Not Mine, I Hasten To Add
I needed some excuse to add in details from an annotated vlog that Joe Blogs put out less than a week ago, which deals with the death rattling of the Ruffian economy. You have to look lively on these vlogs, the numbers keep getting worse week by week and if you laze around and don't update, suddenly they're obsolete and you spent 30 minutes frantically scribbling notes - for Conrad is a dinosaur who works with paper and pen - all to no avail. Now, take RCB's Elvira - Art!
Art! Wrong Dog Buns Elvira!
Excuse me, allow me to deploy the Dounreay-Level Tazer Cannon -
<hideous screeches and crackling sounds are heard>
Let's try again, shall we? The Ruffian Central Bank's Elvira - Art!
Ms. Nabuillina
Elvira, Mistress Of The Mark. Well, she dreams of that, instead she's Roped To The Ruble. Which is performing a bit sickly of late, and do you know, I was both so thorough and malicious that I saved a screenshot from earlier this evening. Art!
Is that bad? ₽97.79 to the dollar? Well, consider that yesterday it was at ₽96.41 in the morning. My cruel prediction of it hitting ₽100 to the dollar by the weekend is looking truer by the day, tee hee!
ANYWAY what I wanted to get across was that Joe derives his information not from Wishful Thinking, the CIA or his Illuminati chums, but the official Russian Central Bank data that they put out. Constrained as this is, there is still oodles of valuable data to be gleaned from them. For example, in their Balance Of Payments surplus, they listed the figures for H1 (first six months of the year) of 2023 as $25.2 billion, which sounds Ever So Impressive.
Well, yes, until they also provide the H1 figures for 2022, which were $165 billion. So, down to less than ⅙ of the previous year.
A distressing metaphor
There's also a bit of 'economical with the truth' in this RCB data, since they only admit a deficit of $21 billion for 2022, when they and the Ruffian Ministry Of Finance have already released data that show a $48 billion deficit for the year. This must be the school of Ignore It And Therefore It Never Happened economics, where bloviating and lying take the place of truth and empirical data. art!
ART!
Conrad further notes that Birmingham City Council - that giant wart of a city that blots itself over the West Midlands of This Sceptred Isle - is all of a sudden bankrupt with debts of £750 million, which - O wild coincidence! - nobody saw coming. This is too big a story to condense into a single paragraph, so we SHALL come back to it. O yes you bet, Joan Jett. Art!
Apparently their hi-tec computer system was rather pricey
O and what's this? Why, it's Donald Trump in an all-capitals rant on Truth Social about how he's the victim, how he's so rich, how his friends came to him with tears in their eyes because they'd used drain cleaner instead of shampoo - The usual guff. What he didn't want revealed came out in his Financial Disclosure documents, which have been viewed by interested parties, and they make surprising reading. Art!
Citizen Trump has two 'Super Political Action Committees' that are funded by his followers: the 'Save America' and 'Make America Great Again'. SPACSA is the one that's been funding all his legal cases, and the cases of some of his compatriots. It stood at $154 million in early 2021, and is now down to -
$4 million. Part of the deductions was a $30 million transfer to the SPACMAGA, which now has as much as $30 million dollars to it, which had to be used for his Prez campaigning.
Okay, so $4 million sounds like a lot, right?
Wrong. The multiple cases he is embroiled in are likely to cost him TENS OF MILLIONS. This is why he's not funding any legal bills for those 18 other co-indictees in Georgia; he can't afford to*.
Well, he can always appeal to his MAGA crowd, can't he?
Not any more. The donations appear to have dried up. It's entirely possible people got fed up of donating to a supposed Prez campaign and ended up paying for his retained law firms. Art!
"Make me King! Make me EMPEROR!"
You can lie all you want on Truth Social or at rallies or on promotional videos; you cannot lie on a Financial Disclosure document.
Well, better go get that laundry in.
A Multitude Of Macguffins
More massed madness from the gadgets of Auximenes, as I think a Pink Floyd bootleg is called, and which might well apply to all the mysterious tat featured for sale on "The Daily Beast"'s webpages. Art!
I know, I know, it looks like a cheap prop from an early Seventies episode of the BBC's premiere dramamentary, "Doctor Who", except their props people would have been expected to create it for £1.73.
Answers in the Comments, ta very much.
The Curse Of Being Creative
Last night Your Humble Scribe decided to settle down and do a couple of paragraphs on "The Big Parade", because it's available in the public domain and thus playable on Youtube, so I can get reflection-free, non-glarey, insets if needed. Art!
At about 23:35 I realised I'd created a 1,000 word Word document that ran to 9 pages, with tons of photographic stills, about what was realistic and what wasn't, and I may yet go back and tickle it up a bit, you know, with an Editor hat on. How is this going to play in the pages of BOOJUM! I wonder?
Watch this space.
"City In The Sky"
Ace and Alex are analysing Arcology One's sole surviving shuttle, to see if there is any reason the previous one blew up mysteriously in the upper atmosphere as it headed for a landing in Australia.
‘It seems a bit risky to me,’ said Ace,
her breath smoking in the bitter cold of the interior. Alex shrugged.
‘We’ve run months of computer models and simulations and plastic scale models,
trying different designs, tweaking what we had, that showed less than a 0.01
per cent chance of failure. Getting down
in real life – I can’t deny that wasn’t a great relief!’ A shadow crossed his face: obviously he was
recalling the subsequent failure and deaths.
Ace looked around in darkness at the bare and functional interior. The only things she could see that might be a
fire risk, let alone be explosive, were the fabrics that covered the
seats. There simply could not be anything here that caused an
explosive failure.
‘Why use steam for changing yaw and pitch and roll?’ she asked. Boiling water wasn’t very efficient.
Alex noted her use of the technical terms for aircraft attitude and
smiled. Either Ace was trying to impress
him, or she was pretty clued-up.
‘We don’t have rocket fuel on tap!
Hydrazine would be great, except that we have hardly any left, and
that’s all in the Pangolin’s tanks, and we can’t make it very easily. Water we have plenty of. All it takes is a high-temperature filament
to heat the water and we have steam.
Don’t forget, these things are only designed to work once. Making them complicated or expensive would be
daft.’
I know, I know, next you'll be wanting to know what 'Pangolin' is or was. PATIENCE!
Caught Cheating!
Out of curiosity, Your Humble Scribe read the story behind this article. Art!
The story is from South Canada, and you can tell from the language used:'crew', 'lot', 'Building code', 'property pins', 'easement'.
You, sir, are busted. The Commenters all agree that it's an old, old story from Reddit that's been reprinted more times that Shakespeare. CONRAD IS VINDICATED!
Must have been a slow news day.
Finally -
The bed linen was nice and dry, thanks for asking.
* Tee hee!
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