tell you!  Art?

     That in the background is $1.2 billion in destruction.  Consequently there are more orcs who were enterpreneurs now whining about all their Wildberries stock being destroyed.  Since WB recently quietly changed it's terms of service, said whiners are not going to get compensated.  Ooops.  Art!

     Here is Brit 'Churchill MG' gloating a bit - okay a lot - about the employees from the big Moscow Wildberries being escorted away by H & S marshals now that they no longer have a warehouse to work in.  Don't worry, Ruffia is missing over  million workers, they can find another job pretty easily.  Art!

     Well well well, so there was a film.  

     

Art From Angus

McKie, that is, which I've mis-spelled 'MacKie' due to being lazy.  Sue me, it's not as if you have to pay to read this scrivel.  Art!

     Very much designed to Go Extremely Fast Indeed And Nothing Else, and with a miserable pilot/driver to boot, the most interesting thing about this artwork is the background.  Not so much the enormous tower blocks, but the even more enormous tunnel that they appear to be operating within.  Conrad is unsure how safe it is to fly a balloon in a restricted interior space with blue bombers wazzing about at silly speeds.  Maybe the Health & Safety Executive has been abolished in the future?

Either A Confession Or A Boast

Conrad is not sure quite what to make of this item on my news feed.  Art!

     If we assume that they worked 5 days per week and got two weeks annual leave, and that they were never off sick - quite an assumption in this case - that means 3,750 days of being plonkoed at work.  Also, given the length of time they were swilling the wine/Special Brew/white cider, they'd have acquired a tolerance for it and would need to up the swilling quotient.

     Of course - obviously! - that's without actually reading the item, which would be the quick and dirty way of finding out the truth.

"Cibola Burn" By James A. Corey

A.k.a. Number 4 in 'The Expanse' nonology, which I am about to start reading.  Out of curiosity, since the previous 3 titles proved to have a connection to the plot, I checked up on what, exactly, 'Cibola' was.  'Burn' is the Corey character's argot for either travelling in space or the fusion expenditure to do so.  Art!

     'Cibola' refers to Early Modern Spanish myths about a second set of El Dorados, cities of gold, that they tried to find and conquer.  Probably without realising how much the value of gold would tank if there were tens of thousands of tons of it lying around ready to be made marketable.

     Why is this relevant?  Because, at the end of Volume #3, the Protomolecule Engineers 'ring station' opened up 1,700 spatial gates that gave access to that many solar systems across the galaxy.  Hom. Sap. got it's hands on potentially 1,700 Cibolas.  Art!

This, but 130 times bigger

Getting Prissy

Just to clarify matters about Pris from 'Blade Runner', whom 'Brewer's' had mis-identified as a cyborg, or a combination of machine and human.  No she's not!  None of the Nexus 6 replicants exhibit anything but human blood and bone when they get schwhacked by Deckard - yes yes yes they may be bio-engineered to be faster, stronger and smarter than Hom. Sap. but they still bleed if shot.  Art!

Yes it's a spoiler.  For a film 50 years old.

     'Short-span supers' might be a better description.

Finally - 

That treacherous sun is threatening to make it's presence known.  Time to draw the lead-and-boron curtains!