I guess Putin was like, you morons, of course it’s a message how many more Murder/Suicides do I have to order before you get it? URGHH ok make it super obvious FFS.
Except it’s not just the traitor, it’s also his daughter, a police officer, and apparently up to 21 people in total. That’s not a polonium sandwich, it’s basically an act of war.
Putin is such a great guy. So glad he has his arm up to his elbow in DJT’s ass, puppetmaster style.
Moscow has learned from Pyongyang’s playbook. By having enough potential power to mess up anyone, anywhere, and by demonstrating a total lack of scruples, Putin can pretty much run blackmail schemes on everyone, sort of like the North Koreans can do by blackmailing the South Koreans with threats to Seoul. Except Putin has more sabers to rattle and even less chance of being checked.
Of course! The Russians would never do that! Everyone knows how Stalin used to send the wives and children of his enemies to spas and resorts.
https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/971147916843794432?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
While Russia has motivations to assassinate Sergei Skripal the intoxication of his daughter poses questions as Russians have traditionalist views of children and women.
- A hash new policy of killing the family members of “traitors”?
- Collateral damage?
- Not Russia?
When Trump repeats this, he’ll say ‘globalists.’
Well, it’s a proven strategy at least going back to the bubonic plague.
When in doubt, blame the Jews.
Tom Lehrer is the greatest, ever.
Tom Lehrer gets terrifyingly more relevant every day.
He’s pretty awesome, and still around! He will be 90. I looked him up on Wikipedia and found this gem:
Lehrer’s song “The Old Dope Peddler” is sampled in rapper 2 Chainz’s song “Dope Peddler”, on his 2012 debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. The following year, Lehrer said he was “very proud” to have his song sampled “literally sixty years after I recorded it.” Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: “As sole copyright owner of ‘The Old Dope Peddler’, I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
“What the Russian soul demands,” says Yekaterina Mamay, “is that there be one strong politician in the country who resembles a czar.”
Trace amounts of the substance used to poison ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found on and around a table where the pair ate at Zizzi restaurant, the BBC has learned.
I’ve been trying to think of how both of them and the cop could be affected. I’m guessing someone spilled a drink on them with the nerve agent dissolved in it. Then it gets absorbed through their skin. When the cop finds them, he touches them and it gets on his hands.
The policeman fell ill after going to their home. So that’s another possible vector.
This is the stuff that scares me. I think a lot of people are comforted by the idea of one person in charge – a dictator. I can see governments all over the world gravitating to this.
Turns out that Hobbes might have been right, not Paine.
If it’s aerosolised it could get everywhere pretty easily, I’d have thought.
Which is why I often assign parts of Leviathan to students. Coupled with Socrates’ description of his ideal city–pretty much an authoritarian paean to collectivist pragmatism–in Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’ views of humanity have shaped a lot of the logic of dictatorship over the years.
Though to be fair to Hobbes, he isn’t advocating a dictatorship, he’s pointing out that without some form of overarching control people tend to exploit each other and have to be forced into being relatively civilized. He leaves open a lot of different ways of doing this, though admittedly a dictatorship seems to be the path of least resistance.
May said at the House of Commons that it is “highly likely” Russia is behind this. Said the nerve agent was “military grade.”
It’s called Novichok and can be stored as two separate inert agents. But when combined it becomes active and very deadly. If not for defectors from Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed (wanting the West to know it as a causative agent) we might not have been able to identify it.
I thought the US, Russia, and others had signed a chemical weapons ban and wouldn’t be actively producing stuff like this, but Russia reneged. Makes one wonder if they’ve been providing materials to Syria for their chemical weapons attacks.