Great image.
Posted on 11/23/2006 3:15:43 PM PST by lunarbicep
Poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died on Thursday in an intensive care ward, London's University College Hospital said.
Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Russian government, suffered a rapid deterioration in his health on Thursday, but doctors still were unable to determine the cause of his death, a spokesman said in a statement.
Well, did not have to be phalloidine [it was mentioned as an example only]. Based on them not being able to determine what it was, a protein poison seems likely. BTW, what else, besides thallium, causes hair loss? Radioactivity they did not seem to have found, and if something very short-lived was used, then those who were handling it prior to the administration would be in intensive care or dead, too.
Anything that kills rapidly growing cells will cause hair loss - radioactivity, chemotherapy agents in addition to thallium and heavy metals.
Certainly a burst of radioactivity could kill someone, if the perpetrator was trained in handling radioactive materials, they could provide a fatal dose without receiving harm.
However, I suspect it will turn out to be an ingested drug, much easier to handle and less traceable. heavy metals are less likely as they hang around for a long time and are fairly easy to diagnose.
" A wise man once said "a snake does not bite all the time, but that does not mean it is producing honey, and not poison". The numbers have nothing to do with it. The readiness to cause these numbers, OTOH, has everything to do with it."
with this sort of relativism, you might as well throw hitler, mao, and pol pot into the comparison as well.
having a ruler who kills vocal critics (in what as far as I can tell are low numbers) is not unusual but is not very nice either, but is something that has been seen throughout history. it is what despots and monarchs do. I assume we are not pretending russia is a 'democracy' in this conversation.
having a ruler who willfully exterminates with little discrimination entire chunks of HIS OWN SUBJECT POPULATION is something else entirely.
please don't fall under the impression i am 'defending' putin; i am not. what i am saying is that there are two entirely different things going on when you have 'will someone rid me of this troublesome priest (and then orders it)' and 'kill everyone who lives in xyz or looks like xyz or who wins a military medal' or whatever.
I happen to come from the former USSR. Putin is a standard kegebun - i.e. a being on whose behavior the only restraints are the external circumstances of superior power. If needed, and when needed, he could out-do stalin without batting an eyelid. If there has been no such need perceived by him up to the present, it is not yet reason enough to give him credit for.
are you old enough to remember stalin's reign, particularly before the great patriotic war?
The purges (both military and civilian) were something on a scale which had not been seen in the industrialized world at that time before though germany was only a few years behind on the scale of murder. Stalin apparently had people killed for the most bizarre or misplaced of reasons, and also managed to kill almost any officer with any initiative and talent or prominence. It is nothing short of a miracle that Zhukov survived the purges to even fight the japanese in the western part of the war.
I was born shortly thereafter, but my folks lived right through them. Given the dynamics of that society, purges at the time were unavoidable, Stalin or no Stalin. Millions of leadership posts of all kinds were suddenly thrown open to semi-literate unprepared people. People, albeit mostly semi-literate, were smart enough to grab at these - by tens of millions. Now, add to it the general level, and you will see that the darwinian struggle for survival among the careerists and would-be careerists had to take some form similar to what it actually took. Plus the general settling of petty scores which overlapped. Right now the dynamics is different, thus no need for purges - but if putin needs to create a bloodbath [chechnya or any other place] - he'd do it without a second thought.
Great image.
thanks for your comments, you have what may be a unique perspective on this time period among FR members.
do you think the claim that putin engineered the 1999 apartment bombings for political reasons is probable? i have almost no basis besides cynicism of politicians in general to judge the claim, though the guy who made it was apparently killed for his trouble as per this thread.
Nice homepage :)
The cold, brutal evil this stone cold killer is dispensing now will be fully returned in the form of justified reciprocity. This KGB beast will be spending eternity with the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Arafat, Himmler, Heydrich, Khomeini, Pol Pot, Togo, Caligula, and the rest of the world's departed monsters.
Worth reviewing again:
"Actually, I have an alibi. Really."
Courtesy of a his position to the ceiling light in the room, he also seems to have acquired a halo.
It won't be communism. Communism is dead.
Fascism on the other hand is growing leaps and bounds.
BBC Breaking News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/?ok
Russian ex-spy blasts 'barbaric' killers
Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, in a statement dictated before he died, accuses his killers of being "barbaric".
Good riddance. I hope this will be the fate of all friends of Chechen thugs and terrorists.
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