The High Cost Of -

If This Were Reddit Or Youtube

Then I'd have to use a euphemism like "Un-aliving" or "D***g" because they don't like nasty words like those and will demonetise or block people who don't observe their rules.

    ANYWAY enough whinging about social media conventions, you may have expected me to end today's title as "The High Cost Of Living" but NO! instead it's "The High Cost Of Dying" because once again we're going to look at the misery that is life in Modern-day Mordor.  With thanks to "Joe Blogs" for doing the spadework on this.  See, I give credit where it's due, don't I? Art!

Norilsk by night

     Imagine living in this hell-hole, which stands at Number 3 in the World Suicide Chart, and Number 17 in the Road Accidents Chart, where butter has become so expensive people carry out armed robberies to steal it, and where the humble potato is now a luxury food item.  Anders Aslund, whom we have quoted before, points out that Ruffia is now experiencing the painful double-whammy of stagflation, where the economy is stagnant but inflation keeps rising, despite astronomically high interest rates.  

     ANYWAY that is the high cost of living.  Let us broach the even darker subject matter of the high costs to Ruffia of dying.  Art!

Table courtesy Jake Broe.  Ta, Jake!

     I should have posted this sooner, because Joe's vlog is from 4 days ago and the number of orcs rendered wholly or partially unalive keeps soaring by at least 1,000 per day, so his numbers are going to be obsolete in mere weeks.            as it is, Joe was using figures quoted by Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, of 200,000 dead and 500,000 injured to date.  I know this doesn't jib with Jake's totals, but we'll go with them as being conservative and understated as it's better to err on the side of caution.

     For his analysis, Joe looked at the two primary costs associated with Ruffian casualties: compensation payments and loss of earnings.  Art!

"Daddy's dead but we have a new Lada!"*

     Initially these payments were $68,000 for a dead soldier, with $41,000 for an injury.  As the Special Idiotic Operation dragged on and on, these figures were revised downwards, to $50,000 and $30,000 respectively.

     Joe then naively calculated that 200,000 x $50,000 = $10 billion, and at 500,000 x $30,000 = $15 billion, thus $25 billion in compensation payments total.

     Er - not quite.  Since the very first days the Kremlin has been wriggling out of as many commitments to compensation as possible.  Conrad recalls their refusal to repatriate 7,000 dead orcs whom the Ukrainians had in cold storage, only a few months into the SIO.  If a person is declared 'Missing' then their surviving family gets exactly $0.00.  You'd think after 3 years some of these families might, perhaps, work out that there's something wrong.  Art!

     This is the background to Joe's calculations on Ruffian mean wages - ₽84,000 per month, or rounded out to ₽1,000,000 per annum.  This sounds marvellous, until you realise it's about $10,000.  

     Taking the average Ruffian age of becoming unalive as 35 - we trust you, Joe - and the Ruffian retirement age being 63, this means that the dead and injured will have sacrificed 28 years of earning power.  28 x700,000 x ₽1,000,000 = 

     $196 billion in total, or $7 billion per year, every year, for 28 of them.  Joe is using the conservative totals here, because otherwise as of today it would be $232 billion, or over $8 billion per annum.  The overall economy is going to miss this money and the state will lose tens of billions in taxes that will never be collected.

     Ooooops.  Of course - obviously! - Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks doesn't care about this because the long-term effects will be impoverishing Modern-day Mordor when he will be safely long dead.  Art!

     Joe also put it about that currently there are 9 job vacancies for every employee in Ruffia, which is an illustration of how badly the employment market has been affected by orcs getting un-alived so prodigiously and consistently.  Prior to the SIO the gap would be made up with migrant workers.  Now they are staying away from Ruffia as the risk of being press-ganged into the army is very real, and the feeble ruble is another incentive to stay away.

     Whatever would Sauron say!

Welcome Back Hazegreyart!

It's been a long time since we had one of Ol' Hazy's animations on the blog, as I feel a bit guilty using his stuff.  It must take him aeons to create them, and then Conrad comes along like an ingrate and - er - 'borrows' them.

     I noticed a picture in the 'Shorts' section of Youtube, thought it resembled the 'Fireflash' from "Thunderbirds", so I clicked on it and - Art!

      He manages a really compelling 'heat ripple' effect over the runway tarmac.  It's also very NOISY, as this puppy can attain and sustain a cruising speed of Mach 6.  Which, for your information, is twice as fast as the fastest aircraft ever built, the Blackbird.  Art!

      There is just one drawback of this aerial wonder - it is powered by a nuclear reactor, so you absolutely do not want it to crash, or even land heavily.  Art!

     4,600 miles per hour.  Or, if you like, from London to Canberra in 140 minutes.  Or, London to Paris in 3 minutes.  This thing goes like stink.

"The War Illustrated Edition 201 2nd March 1945"

We  continue to deconstruct the centre-page montage, which consists of pictures taken in Italy.  Northern Italy, to be precise, where winter holds sway.  Cast away your preconceptions of sunshine and warmth.  Art!

     The accompanying blurb has it that Lieutenant Cheney, who hailed from the considerably flatter and less extreme climes of Kent, could only get around on skis, since there was so much snow.  He needed to travel to get around the positions his platoon were holding in the Apennine Mountains.  Art!

     That's the Apennines in orange, so you can't get away from what might be described as the 'backbone' of Italy, or not unless you debouch into the very North, which has it's own mountain ranges.  Italy and mountains go together.

World Holocaust Day

It would be harder to get any darker than our Intro today, but this title gets there and then some.

     We have occasionally covered the Holocaust in passing, as it's just too vile a subject to enthuse about.  Art!

     This book is one of my exceptions to the rule, being an extremely detailed analysis - and destruction of - David Irving's pro-Nazi works, which had masqueraded as objective historical fact.  Irving has since vanished from public sight, which is a species of justice, thanks to comprehensively losing his libel case and being hit with swingeing legal fees.

     Conrad also recalls Albert Speer's rather whitewashy autobigraphy, where he met one of his Nazi compatriots, who was still pale and shaken after a visit to what he described as a 'camp' at Oświęcim in occupied Poland.  "If you are invited to visit, refuse.  Never, ever go there," advised his NAZI pal.  That's the Polish form of '"Auschwitz", which esteemed historian Alan Bullock succinctly described as 'Anus Mundi': the bottomhole of the world.  Art!

    Ol' Pete also works in a lot of detail about concentration and extermination camps being liberated by the Allies.  Whilst British, French, Canadian and South Canadian soldiery had objectively known about these establishments, coming across them in real life was an eye-opener of ghastly proportions.  Teuton soldiers in the vicinity were frequently un-alived rather than becoming PoWs.

Finally -

Wowsers, what a buzzkill I am.  Conrad is now going to depart and cook things in the kitchen.  Tomorrow may see us being more cheerful!**

*  This is neither fiction nor exaggerated.  I've seen a clip of proud parents showing off their brand-new Lada, bought with the compensation money from their dead son.

**  Or maybe not.