No! This Is Nothing To Do With "Game Of Thrones"
Conrad never understood what all the fuss was about the final episode, but then he'd not been watching it for years and years like the sad aged nerds had been, even if 'sad aged nerd' hits a bit close to home. Invested, much?
Well, at least it allows me to include a nice click-baity picture in here, the better to entice passers-by. Art!
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| "I will not lie to you. We've come to a dangerous place." |
No, what we're looking at in this Intro are how a couple of dictatorships are getting into trouble over oil (and gas) revenue. You can doubtless guess one of them, although the second might surprise you.
Once again, thanks to the ever-excellent Joe Blogs, who has a knack of taking complex economic data and concepts and rendering them easy to understand.
That's the link to Joe's Youtube channel. Be warned, his vlogs are usually approaching half-an-hour long. Art!
That dotted line is the December 5th cut-off point for crude oil sales to the EU, which are shown as the blue area. The Orange one is sales to India, which have also decreased in volume. Neither are particularly good metrics for Quivery Table-Wrestler. Art!
These are figures for Ruffian refined products. The dotted line for their embargo in February's not there, but see the sudden decline in EU imports. These will continue to decline over the 45-day grace period until they stop completely. India (and apparently China has been subsumed into the grey 'Other' section) never imported much of these products anyway. Not looking good, Tsar Poutine!
Joe then pointed out that a lot of Ruffian oil exports have been to nations with 'troubled' economies: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Turkey and Cuba to name a few of the most parlous ones. All four are on the brink of bankruptcy and are pleading to the IMF to bail them out, which will be a neat trick for Cuba as they were kicked out for stiffing that organisation in the Sixties. Art!
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| Cuba go boom |
Let us now jump to Venezuela, that unlovely dictatorship where holds sway Mister Five Meals A Day Maduro. Their oil industry was sanctioned by South Canada in 2019, a bit of a blow as they are even more dependent on oil revenue that the Ruffians are. So, the Vees approached Ruffia, specifically Rosneft, and asked if the Ruffians could sell the Vee's oil and give them back the money?
However, there are no flies on the South Canadians, and they promptly sanctioned Rosneft.
Still no aerial arthropods on the South Canadians and Mexico got sanctioned, too.
At this point the Vees are desperate, because the country will go bankrupt if they don't sell that oil, so, in desperation's desperation, they resort to a network of black-market Mexican third parties.
Success! The oil is sold!
Except, you know, since the Vees are dealing with unscrupulous criminals, they only get 14% of their money owed and have a black hole of $21 billion that their 'networkers' have effectively stolen.
Gosh! Untrustworthy crooks are - untrustworthy! Who knew!
This links back to Joe's focus on Ruffian oil sales to nations who are very possibly not going to pay all, if any, of it back. Art!
Quick, lads, tissue for the sniveller!
Things have gotten so bad in the Ruffian economy that The Pest In A Bulletproof Vest is being forced to face the facts.
"Peridot"
Yes, yet another word that popped into my head for no good reason. Conrad had a vague sense that it came from sci-fi, the name of an occupied space habitat, converted asteroid or moonlet. Art!
Peridot or what?
Alas, no. It turns out to be a green gemstone, also known as Chrysolite. It's unusual because it only ever turns up in an olive-green colour wh,x ds 43t4
'''########
Sorry! Dozed off. I prefer MY Peridot. Reality is boring.
I wonder, did 'Peridot' ever appear in the "Nexus" comics?
Apropos Of Not A Lot
Conrad listens every so often to the film reviews offered by Terry, the Antipodean bloke whose Youtube channel "Terry Talks Movies" is worth checking out. He's not a professional critic, just a chap who's been watching films (usually genre ones) all his life. Well, he described a film poster as being by artist George Barr, making Your Humble Scribe pay attention, because artists who do book covers and film posters get far too little recognition. Art!
I think this one is for a fanzine. Note how he craftily gets in an indication of the scale here, with some appealing aliens. Art!
How to tame your dragon*?
"The Sea Of Sand"
We are seeing events through the eyes of a bio-vore Farmer, one of the now massive revolt along the shorelines of Wastelandworld.
Imgelissa also realised that the
aristocrats and their aides had made a major blunder in sending so many
Warriors to Target World Seventeen. The
total came to nearly a thousand, a thousand Warriors who might have been able
to prevent this rebellion and crush it, but who were off on the Target
World.
In
the near future he anticipated that the littoral aristocracy would arrive with
detachments of Warriors, ready to kill and destroy to re-establish their
regime. In the north, parties of Farmers
were posted as lookouts, waiting to give a warning on seeing any approaching
forces. The north wasn’t a problem.
South
was where they had a difficulty. South
lay the trans-mat complex, guarded by surviving Warriors, Overseers and one or
two misinformed Farmers. The Warriors
were too numerous, well-armed and protected to be overwhelmed by a direct
attack. That had been proven, bloodily,
twice.
Not
only that, recalled Imgelissa, with a nasty feeling of having missed a trick,
the other lords along the littoral might send reinforcements to the loyalists
holding the trans-mat by
trans-mat. As a mere Farmer he didn’t
know how many trans-mat stations still operated, those ones capable of sending
matter across the continents, but it would be folly to assume none still
functioned.
Plan for the worst and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't happen**.
No, Of Course You Won't Need One Of These Anytime Soon
The BBC recently published a news item about the secret nuclear bunker at Corstorphine Hill in Edinburgh, originally created in 1944 for the Second Unpleasantness and then upgraded for the Cold Unpleasantness. You know, that time when you did need to worry about the three-minute warning and Mutually Assured Destruction. Art!
The Operations Room. Sadly not a WAAF in sight.
It does look a little like a BBC studio, which is quite fitting, as they did possess an actual BBC studio in case emergency broadcasts were needed. The whole site was abandoned in 1955 with ownership being traded in a merry-go-round. The interior has been gutted by fires and thieves and it would cost circa £20 million to restore. Art!
The view from above
So, you can reflect back on the bad old days, because of course - obviously!- we don't need anything like this nowadays.
Finally -
I've just realised it's Good Friday tomorrow, shortly followed by Easter Monday, which would mean more if I was gainfully employed. If you know of any full time permanent jobs going that involve drinking multiple pots of tea, doing codewords and eating anything Marmite-flavoured, do let me know in the Comments.
* Apparently it's about the collision of the industrial world with elves.
** A sound motto to live by, I find
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