If I Were To Say 'The Enforcer'

You Might Well Believe I Was Talking Of The Clint Eastwood Film

Which I have seen, many many years ago, and a right rollicking riot it is too, not stinting on the action, with Clint reprising his role as 'Dirty' Harry Callahan, a detective who shoots first, shoots second and pretty much just shoots.  His method of negotiating a hostage release is a little - shall we say, unconventional.  Art!

     Here the liquor-store robbers with four hostages demand a car from our man Harry, making him dirty his best sports jacket.  Well, they demanded a car - Art!

Car, as requested

    No prizes for guessing where Harry shot him.  Remember what I said about stair stunts earlier this week?  Art!

     There the stuntman is, protecting his head and balling-up to better roll not fall, which is p

     ANYWAY of course - obviously! - none of that has anything to do with what the rest of the Intro is about, although note that Harry caused over $14,000 worth of damage with his car and shooting.

     No, you see what I want to put to you today is an annotation I made of 'Jason Jay Smart' and his vlog of two weeks ago, some of which is now looking rather dated as events in Mordorvia are spiralling ever-faster.  JJS's title was 'Ruffia's $350 Billion Defence Catastrophe' which is a misnomer, yet which gives you an idea of the gigantic sums of money involved in Mordorvia's military-industrial complex.  Art!

     Imagine this metaphorical pie as one a mile deep and three hundred miles across, made up of dollars, which the FSB, the military, Rosgvardia and the oligarchs are all trying to acquire.  Pre-war, there was enough to go around; three years and nine months into the Special Idiotic Operation, there isn't enough and thus there is competition and what JJS called 'clans' are now robbing each other, instead of staying in their lane.  Art!

    Jason made the point that only oligarchs were competing with each other for a share of the shadow fleet profits to begin with.  Then, as extortion and shakedown yielded less money, the FSB stuck it's long, inquisitive nose into tanker operations, fighting for control of ports and customs.  This was before the cataclysmic South Canadian oil sanctions, which have immobilised the shadow fleet on the high seas.  Nobody can reap profits from oil sitting in ships not being offloaded.  Art!

     Currently the oligarchs are split into two mutually-opposing factions: 'The Bankers' and 'The Hammers'.  Art!

    This is Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft, before his business was sanctioned up the wazoo. His clan are The Hammers, so-called because they have a reputation for violence and will happily defenestrate anyone whose business they want to steal.  Very direct and Ruffian.  Art!

     Meet Yuri Kovalchuk (Ukrainian surname!) who heads 'The Bankers', the faction that uses 'soft' methods of acquiring businesses, by using the judicial system against them.  

     There is not enough pie for both these factions, which is why they keep falling out of windows or hanging themselves with their hands tied behind their back.  Art!

     Just to complicate matters, enter the FSB, who seem to dedicate quite as much of their time to fraud, theft, embezzlement, extortion, blackmail, passing the port to the right hand side and other hideous crimes, as they do to carrying out intelligence work.  Their 'Department M' places their agents inside other government agencies in order to find out how much money they make, so they can steal it.  Art!

Ivan Tkachev - a.k.a. -

     THE ENFORCER!  Tkachev is head of Military Counter-Intelligence (FSB Department K) and is powerful enough, with sufficient clout to arrest generals and get away with it.  All Ruffian generals are utterly corrupt as you only get to that rank by being so crooked as to make a pretzel look all ninety-degree angles.  Th standard practice is to arrest all their minions first, before moving in on the general themself, which happened to Shoigu and which is happening to Gerasimov.  Thus far, 17 generals have been arrested, and By Wild Coincidence, all their positions have now been assumed by Tkachev's clan members.  Art!

     Just to complicate things, here's Rosgvardia, the 'National Guard' of Ruffia, whose skillset is primarily arresting, beating and torturing unarmed civilian protestors.  They acquired a whole lot of heavy weapons when Wagner were wound up, including tank companies, which are not, as you may expect, to prevent demonstrations or protests.  No, they are there to provide a 'third force' to challenge either the military or the FSB if there is another coup attempt in Barad-Dur.  Art!

'Herr Schickelgruber could never quite master karate'

     This chaotic in-fighting, corruption, back-stabbing and competition reminds me of nothing so much as the Third Reich, where Herr Schickelgruber encouraged such practices, as it meant his minions were too busy fighting each other to bother trying to oust him.

Get Along Little DOGEs

With apologies to the South Canadian cowboy song.  Of late Conrad has been wondering what happened to the Elong Tusk-inspired 'Department Of Government Efficiency' a.k.a. DOGE, which has been notable by it's absence from the headlines.  Art!

'Elong's right arm suffered from a bout of "Doctor Strangeloveitis"

     Art!

     No drums, no trumpets.  The downfall of DOGE may lie in the bitter falling-out between Tusk and the Orange Land Whale; possibly not as Donold would probably go boasting on Truth Social 16 times in the space of an hour about how he 'totally fired Tusk' and other rants.

     Another reason is as follows:

DOGE did not provide any details of what they had cut, when they had cut it, or how much they had effectively saved

     In fact administration officials had to be re-hired because of the utter chaos their sacking had caused, and some lower-level DOGE minions are now worrying about being prosecuted for what they did, especially as Tusk has vanished from any more political involvement in South Canada.  O dearie me.

Elong getting high.

BaDalek

Yes, back to the Daleks, those hateful motorised dustbins with an unquenchable lust for power and a hatred of stairs and 45º slopes.  Conrad noticed an extremely bad rendering of them on the back pages of 'TV 21', where they had their very own strip, in colour, too.  Art!

     I think the artist belatedly realised he'd done a bit of a bodge job on the foremost pepperpot, and used it's blaster and ray to conceal the rear two.  Art!

     Better if not quite there.

     Ron Turner delivers.

Number Five Is Unalive

If you have a memory better than that of a goldfish, you ought to recall that Conrad was gradually going through the contents of a 'Spacedock' video about 'Five Realistic Spaceship Designs' and didn't get past Number Four.  This is because Spaceship Five as chosen was a 'Lighthugger' from Alastair Reynolds' 'Revelation Space' series.  Art!

    These things are so advanced they might as well use black, white and coloured magic to operate, meaning that they are not 'realistic' at all.  They observe the laws of physics is about the most generous thing I can say about them in terms of realism.

They Shrunk A Tree Trunk

Back to that incredibly satisfying collage of shredding, crushing, mauling and generally DESTROYING clips courtesy of 'Discovery Tech - US', on this occasion using a 'Woodcracker W 1000' to split logs apart.  Art!

     The hydraulically-driven jaws split logs apart in seconds, then split the split logs further, as you can tell by all the timber carcasses lying around above.  Art!

     Would it work on a nut, I wonder?

Finally -

Let us end with another Biercism, of which I have thousands, contained within 'The Devil's Dictionary', a tome dedicated to citric wit not worship of Old Nick.

"Lawyer n; One skilled in circumvention of the law."

     Can't argue with that.