So Alexei Navalny is sentenced to three and a half years for being poisoned.
Unbelievable.
The Russians like to kill enemies of the State in unique ways which make it clearly identifiable that it was them, while they stare grimly into the face of global condemnation and sing a dead eyed karaoke performance of, “It wasn’t me”, by Shaggy.
So you can imagine Russia’s rage when someone has the temerity of surviving a poisoning and has the audacity of breaching bail conditions by flying to Germany for treatment and then returns to Russia.
Jailing Navalny for breaching his bail conditions because he flew outside Russia to get medical treatment for a poisoning that was most likely carried out by Russia is such an extraordinary outrage the people of Russia have protested in the tens of thousands and have beaten and arrested in the thousands.
There comes a point when the irrationality and contempt of the State becomes so great you simply can’t tolerate it any longer. Imprisoning a critic of Putin for breaching parole conditions because they flew out of the country for medical treatment from an attempted assassination is pretty incredulous.
I’ve always sided with Russia on most things because the hypocrisy of Western Imperialism is sometimes too great, but on this, Putin only displays the fragile grasp on power all ruthless regimes face when their abuse of power becomes too contemptuous for the common person on the street.
Social media allows that rage to gain focus, we saw that with the Orange Lives Matter Insurrection.
China will be watching with great interest the speed of opposition to Putin and attempting to learn from any Russian mistake that allows the system to be challenged because China runs the risk of internal dissent as well.
Increasingly there is an argument that while there was no grand conspiracy to bioengineer the Covid virus and that all the science tells us the virus originated in animals, there is a possibility that the virus leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab from infected animals.
We know from secret embassy cables leaked to the Washington Post that a virus leak from the Chinese labs was a main concern for American scientists when Trump first came to power before this pandemic even occurred…
The cables had been sent to Washington in 2018 after the officials had visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the first lab in China with a Biosafety Level 4 rating, meaning it has the security for working with the world’s most dangerous pathogens—and been told of safety concerns there. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” one of the cables said, urging the government to send additional support to the lab and stressing how important the WIV’s work was for “future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
…Trump didn’t end up actually doing anything to bolster funds for these labs and the rest is history. The reality is that there is a long list of accidental releases from these types of labs…
The modern era of pathogen releases can be said to have begun in 1973 in England, when a lab assistant working with smallpox infected herself and spread it to three others, two of whom died. Four years later, smallpox was almost officially eradicated from the wild, yet the following year a medical photographer at Birmingham Medical School mysteriously died of the disease. It turned out that researchers in another part of the building were experimenting with smallpox, and the virus most likely reached the photographer through the ventilation system.
There’s already been one lab-caused mini-pandemic, in 1977, when a strain of influenza erupted in China and swept the globe. (Luckily, it was a mild one.) Flu strains are famous for constantly mutating, but this one was nearly identical to one last seen in the 1950s, meaning it had been held somewhere in suspended animation. Suspicion fell on the Soviet Union’s robust bioweapons program, but researchers concluded the pathogen had more likely been released during a vaccine trial gone wrong. Nobody fessed up.
The Soviets got their moment in 1979, when a cloud of anthrax spores escaped a secret bioweapons lab when an air filter wasn’t properly replaced after maintenance. The spores killed at least 66 people in the adjacent town of Sverdlovsk. The Soviets aggressively denied it, but American intelligence was suspicious. The incident was only confirmed in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when President Boris Yeltsin invited an independent team of scientists to investigate.
The best protocols in the world can’t eliminate human error, which is the cause of most accidents in high containment biolabs. Official incident reports read like something from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant in The Simpsons. A wrench got caught in the lid of a centrifuge and kicked over a tray of pathogens. An animal cage containing bedding potentially contaminated with novel SARS coronavirus got knocked over by a freezer door and spilled its contents onto the floor. Liquids aerosolize. Lab mosquitoes can escape. Lab rats bite. Lab technicians attempting to inject lab animals accidentally hit their own fingers. Often, as the Laboratory-Acquired Infection Database reveals, there’s no smoking gun explaining how the researcher got infected. Nature finds a way.
This happens even in well-run labs. The National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases estimates that, at their labs, a lab-acquired infection will occur once for every 600,000 hours of work. That’s really low, and if there were just a few scientists working with these pathogens, the odds of an accident would also stay low. But with hundreds, maybe even thousands of such labs proliferating around the world, even low-probability events can become relatively common.
…because of the prevalence of these types of labs and with human error factored in, there is an 80 percent chance of a a dangerous pathogen escape every 12.8 years.
So the possibility that Covid accidentally leaked from the lab that was studying this very virus in dead bats is actually not that impossible.
Seeing as China are already on the hook for lying about the true extent of the pandemic, had secretly bought up all the global safety equipment while telling us it was ok and grossly under reported the deaths, any evidence that Covid accidentally came out of a lab will have Chinese citizens demanding angry answers and a planet demanding angry compensation.
This could be the real reason China have aggressively upped their rhetoric for war. A country desperately wanting to distract a planet away from their culpability in a global pandemic will want to lash out first.
China will be watching how Putin stamps down Navalny protests because they may have to be be doing it soon themselves.
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Christ Martyn – do you want Mark to call you a SINOPHOBE again?
You know he likes to show off big words and quote information from the CCP propaganda outlets.
Oh I so look forward to it.
Yup – Now 7.00am in Beijing so Mark should be along shortly.
Why don’t you pick on USA/Israel for a change? They are the only ones actively wanting war.
@ Garibaldi – there are constant articles condemning the US and Israel’s actions on TDB?
Alexei Navalny is very courageous. He will be remembered in history.
FFS he is the wests puppet met with MI6
+1 “Seeing as China are already on the hook for lying about the true extent of the pandemic, had secretly bought up all the global safety equipment while telling us it was ok and grossly under reported the deaths, any evidence that Covid accidentally came out of a lab will have Chinese citizens demanding angry answers and a planet demanding angry compensation.
This could be the real reason China have aggressively upped their rhetoric for war. A country desperately wanting to distract a planet away from their culpability in a global pandemic will want to lash out first.”
China will be watching how Putin stamps down Navalny protests because they may have to be be doing it soon themselves.”
But what do you mean watching Putin, PRC have their own methods which seem to be more effective like the Nazi type Uighur camps and disappearing people.
Do you people live under a rock and have a direct feed from the CIA propaganda line
These protests kicked off in the east and Siberia before the arrest of Navalny. The started over Covid19 and the inconsistent food supply. Things are way worse inside Russia than most think.
It is tricky to claim definitive knowledge of any of this stuff really, just look at past behaviour of imperialist powers and wade through all the contradictory and wildly varying messaging, and take a guess perhaps. Claiming to know what Russia and China are up to verges on some twisted form of pundit confirmation bias imo. Why should the establishment media be believed on Russia or China when they can’t be believed, or demonstrate hopeless bias on NZ and other global politics?
It still stretches credibility for Mr Navalny to have been administered what has repeatedly been called a “deadly nerve agent” and not die, or is a less than fatal dose administered to make sure the target lingers and suffers for a bit perhaps? These outlaw chemical weapons are unconscionable anyway.
Mr Navalny is a Yale University trained finance capitalist, and by definition an exploiter of the toilers, but hopefully not an authoritarian bad bastard like ‘Pres for life’ Putin. So “lesser evil” applies. Little is perfect in ‘real politik’. And surely any situation where favourable political results, or freedoms, for the masses are achieved via direct action of the people, has to be a good thing.
Well said what the F*** is bomber smoking
And in any case what the fuck does the Navalny case have to do with NZ? What the fuck do the internal affairs of other countries have to do with NZ? Would we like other countries passing strident commentary on the imprisonment rate of Maori, or health disparities etc.
Q. “Would we like other countries passing strident commentary on the imprisonment rate of Maori, or health disparities etc.”
A. Yes please.
‘will have Chinese citizens demanding angry answers.
You are quite right that Chinese people will be angry.
But the Chinese public do not have the right to ‘demand answers'( well they do have a constitution that claims to have free speech, the right to belong to a religion and stuff like that – but FFS nobody expects a local cadre to take any notice of that crap).
If you think I am joking I saw the result when our neighbour argued with the local licensing official about whether he had to pay a fee.
It is not a good idea to have any long hair when three thugs grab you by it and drag you to the paddy wagon.
I was passing, looked, and received a salutation from one of the thugs. ‘ Waiguo hundan! Guan ni de pi shi’
(foreign bastard, mind your own fucking business).
One of the great things about being a foreigner in China is we have these things called embassies that we can complain to.
They may not be a great help but if we complain to them, they are bound to complain to the Chinese government which means someone somewhere eventually has to stop playing Qi with their comrades and get off their arse and attend to the complaint.
It is for this reason that the local bullies generally leave foreigners alone and that be what Mark meant when he told me ‘China is full of white privilege.’
Ordinary Chinese citizens have no such protection but it is true that many still do have the courage to protest and I intensely admire them for it.
Long life to the Dalai Lama and may god support the Uyghur people at this time.
Truly pathetic post, but some commenter’s seem to lap it up. An interesting array of ignorance, and bias and other agendas..
I’m surprised you were allowed to say that. My comment, critical of the outlandish thinking detached from reality was censored out of existence.
We know we’re in deep shit when truth is banned.
Fantastic comment
‘And in any case what the fuck does the Navalny case have to do with NZ? What the fuck do the internal affairs of other countries have to do with NZ?’
No man is an island Mark. The death of any person diminishes me. We are all connected.
Cast your eye over Chinese history Mark. When Japan attacked China and the Chinese appealed to the world for help.
Was there not bitter resentment in China when the West said ‘ what the fuck does China have to do with us? Let the Japs kill them- less of the yellow peril for us to worry about’
What constant anger in China today because other nations ignored the Rape of Nanjing.
Then the U.S. and Britain place sanctions on Japan. Why? To aid China!
Japan attacks those nations because they wish to save the lives of Chinese people.
Freed from Japan by the efforts of other nations the Chinese stop killing each other and form a new nation.
The United Nations respond to aggression in Korea.
Does the Chinese leadership say ‘ What the fuck does Korea have to do with us?’ No it does not. It sends troops to aid its Communist ally.
Does the Chinese leadership say ‘ the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs all show they do not want to be part of our state.’
‘What the fuck does that have to do with us? Let them all go of and form their own countries.’
No China forced all these people into union at gunpoint.
India, Vietnam, Russia – all have at some time felt China’s necessity to intervene in their affairs( and I have not even mentioned Taiwan.)Arms shipments to insurgents in Latin America, Africa, South East Asia. Chinese military presence in Dijuboti, Chinese security guards shooting up strkiers at African mines, shall I keep going?
But actually Mark there are questions I would like you to answer: I have spoken to many Han Chinese who spent time in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Xinjiang as volunteers and all of them hate these places. Without exception they claimed the inhabitants were backward savages, the food was terrible, the climate horrible and all of these minorities are sullen and unfriendly to Han people. Not one of them enjoyed their time there.
So if the Chinese hate these places and their people why the fuck do you not just leave them alone?
You do not want to be there. They do not want you there so why don’t you just fuck off out of their countries?
The other thing is in PRC there are always pictures of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels and Lenin on the walls of Chinese schools and factories.
Communist Party members point them out to me and proudly say “that is Karl Marx.’
I say ‘yes, Have you read the Communist Manifesto?’ Blank look.’ Have you read Das Capital?’ Another blank look.
In ten years I never found one party member who ever read anything Karl Marx wrote, nor anything Lenin wrote.
So do you and your comrades read anything that is not Party propaganda? Would you actually know what socialism is if it came and kicked your arse.
There are a few other questions I have Mark like why is the Long March seen as fantastic feat of arms when the Red Army ran around like a headless chicken, lost ninety percent of its personnel, and was saved from annihilation by the Xi’an Incident.
Why could a country the size of Japan repeatedly beat the seven bells of shit out a much larger China.
Why you celebrate a great wall that thousands died building, bankrupted the country and did not keep out any invaders.
‘Would we like other countries passing strident commentary on the imprisonment rate of Maori, or health disparities etc.’
As a matter of fact Chinese Middle School textbooks do all these things. I do not say they should not do it but it is incorrect to say Chinese do not pass commentary on events in New Zealand and other countries.
You know that Mark so stop making a Joe Hunt out of yourself.
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