So, a prominent figure who opposed Putin has died. There’s a shocker.
According to his company’s statement, Maganov “passed away following a severe illness.” However, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that he died after falling from a window.
That all makes sense. They didn’t say he died FROM the severe illness, just “following” it. Here’s my theory: the dizziness from the severe illness caused him to lose his balance and fall from the window. That could happen to anyone.
Well, anyone in Russia.
Kind of ironic with the passing of the man who effectively ended the Soviet Union that we’re seeing the installation of Soviet Union Mach 2. Just remove the Communism part and replace it with a corrupt Russian Orthodox church presided over by the humble churchman with the $40,000 wrist-watch, throw in some hyper-nationalistic mumbo jumbo about “Eurasian values” (the “We are the heirs of Genghis”) stuff, bring back the anointed rulers of the Slavs crap, and there you are. An autocratic police state with complete power over media and education and an inclination to wipe out any opposition, political or religious which might arise. Only difference is the troika is no longer Party, Police, and Army; it’s Putin and his clique (a great many of them ex-KGB), Police, and Church, the Army apparently having ceased to have any real separate weight.
Meet the new boss…
Technically speaking, brain hemorrhaging from cracking your skull open after falling out a window does count as a serious illness.
Epstien was a piece of shit. This guy was standing up to a piece of shit. so not exactly the same. But yeah, I could see it happening. The FBI tried to coerce MLK into committing suicide.
If this kind of this could happen in the U.S? Uh, Jeffrey Epstein anyone?
I seriously thought that back when Biden was running against Trump that Trump would find someone with Covid and pay him to exhale hard into Biden’s face. This was back when Covid was new and people were dropping like flies. It would have been an easy way to take out Biden. Vaccinations were not a thing in early 2020. Surprised it didn’t happen.
Trump did show up at one of the debates arguably infected with Covid.
Most people do not die from covid. It wasn’t like the vaccinations saved us. Only a small percentage die from it and most of them are already ill. My grandmother technically died from the flu. People were not dropping like flies.
Well, there it is: The stupidest thing I’ll read all day.
I hope.
A “small percentage” of 95 million cases (in the US alone) still resulted in a million deaths, from a disease that essentially did not exist three years ago. Looking back at the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, most of its victims actually succumbed to the pneumonia that went hand-in-glove with the flu virus; but unless you want to be an extreme semantic nit-picker, you can still say that all those people “died from the Spanish flu.” They would have loved to have seen if vaccines would have made a difference.
That’s tantamount to saying that nobody died from AIDS, because they technically died from the other infections that crept in (especially pneumonia) when their immune system was deficient.
The real question is this:
How many people died in 2020-2022 that would not have died had there been no COVID?
Only some of those were direct victims. Others died because they were either afraid to go to hospitals for other problems, or couldn’t go because of shortages of doctors or hospital beds. In the early stages of COVID there were also deaths from non-COVID patients who could not receive appropriate in-home care during lockdowns. In some areas the COVID deaths were just under-reported for reasons varying by area, including cultural and political factors as well as sheer incompetence.
Globally, the number of excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was about triple the number of actual reported COVID deaths. (14.91 million in the 24 months between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021, compared to 5.42 million reported as directly attributable to COVID-19.) WHO estimates that India had ten times as many excess deaths as reported COVID deaths! That country alone accounted for nearly half of the global difference between excess deaths and reported COVID deaths. (4.26 million is the difference between the two numbers in India, versus the world’s 9.49 million.)
The disparity between the two numbers is not very large for the USA, nowhere near as large as for the world in aggregate. For the United States, the CDC estimated that excess deaths between the weeks ending March 7, 2020 and March 5, 2022 totaled 1,105,736, only 15 percent more than the official death toll from COVID-19. Fifteen percent is a far cry from the nearly 200% across the globe. Still, that means that the effect of the COVID epidemic in the USA is greater than the official numbers of direct COVID deaths, as opposed to some claims that the official number is exaggerated.
The data for the USA are not consistent by state. For example, while the reported number of COVID deaths in Massachusetts closely parallels the number of excess deaths in that same period, Wyoming’s report of COVID deaths, if not deliberately understated, appears to have been determined by a random number program. It’s not just Wyoming that exhibits a major disparity between excess deaths and reported COVID deaths. Many counties in the South show the same failure to live in reality.
I really wonder if this kind of thing can happen here in the U.S if Trump had his unimpeded, corrosive ways into government at all levels.
If someone prominent critical of Trump dies in a suspicious manner, at the very least, I can easily imagine GOP officials making excuse, deflection of the death and/or intimidate or pressure law enforcement into not doing their job to investigate.
People get killed for a variety of reasons. Of course people get killed for political reasons. Is this really a question in anybody’s mind?
In the United States? Yes, very much so. In Putin’s Russia? No, of course not. That is why some people in the US do not want it to become like Putin’s Russia, which appears to have been the dream of Donald Trump, and still may be of an unknown number of other Republicans.