Links and Minifeatures 11 24 Black Friday

Classical Values has a post about, among other things, fake SWAT teams and the immunity of police and the insanity of disarming citizens.

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Poisoned Spy Blames Putin for His Death

The Health Protection Agency said the radioactive element polonium-210, which is extremely hard to detect, had been found in Litvinenko's urine.

Now how did that get in there? He must have ingested it while cleaning his weapon collection, and he slipped and shot himself 357 times with bullets of varying caliber, after which thieves made off with every last piece of the weapons collection, vanishing in the 29 seconds before the police got there.



Polonium is such a minute part of the environment that the weapons scenrio above is vastly more plausible than that Litvenenko wasn't intentionally poisoned. Do we know who did it? No. But there is a logical suspect.

Goldfarb said the attack on Litvinenko bore "all the hallmarks of a very professional, sophisticated and specialist operation."



"The very fact that experts are still at a loss to say what poisoned him tells you it is not a sleeping pill that has been given to him," he said.

Circumstantial evidence, to be certain. But it does point in the direction of the Putin government.

The Russian government has strongly denied involvement, and Putin told reporters at a European Union summit Friday in Helsinki, Finland, that British medical documents did not show "that it was a result of violence, this is not a violent death, so there is no ground for speculations of this kind."

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. These are not the droids you're looking for.



Motive, Opportunity, and Method points squarely at the Putin government. It is very possible that someone else did it as a frame job, but in that case, the Putin government had better devote some serious resources to discovering he real culprit. Absent a smoking gun pointed at someone else, the chances of a reasonable person believing anyone other than the Putin government did this are nil. Of course, Russia has no free press, so why would they Putin government care?

"You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed," Litvinenko said in the statement read by his friend and spokesman Alex Goldfarb. The former spy said "the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

Let us hope so. The Russian people deserve better than Putin. They should have had better than Putin, and if we had invested more heavily in democracy in Russia, as opposed to keeping apparent friends in power, both the US and the world would be in a much stronger position today.



Democracy: It isn't perfect. But it beats the alternatives.



If you ever wonder why I have nothing but contempt for the "accommodate the tyrants" school of diplomacy (as exemplified by James Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeline Albright), you have only to look at the results of its machinations in Russia. As well as a couple score other nations.



Yes, it's an imperfect world, and you've got to pick your battles. But that doesn't mean being unwilling to confront the tyrants in order to improve things, so that you've got better choices next time.



The last time our leadership tried to make certain we got better choices next time was just after World War II, with the Marshall Plan. And everybody knows what a miserable failure that was, right?



While they are at it, the Putin government has now Russia sent an air defense system to Iran, so that if our politicians ever do get the gumption to actually deal with an Iranian nuclear threat, they'll be better able to shoot down the planes they send.



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Ex-employee says FAA warned before 9/11

In the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dzakovic says, the team was able to breach security about 90% of the time, sneaking bombs and submachine guns past airport screeners. Expensive new bomb detection machines consistently failed, he says.

The FAA is a culture of patronage, not a culture of service or results. The problem with cultures of patronage is not just that they waste money and resources, but when a challenge happens, they view it in terms of the the mordida they can extract, not in terms of the best or most effective way to deal with the challenge. Before 9/11, they could fool themselves that there was no challenge. Unfortunately, they are still fooling themselves.

Eventually, the FAA began notifying airports in advance when the Red Team would be doing its undercover testing, Dzakovic says. He and other Red Team members approached the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office and members of Congress about the FAA's alleged misconduct regarding the Red Team's aviation security tests. No one did anything, he says.

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Could well be the longest drive in history (to date) Cosmonaut hits golf ball into space



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Anti-Syrian Christian Leader Pierre Gemayel Assassinated in Lebanon

Gemayel, the industry minister, was the fifth anti-Syrian figure to be killed in the past two years and the first member of the government of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora to be slain.

Is there anyone who is actually surprised by this?



Gateway Pundit notes that Hezbollah got involved after it was "insulted" at Gemayel's funeral.



What was said? I can't see how it's possible to insult Hezbollah. The worst things I can possibly say about any organization are no more than the truth about Hezbollah.



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Democracy Versus Freedom



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In keeping with my earlier rant about Russia, A Doctrine Worth Saving



Max Boot: Cutting and running on our allies



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Wizbang: You can't keep a bad idea down.



Ladies and gentlemen: If you want to freeze the pharmaceutical state of the art right where it is, the proposal to re-import price controlled drugs back from Canada has a lot going for it.



Pharmaceutical companies do all this research because they want to make money. They make money by selling the drugs they research for what people will pay for the first seventeen years those drugs are on the market, after which, the patent expires and the generics swoop in.



If the company cannot make money, there is zero motivation for them to spend all that money researching it, getting FDA approval, etcetera. If they cannot make as much money, there is less motivation than currently, which means it will happen less often and there will be fewer new drugs - potentially, none. If the drug doesn't get invented and approved and patented in the first place, there will be no cheap generics in seventeen years.



The pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars per year bringing new drugs to market. They do this because they can make more billions doing it - and as a corollary, tens of millions of people in this country lead better, less painful, more productive lives because of it. Hundreds of thousands of lives are extended, by which I mean that they survive a critical incident, such as a heart attack or blunt instrument trauma every year.



Now they'll still spend money on stuff with obvious potential for profit. A new headache medicine? Sure. But a new medicine that saves the lives of people with a disease that strikes maybe five people per million? Emphatically not.



We are footing the bill for socialized medicine in Canada. If the US Congress had any guts, we'd prohibit sales abroad at a per dose cost less than the best that can be negotiated in a free market. In other words, let's say Company X has a brand new wonder drug, and they're charging $100 per dose here in the US, and the lowest that anyone can persuade them to offer the product for is, let's the the VA hospital system, for $80 per dose. If they sell the drug anywhere in the world for less than $80 per dose, they get hit with some appropriate penalty like a fine for the difference, in the form of free product, distributed in accordance with prchasing percentages.



The US Health Care consumer has long shouldered the burden of funding development for the rest of the world, which. Of course Congress isn't going to do anything about it. But that's the real crime of the present system.



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What American journalists (and others) should be thankful for



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Thank you all for stopping by.