Hello, ho, ho! Here's an important message from Network Rail for anyone who's travelling by train this Christmas and New Year.

We'll be working over the festive period to make improvements to the railway. Most of the network remains open, but some train services will be affected from Sunday the 25th of December until Monday the 2nd of January.

So, to keep your festive plans on track, please check before you travel at nationalrail.co.uk slash Christmas.

This is the place where the explicit language warning goes. But on this podcast, there is no explicit language. Think of it as like the page on a legal document that says this page intentionally left blank.

Thursday, September 15th, 2022 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the GIST I'm Mike Pasca.

Flattere Putin has some internal critics, and if I were them, I'd worry about the liquefocation of their internal organs.

Novichok? Scarsia. It should. More than 30 Russian municipal deputies have signed the petition calling for President Vladimir Putin's resignation over the handling of the war in Ukraine.

That number is since increased. I see different numbers, I'm close to 100. I do know what kind of job security or life insurance these people think they have.

But I think they're going out on a limb or a ledge, literally by force. Please, Russian municipal deputies, be mindful of windows.

Know your windows, window awareness. Putin critics seem to have the same relationship to windows as kids on a mountain do commercial have to crags, overhanging gullies and ravines. Only they land with more of a splat in Russia.

The courts have already find a handful of the municipal deputies for daring to call for the president's resignation.

And there are some sites, EuroNews.com is one. I don't know how authoritative they are, but they keep running tallies of prominent Putin critics who are no longer available to offer up a quibble or a caval, owing to their very much being dead.

A couple of days ago, Ivan Petroren, a top manager at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, was found dead in Vladivostok after allegedly falling off his luxury yacht.

Non-slip, deck threads people. No Vladimir, I said deck threads, not death threats.

By the way, that same corporation for the development of the Far East and Arctic, their general director, then 43-year-old Igor Nozov, and forever 43 years old, because he was not allowed to live longer than May 21st, he had a reported stroke after taking over the reins of that company.

And two weeks ago, the chairman of the board of Russia's largest private oil company died in what Russian news agency called an accidental fall from a hospital window.

When the war started, Raveel Maganov did not cheerlead. He instead expressed his company's quote,

deep as concerns about the tragic events in Ukraine and called for the soonest termination of the armed conflict. Took a couple months, but there was in fact a termination.

Putin, or Putin loyalists, or just the Shady Russian window installation industry, do show their keen at amassing a high-body count among anyone in Russia who dares defect from the party line.

The problem for all of them is that Ukrainian people, leadership, and military are not so easily dispatched of. Either that, or they just know to stick to the first floor.

On the show today, it's an international trade spiel, international trade, as in one deceptively mid-sized Nordic aisle for one situated in the Caribbean. Who says no first? Do we got a deal?

But first, actually, but first, but first, I do ask you to go to the Apple Podcast page, should you be so inclined and leave us a review, a written review, and it's not because it helps others find us, and it is not because it's an example of podcast hygiene.

...