All Fall Down

You Might Think This Is About The Ruffian Economy

And you'd have a point, because nobody elsewhere has an economy that is dying by the inches on a daily basis.  Except perhaps Venezuela or Cuba, where they are eating each other as food, and exporting the bones as fertiliser to North Korea.  They have to boil pasta for at least twenty minutes or you break your teeth on it, as evinced in "The Walking Dead" comic book version, which is quite besides needing to add meat into the pot.  Art!

     Let us look at the Ruffian economy as regards - 

INCOME of Q1 of 2023 - that is, January, February and March of 2023, compared to the Q1 of 2022.  O dearie me.   They are down 21%.  This, lest you be unaware, is not good.  It is, in fact, rather bad.  Which is British Under-Emphasised for "Dog Buns awful!".  Then we have 

     NATIONAL DEFICIT: Or the gap between what Peter The Average is spending as opposed to what his criminal cronies are bringing into the country.  In Q1 of 2022 the deficit was ₽1,000,000,000 which is $14 billion in proper money.  In Q1 2023 the deficit was ₽2,4000,000,000, which is $29 billion.  So, 83% of the entire 2023 budget deficit has been hit already, which would have been $36 billion.  Lest you be unaware, this is not good.  Not good AT ALL.

NATIONAL WEALTH FUND: There used to be $150 billion in the NWF, until that reserve was used to pay off the $48 billion deficit of 2022.  There is now about $75 billion left in the NWF, which is hostage to future Ruffian economic disasters.  Back before the Special Idiotic Operation the NWF stood at $600 billion.  Art!

     Putin's Piggybank appears to be running rather low, with stoked inflation the likely result.  For a nation where pensioners have to get by on $250 per month, deliberately printing money to prop up the regime would be -

     Well, it wouldn't be good.

     Let Conrad reassure you that the figures we've been using here are OFFICIAL RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF FINANCE data, not third party guesstimates, and hence quite possibly massaged to look better than they actually are.  Even if they are quite as bad as it is possible for bad to get.

      But don't worry, gospodin, it's all going tremendously according to plan*!

Er - What?

As you may be aware, Conrad likes to fly under the radar of social media, because what he writes here is often slanderous, not to mention copyright infringement, or both.  So - what did I espy on Twitter a few minutes ago?  Art!

     We had better organise an editorial meeting to brainstorm what to do about what.  Yes! Conrad is quite happy to be the first Aresnaut on Mars if it means not being sued into the stratosphere.  Matt Damon be jealous.

     Also, 'Starship' looks suspiciously designed along the lines of Dan Dare spaceships, which were in turn designed before Yuri Gagarin ever topped the heavens.

Further To Cooking

Conrad, thanks to his Fitbit counter, walked into Lesser Sodom today and acquired a few cooking ingredients for a 'Braised Cabbage And Sausage Stew' that came up on his list of Ukrainian stew recipes.  I was actually looking for a casserole recipe that would allow use of the recently-acquired Enormous Cooking Pot, but you go with what you've got.  Art!

     Conrad's dilemma, once again, is that this dish is obviously meant to feed six to eight people, and here he is on his own.  I can't offer it to other people because the beef's Best Before date is in 2022.  Which is still two years later than the markings on my Morrison's sugar-free sweets**.

"The Sea Of Sand"

The other shoe is about to drop.  Very near the end of our epic.

‘Stop!  Stop!’ called the Doctor, coughing and choking in the half-light left by the passing blanket of dust and sands.

          Dominione cocked an inquisitive eyebrow, braking to a slow forward.

          ‘Before we left Makin Al-Jinni, I set the geothermal spike array to  maximum intake but minimum discharge.’

          People looked at each other.

          The Doctor sighed.

          ‘A self-destruct mechanism.  Normally the complex staff would be able to divert the energy, usually by the pylon.  Without that they’d use the instrument panels to organise energy dischage.’

          ‘Those would be the energy-manipulating panels you destroyed?’ asked Sarah, to a nod from her mentor.

          The Doctor pictured the surviving bio-vores arriving back at their complex, seeking to recharge their Combat Car, only to be informed that their equipment wasn’t able to recharge.  The sabotage would have escalated enormously by then, without any staff on hand to restrict or remedy it.  Seeking out the source of the sabotage –

          An incredibly acute, purple-white flash came from the depths of the desert, at approximately where Makin Al-Jinni would have been.  Two minutes later odd bits of glass and granite began to fall amongst them, the remnants of the archaeological dig.

          Just to make sure, the Sahariana and crew hung around for another twelve hours.  Nothing moved in the desert apart from them.

* Whichever plan is in play, that one from 22/02/2022 being the frontrunner.

**  Bring up the front-runner and let it be!