Sticks And Stones: Modi's China War, 2020

On the night of 15th June 2020, a major clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops on the ridges overlooking the Galwan River in Ladakh. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed, and according to both China and India the Chinese also "suffered casualties". This did not occur out of nowhere; in fact the two sides had been in close confrontation for over a month on that border and there had been multiple fistfights between them. Why - the border having been calm for decades - this happened now, who benefited, and who won, is the purpose of discussion of this article.

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Long Shadow Of The Locust

Imagine this scenario.

You’re a farmer in a country, let’s call it, oh, just let’s say it’s called India.

You don’t have much of a farm. In your grandfather’s time it might have been quite large, and fertile, and the rains irrigated it plentifully every summer so that his crops never died of thirst. Even if there was a year or two when the monsoon rains failed, there was a tube well and more than enough groundwater to ensure that the harvest wasn’t a failure. And whatever your grandfather produced, the government guaranteed that it would buy it at a certain price, known as the minimum support price, so he knew that even if he couldn’t sell it at a bigger profit in the open market, he could still depend on a certain guaranteed level of income, just so long as his crops continued to grow.

But that was then.

Things happened. First, with increasing health care standards, no matter how imperfect, more of your grandfather’s offspring lived to adulthood than in his father’s time. So your grandfather’s farm was divided among your father and uncles. And, in time, your father married and bred, and more of your siblings survived to adulthood than in your father’s generation, which meant that his share of the farm was divided again between you and your brothers. So, you ended up with only a tiny fraction of your grandfather’s farm.

Meanwhile, other people have been breeding too, and their children, too, have been surviving to adulthood in hitherto unprecedented numbers. So, to house them and to supply food for them, and to rip coal and oil and minerals out of the ground for them, forests have been chopped down; and to supply the thirsty cities with water, rivers have been dammed and their water piped to said cities. Chimneys have been spouting smoke from factories, because the government has decided that unchecked industrialisation is the only path to “growth” – and also because the corporations owning those industries are important sources of funds for elections and to buy up politicians afterwards. All this has done enough damage to the climate that the rain has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable, so that you’ve had to rely more and more on your tube well to irrigate your patch of field. The groundwater level, in consequence, has been falling, and falling, and you’ve had to borrow money to dig your tube well deeper and deeper – and still the water continues to fall.

All this while, your own expenditures are climbing. Things are more expensive. Your tiny patch of field doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills unless you begin to plant multiple crops a year. This is turn exhausts your soil, leaching out the fertility, which earlier used to be renewed because your grandfather could afford to leave it fallow between planting seasons. So you have to buy huge amounts of fertiliser as well as farm machinery, because the old ways are no longer productive enough. Pests invade your field, and the pesticide you used to use no longer work because the pests have developed resistance. So you have to buy more expensive pesticides. Because the pesticide, fertiliser, and farm machinery are not free, you have to borrow money to buy them, so you slip into debt.

Then the government decides on “economic liberalisation”, which means that it starts systematically pandering to the corporations that provide it with money. Suddenly, your minimum support price is no longer paid on time, or is simply abolished altogether. You can’t pay your loans back to the banks from where you took them. They threaten to foreclose on your land. So, in order to pay them off, you borrow again, this time from the village moneylender. And then an unseasonal storm, which happens more and more frequently, comes along and kills off your entire harvest.

You think you have problems? Your problems are just beginning.

Because there isn’t anything like enough money coming in from your farm to pay your bills and even the interest on your loans, in between plantings and harvests you need some other income. So you look for work, as a labourer or whatever else you can manage. Work isn’t available in the vicinity, so you have to travel long distances, often to the other side of the country – and it’s a big country – to look for work. In a desperate attempt to make ends meet, you hire yourself out as a labourer for some months, rush back home, harvest and plant, try and sell on the market, try to keep your head above water, and then rush off to work as a labourer again.

Meanwhile the cost of machinery and fertiliser keeps increasing, the groundwater levels keep dropping, your debts keep piling up, some foreign company called Monsanto cajoles and bribes the government to compel you to buy seeds from it – seeds that cease to grow after one season, so every year you need to buy seed stock from Monsanto again, instead of using leftover seed from the previous year to plant again. And it begins to rain when it shouldn’t, drowning your crops, and it’s bone dry when it should be raining, so that what you have left withers to straw poking through cracked brick-hard soil. And the government, which you voted for, doesn’t care. It wants to grab your fields to hand over to its capitalist cronies for factory farms or just factories, and the worse things get for you, the better said capitalist cronies like it.

You see where we’re going with this?

Then, just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do.

You’re in the city, working at a temporary job as a construction worker, and you need to come back to your tiny farm because the harvest is due. But just as you’re about to, suddenly the government imposes a curfew because of some foreign disease that is supposedly killing people left and right. Your employer dismisses you and doesn’t even give you your back pay, on the grounds that he has no money. You can’t even step out into the street without being beaten by the police, even to buy food; and, if you do manage to sneak out of the city, you don’t have any way of getting home. There are no buses, no matter what the politicians claim, no trains, nothing. So, with no other option, you begin walking home along the highways, under the grilling midsummer sun, while the government spends taxpayer money to bring in rich Indians who abandoned the country for greener pastures abroad and suddenly find themselves unwelcome in their new homelands.

Meanwhile, your brother, who’s stayed back on the farm, has his own problems. The harvest can’t be sold because the markets and distribution systems are all shut because of the government’s lockdown. There are no preservation or storage facilities, so the produce can’t even be kept relatively fresh, and, even if there were, he couldn’t afford the fees. So what option does he have except to dump the stuff in the fields to rot in the sun?

None.

It isn’t the worst yet, oh, no.

While all this was going on, the climate worldwide has been going to hell, too. Forests have been disappearing, fossil fuels have been filling the skies with smoke and carbon dioxide, ice caps have been melting, the ocean currents have been changing as a consequence, and scientifically illiterate imbeciles have been pretending all of this is a hoax. Evaporation from oceans that are warmer than they used to be has warmed the air above and filled it with moisture. The warm air, rising, has drawn in colder air from around it to warm in turn, pick up moisture, rise, and bring in yet more colder air, until you have a gigantic vortex of rotating cloud and wind, spiralling towards land, bringing not just destruction but heavy rain wherever it goes. This thing is known as a cyclone.

This cyclone hits, shall we say, another – possibly fictional – country called Saudi Barbaria, which is mostly desert. It dumps so much rain that actual, literal lakes develop in the desert. This sudden moisture causes an equally sudden proliferation of vegetation. And, before the sun has an opportunity to parch this vegetation to mummified hay, yet another cyclone comes along and dumps another few thousand tons of water on the desert, creating even more greenery.

Great, right? Green is good, right?

Wrong.

There are animals living in that desert, notably insects, those most adaptable of all creatures. One of those insects is a, usually inconspicuous, middle-sized short-horned grasshopper called Schistocerca gregaria. This is a rather well-known insect; it’s been featured in no less than the Bible and the Koran, and you may even have heard of it under its common name.

Schistocerca gregaria is also known as the desert locust.

Locusts are grasshoppers. Grasshoppers eat vegetable matter. When there is a lot of vegetable matter, the grasshoppers lay a lot of eggs, which hatch to form many more grasshoppers, which live to grow to adulthood because of all that easily available vegetable matter, and lay more eggs, which give birth to more grasshoppers, which...

You get the idea.

And then there are so many grasshoppers that they begin to eat all the vegetation. And the cyclones don’t keep coming, so the lakes dry up, as the desert returns to its usual state, and the greenery, without water, begins to die off. So the grasshoppers crowd together to get at whatever little vegetation remains, because they don’t want to starve to death any more than you do. And when they get packed in tightly enough together, they bump against each other, just as you would in those crowded unreserved railway compartments in which you’d travel back to your hometown from your construction job in the city.

Now, unlike ordinary grasshoppers, locusts – there are many species, all of which are short-horned (that is, with short antennae) grasshoppers – do a special thing when there are a lot of them in such close proximity that their hind legs bump each other. Their biochemistry changes, with increased production of the hormone seratonin. Their bodies change colour, in the case of Schistocerca gregaria to yellowish pink and black. 

Their habits change – normally night-flyers, they now switch to flying during the day, and instead of maintaining distance from each other, they now actually seek out each other’s company. This is known as the gregarious or migratory phase. Soon, the massive agglomeration of these insects takes off in search of new food deposits to devour.

And, because of that global warming, there have been unseasonal rains here and there, so the locust swarms have plenty of food. They land, eat, have sex, lay eggs, and, with their ranks swollen by the new generations, set off again on their mission of conquest, flying up to a hundred and fifty kilometres a day. Oh, and they can cross oceans too, because when they get tired, they rest on the floating corpses of their friends who died of old age or exhaustion and float, bobbing on the waves.

Now these locusts have been migrating east and west for two years, devastating countries with names like “Ethiopia” and “Somalia”, “Yemen” and “Kenya”, which you’ve never heard of. But the government, with its overeducated bureaucrats, has most certainly heard of them. It is aware that two neighbouring countries, let’s call them, for fun, “Iran” and “Pakistan” have been hit hard in recent times. Just the previous year, in fact, Pakistan had some 40% of its crops eaten by locusts, which isn’t a small amount. In fact, a one square kilometre swarm of locusts – which is an extremely small swarm – can eat, in one day, as much food as would be needed to feed, wait for it, 35000 people. Locust swarms can extend over hundreds to thousands of square kilometres.

In reality, locusts are such a menace, and have been such a menace through history, that the United Nations’ Food And Agriculture Organisation (FAO) monitors them closely and warns governments when their countries are about to be attacked. Your own government – the same one that has stopped paying your minimum support price and is having you beaten up for coming out in the streets – knows that the locusts invaded the country last year, but did nothing, claiming that the insect swarm had receded without doing any crop damage.

Well, right now, those swarms are back. They’re back earlier than ever, in greater numbers than ever, and they’re eating their way across the west of the country. In fact they’ve been doing it for some time, but that same government and its tame media, which ignored your existence as long as possible, ignored the swarms too, until they blanketed the city of Jaipur, known for its pink sandstone construction, in a pink blanket of hungry insects. Then, suddenly, the media deigned to notice it. Because it had no choice.

So, to recapitulate.

The agriculture sector had already been devastated by shrinking farms, dropping groundwater levels, irregular and unpredictable rainfall, and cyclones, The government has taken a policy decision to let small farmers die, literally and metaphorically, by neglect so that the farming sector can be taken over by corporate cronies to set up factory farms and car manufacturing plants. Farmers are drowning in unpayable debt that keeps piling up as their land becomes agriculturally unsustainable. And then you’re walking the highways starving after being thrown out of your job without pay, the economy has packed it in, what of the harvest was collected is unsaleable and had to be thrown out to rot, and now a plague of ravening pinkish grasshoppers is eating every bit of vegetation in sight.

Right. Not only was much of this – in fact every bit of it except the COVID-19 outbreak – totally predictable, none of it just turned up overnight. All of this has been developing over years to decades, and the successive, post-1990, governments of India not just ignored it, they actively connived and encouraged most of the worst of it. They, and their paid media prostitutes, actively promoted the idea that the manufacturing industry was the only way to economic “progress”, and, to do this, the farm sector would have to be sacrificed. I remember asking multiple times on internet fora over the years whether people would be expected to eat cars and television sets, and being downvoted en masse every time.

But people cannot eat cars and television sets, and with the economy sliding downhill into the nether doldrums, there is no longer any market for cars and televisions; the vehicle industry has been moribund for well over a year. And the farm sector isn’t doing exactly well for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, so that, for the first time in thirty years, the level of average nutrition is actually dropping in India. And the Modi regime has systematically ignored all of this, including the gigantic locust plague which has been moving towards India for over two years now.

And by gigantic, I mean that this is the largest plague in 78 years. It’s also much more dangerous than any plague of comparable size 78 years ago. Why? For the simple reason that the population of the planet is much, much higher than 78 years ago, and vulnerable areas – east Africa and west and south Asia – are infinitely more stressed than they were 78 years ago. Not to speak of the fact that global warming causes more and more of the flood-drought cycle that promotes swarming, and that two of the worst affected countries, North and South Yemen (I do not consider them to be one country any longer, as a supporter of the now fait accompli South Yemeni independence), have been under invasion and a starvation blockade by Saudi Barbaria and the Imperialist States of Amerikastan since 2015.

Therefore, the chances of famine are extremely high, and, since the Modi regime has shown absolutely no signs of changing its policies, have been growing higher and higher. And now the locust swarm, which is spreading steadily eastward and northward towards the agricultural heart of India, is in the act of delivering the coup de grace.

I have noticed that the Modi regime’s pet media, after a couple of days of finally admitting the existence of the locusts, have suddenly made a point of repeatedly mentioning that the locusts “entered from Pakistan”. I assume that this is not accidental; nothing the Modi regime’s media does is innocent, accidental, or without the acquiescence of the regime. I can only speculate that if the regime fails to halt the locusts through the measures it is now allegedly taking – spraying pesticides from drones – it will move on to accusing Pakistan of deliberately sending the hordes of Schistocerca gregaria over the border to harm India. This would be on a par with the Trump regime in the Imperialist States of Amerikastan accusing China of creating COVID-19, a claim parroted by paid CIA agents on Indian social media.

Speaking of which, the Modi regime – in a desperate and transparent attempt to divert attention from its endless failures – is trying to provoke a border confrontation with China. Except for the fantasy world of Modi’s pet television channels, Republic and Times Now, this is going over like a lead balloon.

Starving people have more immediate concerns than that.

Anyway, if and when the Modi regime decides to blame Pakistan for the locusts, I’ll make it easy on them and give them proof. Here’s your Jihadi Locust, Jihadocerca pakistaneria.

You’re welcome.

Dispatches from Hindunazistan: Coronavirusation Day

Note: In this article I shall concentrate only on the situation in India and its response to COVID-19. I shall not talk about whether COVID-19 is something which justifies the global panic, a topic I have already discussed in two prior articles, here and here.

I should have known it would be this way, but I was still taken somewhat by surprise when the Modi regime not too subtly attempted to turn the COVID-19 issue into a Hindu versus Muslim affair. It happened like this:

There is a Muslim movement called the Tablighi Jamaat which was founded in India in 1925 and which is focussed on “purifying” the faith from within. Although fundamentalist, this group is and always has been entirely peaceful and one important reason the then Brutish rulers of India tolerated it was that the very concept of jihad has never, in any form, featured in its teachings.  I’ve read Tablighi Jamaat literature, by the way; the amount of rituals required by them even before doing such a thing as going to sleep is mind-boggling, and I’m not surprised that most Muslims avoid these people just like most adherents of any religion avoid hectoring True Believers telling them how they should live their lives.

Anyway, this Tablighi Jamaat has its headquarters in a mosque complex called the Nizamuddin Markaz in Delhi. From the 13^th to 15^th March – remember those dates – it held a congregation attended by 2000 delegates from all over India and abroad; there were people from this city as well as from such countries as Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Barbaria, Malaysia and Indonesia. Many of the delegates, who dispersed back to their home places or elsewhere in the country, subsequently developed symptoms of COVID-19 and several have died.

Suddenly, the Modi media are playing up the Tablighi Jamaat as a dangerous fundamentalist organisation, hinting that it deliberately sought to spread COVID-19 around the country, and the people who attended the function are being “tracked down” on television channels as though they were terrorists, not possible and certainly unwitting carriers of a disease. The word “manhunt” is in fact being used to talk about the Jamaat’s current head, Maulana Muhammad Saad, whose whereabouts are allegedly, at this writing, “unknown”. Modifellating Bhaktonazis (the term I use for Modi worshippers) are flooding Indian WhatsApp with videos (some of which date back to 2018, and are about a totally different Muslim group, the Bohras) as “proof” that the Jamaat are “spreading Coronavirus deliberately”. The 960 foreign delegates have been declared persona non grata, as though they’d bring the virus back in if they fell ill, recovered, and decided to visit India again. One Gangadhar J., a businessman from this city, has gone on Fakebook demanding that Modi implement an emergency. Because, obviously, we are not being oppressed quite enough already, you know.

All this is despite the fact that when the Tablighi Jamaat meeting was held, legally there was no restriction on gatherings; 13^th to 15^th March was seven to nine days before Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi’s allegedly voluntary “People’s Curfew” of 22^nd March, and nine to eleven days before his three week long national lockdown, which began on the 24^th.  Ergo, while the wisdom of holding a congregation in the middle of a pandemic can be questioned, legally there was nothing against it. And though the Nizamuddin Markaz literally shares a boundary wall with the local police station, it had ignored the gathering totally.

Some of the Modifellating Bhaktonazi claptrap is so ludicrous as to be amusing. There’s a famous Pakistani cricketer called Shahid Afridi, who’s set up a foundation for providing emergency medical equipment to South Asian countries (not just Pakistan, all South Asian countries). Two equally famous Indian cricketers, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh – no, they are not related – called on Indians to donate to the foundation. Modifellating Bhaktonazis on Twitter immediately declared these two gentlemen “anti national traitors”.  That is despite Yuvraj Singh being the prime reason why India won the cricket World Cup in 2011 while said Modifellating Bhaktonazis were sitting at home watching him on television.

Meanwhile, the brunt of the “anti-coronavirus” efforts continue to fall, quite literally – in the shape of police batons – on the backs of the poor. 

[Source]

At the time of writing (the evening of 2^nd April, less than halfway through Modi’s national lockdown), there have been, officially and including the dead and recovered, 2341 cases.

I believe that this is a gross underestimate. I believe that the actual number is at least ten to twenty times, and probably fifty to a hundred times, greater.

Here are my reasons, as expressed in a message I wrote on WhatsApp :

 1. COVID-19 is asymptomatic in at least 25% of cases - that means it produces no symptoms at all, not a sniff, not a cough, not a sneeze. But the people infected are still fully capable of passing on viruses. 

2. The great majority - up to 74% of the remaining 75% - show subclinical symptoms, that is, mild temperature and/or cough with or without sneezing (that in this season can be just mistaken as common cold, industrial pollution, pollen or dust allergy, or not even noticed). But these 74% like the other 25% are also fully capable of passing on the virus.

3. Therefore, fully 99% of the infections don't show up as symptoms that get reported to any medical professional*. That's anywhere in the world, not just here.  

4. Unlike SARS, for instance, even the remaining 1% of COVID-19 sufferers are infective long before they start displaying symptoms. This is basically why this virus spreads quickly. In this it's identical to most respiratory viruses; SARS was actually an exception.  

5. There aren't enough test kits to test everyone or even more than a small sample.  

6.  In India we have a peculiar set of circumstances that make it extremely unlikely that the majority of the remaining 1% will visit any doctor: 

(a) The widespread illiteracy and ignorance of the rural population and the urban poor. Most of them don't know what a Coronavirus is. They don't know what it does. All that they know is that suddenly they can't work and they're beaten by police if they step into the streets. Since they have to make a living somehow they'll do whatever they can and social distancing is the last thing on their minds. 
(b) Indians as a nation don't want to go to the doctor. It's literally the last resort. Even for toothache the first thing they do is buy a painkiller from a chemist’s shop and try to get through it. If they have any illness their first stop is the local homeopath or kaviraj (herbalist) or some quack or astrologer. The doctor is reserved for when all other treatments have failed. 
(c) I am ashamed to say this but a huge number of Indian doctors are openly contemptuous about the problems of the poor. Step into any North Indian hospital and watch how they talk to poor patients and compare it with how they behave with the middle class (the rich wouldn't go to those hospitals anyway). Their only interest is to shove off the problem, give a few pills and get rid of the patient. The last thing they would do is take a detailed history and do all the necessary, and expensive, tests, which the poor don’t want because they’re unaffordable in time and money anyway.  Not only do they don't have time for that, they know that if they do come up with a Coronavirus case they... 
(d) …run the real risk of being locked into quarantine, or as in Telengana thrown out of their rented houses, and this is a powerful incentive to not find any Coronavirus case. Especially true for private practitioners. 
(e) The vicious behaviour of the police, which makes it difficult to impossible for poor people even to go to the hospital if they're sick. Those photos and videos of police beating poor people that keep being shared on Indian WhatsApp, often as a joke? They are not funny. They are an acute danger to everyone, not just the poor, because people being forced out of public view aren't people who cease to exist or who are incapable of contracting or passing on the disease. 
(f) The Nizamuddin Markaz thing where certain television channels are treating the tracking down of attendees as though it was a manhunt and they're dangerous terrorists. For reasons we don't need to go into here, Muslims in hyperpopulated North India are overwhelmingly confined to ghettoes in squalid conditions, and have become habituated to treating any authority as a threat. They believe that they could be blamed en masse if any of the Tablighi Jamaat attendees admits to being among them so they'll hide the fact. 
(g) Migrant workers in general know that if they are isolated they'll lose livelihood and they'll do a lot to hide from authority to stop being put in isolation. Also any worker who is found infected with COVID-19 can say goodbye to employment for the rest of his or her life, and knows it, too. 
(h) Typically when poor people die they die at home and not in hospital, their deaths go unrecorded, and if they die of Coronavirus nobody will be any the wiser. 
(i) A villager who knows or suspects he has COVID-19 is at risk of being attacked  by other villagers, his family thrown out, his house burnt, himself lynched, as a "contaminant", so he's got an extremely good reason to keep silent about it. 

The whole system is in fact giving the poor an incentive to not go to the authorities if they fall sick. This is not a viable way of countering an epidemic.

*Just 1% of infected people developing severe symptoms may sound as not much of a problem, and, yes, normally it would not be a problem. It would definitely not be a problem in a country which has not systematically neglected its public health care sector in favour of obscenely expensive and corrupt private healthcare. But in India, which has, and which also has a gigantic population, 1% means more cases than the hospital system – such as it is – can bear. The Modi regime has attempted to convert some train carriages into makeshift hospitals, and Modifellating Bhaktonazis on WhatsApp are celebrating it as a triumph, as though a train carriage is an adequate substitute for a purpose built hospital. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

Literally minutes after I’d written the above message, news broke that doctors in Indore, in central India, had been attacked after they’d gone to a poor locality to track down people who might have come in contact with COVID-19 positive people. The locals, terrified (for reasons I mentioned above) at the idea of someone in the locality being found COVID-19 positive, assaulted the doctors and two of them were injured. Modi media, ignoring the reasons why people might be reluctant to be compelled to starve for weeks and be stigmatised for life, promptly went ballistic, and it’s almost certain that we’ll see a further militarisation of the so-called “anti-Coronavirus effort” shortly.

Talking of militarisation, I’m anticipating being conscripted into the “campaign” in the near future. Yesterday – 1^st April, and, no, it was not an April Fool’s joke – the government of my state, which has yet to see a single confirmed case but has imposed a curfew on top of Modi’s lockdown,  asked doctors, dentists, and traditional medicine practitioners (“AAYUSH”) to report to the district health authorities for service in the Great Big War On Corona. At the moment this is still “voluntary” but I doubt it will stay that way for long.

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Before I finish, let me make four additional observations unrelated to the rest of this article.

First: While everyone’s going on and on and on about COVID-19, which (as readers of my previous articles will be aware) I do not consider to be anywhere like the threat it’s presented as, the real holocaust is already upon us – has already been upon us for years now. It has nothing to do with viruses; it concerns drug resistant bacteria.

Right, while everyone’s going off their nut at COVID-19, drug resistance in bacteria is exploding and is already a terrible problem. Ask any doctor or dentist and you’ll hear the same thing: antibiotics we could rely on to be effective ten years ago are usually totally useless now. diseases like tuberculosis, once almost eliminated, are making a roaring comeback. In fifteen to twenty years the antibiotic era – which has doubled life expectancy after WWII – is likely to be over. What then?

I don’t know. And you don’t know, either, because this isn’t something the media sees fit to tell you.

Second:  If I see another idiot babble online about how COVID-19 should be tackled by developing “herd immunity” I’ll hit them over the head with a, regrettably virtual, hammer.

What is this “herd immunity”? As far as I can make out, it’s the idea that if enough people in a population become resistant to an infectious disease, there won’t be enough vulnerable people left for the infective agent to find new victims. Therefore, the proponents of this idea aver, people should attempt to contract the illness to become immune to it.

Now this might have made sense a couple of hundred years ago, when most populations were largely isolated and any travel was a slow affair stretching over days to weeks, or even months, allowing for enough time for infected people to develop the illness and die or recover in between. In today’s era of mass air transport, where even the opposite side of the planet is only hours away, however, it’s a bad joke. Either every member of a population is immune, or else those not immunised will remain at risk until and unless the infective agent is isolated and eliminated.

I’ll give you an example that I’ve seen myself. India began mass vaccination against poliomyelitis many decades ago; by the time I was a child, in the early 1970s, vaccination against polio was standard. I remember being vaccinated myself; it’s one of my earliest memories. However, there used to be a family that lived a few hundred metres from here. The father, on the premise that his parents and he had never contracted polio despite not being vaccinated, chose to not vaccinate his own son; the child, of course, developed polio and is on crutches for the rest of his life.

All this is common sense, and the only reason I can think of that proponents of “herd immunity” continue to push their bunkum is that they think of themselves as cattle. Their intellect certainly suggests it.

Third: People who imagine that the rights they are so eagerly giving up in order to “fight COVID-19” will ever be restored, or that the actions that governments and their corporate owners are taking to “fight the virus” will not be used as a precedent in future, are likely to have a rather interesting rude awakening.

Fourth: If western governments insist on trying to blame China for “spreading Coronavirus”, well, then, China can quite legitimately charge said western governments' overlord the Imperialist States of Amerikastan for spreading the fall armyworm caterpillar, a devastating pest of crops from maize to rice to fruit. This caterpillar, which is of North American origin, is eating its way across Africa and Asia, and is actually a near-perfect bioweapon, since it devastates crops literally overnight, appearing apparently out of nowhere.

And, seeing that it mysteriously turned up in Africa, all the way across the Atlantic - somehow skipping Amerikastan-allied Europe - and then as mysteriously in Asia, an actual bioweapon it might be, too.

I absolutely would not exclude that.

New Parasitic Wasp Discovered

Rueters, 1^st April 2019

By Kanmani Ponnu

With additional reporting by Peppa Chamatthu

Researchers at the Department of Parasitology, Hops Johnkins Medical Institute, Washington DC, today announced that they had found a major new parasite of human nervous systems.

The creature is the larva of a microscopic wasp, the smallest ever discovered, smaller than some single celled organisms. It has yet to be issued a formal biological name, but the Hops Johnkins Parasitology Department has shortlisted one for consideration.

“The animal is truly remarkable,” the head of the Department of Parasitology, Dr Hector Oaks, told Rueters over the telephone. “Not only is it so small, but its mode of infection is more like a virus than an animal.”

The parasite, Dr Oaks said, is, like other wasps and bees, a member of the order Hymenoptera of Class Insecta, Phylum Arthropoda, the group that includes butterflies and cockroaches, crabs and lobsters, spiders and millipedes. It is the larva of the adult, which itself is so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.

“The adult wasp,” Dr Oaks said, “has evolved drastically away from the original form but only in size; it can still handily be recognised for what it is under the microscope. It is, however, the larva that is parasitic. This larva, which is white, is sharply curved except for its tail end, so that it closely resembles a sickle in shape. It is so tiny that it can enter the body of the nerve cells, the neurons, and gestate inside them before moving to other cells.

The female, winged, wasp (above), compared to single celled animals, and the wingless male (below)

“This animal,” Dr Oaks continued, “has developed parasitic tactics hitherto unknown among other multicellular organisms. The wasp lays its eggs on the surface of a person’s skin. The larva hatches on the skin, and crawls down the duct of a sweat gland until it reaches the inner skin layer, the dermis. There it bores its way out of the sweat gland and crawls around until it finds a neuron, which, of course, is not difficult since the skin is richly supplied with nerve endings. It bores its way into the neuron with its sharp sickle end, and there, inside the cell, it settles down to feed and lay eggs.”

Dr Oaks went on to say that the wasp larva is the only multicellular organism known in which the juvenile form also lays eggs. “It is one of the most remarkable evolutionary adaptations ever seen,” he said. “The larva is born pregnant, and is in fact little more than a bag of eggs. Once it settles down in a neuron, it absorbs nutrition from the cell cytoplasm, and swells up until it bursts open, releasing the eggs. These eggs resemble tiny blue rods with a blob at the end, so that they look rather like a hammer. Each hatches within hours, releasing more larvae, known as Stage II larvae. These Stage II larvae are externally identical to the first, or Stage I, larva, but are of course even smaller. They burrow out of the neuron and move along the body of the nerve, absorbing nutrients as they travel, until, eventually, they reach the brain.

“Once they arrive at the brain, each larva begins to secrete chemicals called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters, of course, are naturally produced by the human brain, but the parasitic wasp produces mimics which override the genuine neurotransmitters and significantly affect the behaviour of the host. Parasitic wasps are well known for their ability to convert their hosts into “zombies” which obey the commands of the parasites, but this is the first instance where such an action has been seen in a human being.

“The effect in a human is to drive the afflicted person to seek out others, both affected and unaffected, and to congregate with them in large numbers. Meanwhile, some of the larvae, but not all, crawl out of the brain and back down the nerves until they reach the closest skin, usually that of the face. They then burrow out of the nerve endings and wander around the dermis until they find a sweat gland. Each larva that has survived up to this point immediately curls up and secretes a capsule around itself, which has five points, which under the microscope resembles a star and is dark red in colour. Inside that capsule the larva pupates and emerges as a new adult wasp, which crawls up the sweat gland duct until it reaches the surface of the skin. There it waits, secreting chemicals known as pheromones, which attract wasps of the opposite sex. After mating on the skin, the males, which have no wings or functional mouth parts, die; the females, which are now pregnant, fly off to find new hosts on whose skin to lay eggs and begin the cycle over again.

“Meanwhile, the larvae that have remained in the brain continue to produce neurotransmitters that modify the host’s behaviour in drastic ways. First, as already stated, the parasite compels the infected person to congregate with other people, both infected and otherwise; the sufferer will, in fact, be driven to organise such meetings, by the internet if necessary. This means that the pregnant female wasp has more potential hosts to infect, while the male has the opportunity to mate with females from other hosts and avoid the risks of inbreeding. Secondly, it drastically changes, for reasons so far unknown, not just the behaviour but the political beliefs of the affected person.

“And in what way does it do this? You only have to look at the shapes of the various stages of the larval parasite. While the adult female looks like a very, very tiny wasp, with wings like tendrils, and the male similar but with no wings at all, the larva looks, first, like a white sickle. Then it produces eggs that resemble tiny blue hammers. And in its final stage, the pupa, it looks like a dark red star.

“Is that not enough? The larva in its various forms looks like a white sickle, a blue hammer, and a red star. Clearly there is only one way it can affect the political beliefs of those it infects!

“Yes,” Dr Oaks concluded. “We have confirmed that this parasitic wasp turns its victims into Russian bots, trolls, agents, and zombies. And we therefore suggest that it can only have one name appropriate to it – Moscowaspus vladimirputinii - after the evil Russian dictator, who must in some way be responsible. And we will recommend to the Pentagon that the United States must start World War Three at once!"

For more on this story,  click here.

Armageddon: On The Brink

By this time tomorrow, we may be at war.

Back in the ancient days of 2013, a year before Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had taken power, I had written a story called Armageddon: The India-Pakistan War Of 2019. In this wholly fictional piece, I had made the following “predictions”:

It is early 2019. Modi’s government is in trouble, mired in a corruption scandal, faced by a uniting opposition, and facing near certain defeat in the coming elections. There is a bomb blast. Modi seizes on the blast as a casus belli to start a war with Pakistan.

Pakistan, faced with annihilation by Indian armoured thrusts through the desert, uses short range tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out Indian divisions. Modi, faced with either withdrawing in defeat or escalating, chooses to escalate with a nuclear strike on the Pakistani city of Multan. Pakistan retaliates by nuking Delhi, both sides start indiscriminately using nuclear weapons on each other, and by the time it’s over, both nations have effectively ceased to exist.

To this day, almost six years later, it remains far and away the most-read thing (if not the most popular) that I have ever written.

That was in August 2013. The years rolled on, as they will. Modi duly took power in the 2014 election (hardly an earthshaking prediction on my part; the incredible incompetence of the preceding Congress government had made it a foregone conclusion). More years passed; and the Modi regime, astonishing to relate, did not cover itself with glory. Not at all!

So here we are in early 2019. The Modi regime is mired in a corruption scandal (several, actually, but the main one is over the purchase of French Rafale fighters for the Indian Air Force, “renegotiated” by Modi with the manufacture of subsystems handed over to his capitalist crony and fellow Gujarati Anilbhai Dhirubhai Ambani, who, as far as I know, has never manufactured an origami paper plane, let alone components for a modern jet fighter). After a string of losses by the BJP in recent state elections, the opposition parties are uniting, and Modi’s prospects in the next election are, to put it mildly, dim.

(If you are wondering at all the names ending with bhai – Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi, Anilbhai Dhirubhai Ambani, Amitbhai Anilchandrabhai Shah, and others – it’s because these vermin are all ethnic Gujaratis, a species hailing from the state of Gujarat in India’s extreme west.. The Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi regime is of, by, and for the benefit of a cabal of Gujaratis, and nobody else.)

And then there was a bomb blast.

This is how it happened.

On the afternoon of 14^th February, a huge convoy of 2500 Central Reserve Police Force (it’s an armed police force used as a paramilitary outfit) personnel in 78 lorries, buses, and other vehicles were travelling through Pulwama in Kashmir. According to the official account of what next happened, a suicide car bomb driven by a member of the rebel group Jaish e Mohammadi (JeM) struck one of the buses in the convoy, destroying it utterly and killing 40 CRPF personnel aboard. According to whom you believe, the death toll was higher than that with up to nine more CRPF men in other damaged vehicles dying in the blast or subsequently.

Jaish e Mohammadi is a group with a Pakistani leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, who was in an Indian prison for many years before being released by a previous BJP government after an Indian plane was hijacked to Afghanistan. Since JeM uploaded a video taking responsibility for the incident, India immediately blamed Pakistan itself for the attack. The driver of the car bomb, by the way, was not a Pakistani, but a local Kashmiri teenager named Adil Ahmad Dar; he had been, according to his family, “radicalised” after being beaten up by Indian police or military at a checkpoint. That he was a local Kashmiri, anyway, meant nothing – you don’t just come across military grade explosives and the wherewithal to build a car bomb merely because you decided to become an armed rebel. Not without assistance.

There are many questions about the whole affair, but the most glaring one to my mind is why this gigantic convoy ever meandered its way through the daylight hours in the first instance. Two days before the attack, the Kashmir police had issued a warning that there might be a car bomb attack; something that had only once before happened in Kashmir but which is a routine method used by jihadis of the same ideological bent as JeM in Syria and Iraq. Suicide attacks on convoys, in fact, were so common in the two countries that they have both evolved highly effective countermeasures to tackle them; I find it impossible to understand why this was not done.

Why, for one thing, was this gigantic convoy not broken up into small, fast convoys and made to move at night? The CRPF claimed that the information before them was not “definite” so they could not take adequate precautions. I don’t know if they expected the JeM to issue engraved announcements complete with RSVP of the time and place of the attack, but common sense says that if you have been informed that the enemy will use a particular tactic, you take defensive measures against that tactic, whether you expect to be personally targeted or not. It’s like keeping fire extinguishers around even if you don’t anticipate your house catching fire.

It would be, of course, invidious of me to speculate that the attack was allowed to go ahead in order to further a political agenda, so I won’t. I am absolutely not, therefore, saying that there were no precautions against the attack because someone wanted it to happen. I repeat, I am not saying that. No!

In any case, the Modi regime acted exactly like a drowning man being thrown a rope. It seized on the incident to instantly put all the blame on Pakistan, and simultaneously “cracked down” on nonviolent Indian Kashmiri separatist leaders, withdrawing their security details (which they had not asked for in the first place). The Hindunazi WhatsAppsphere (Hindunazis now use WhatsApp for spreading their poison) filled with demands to attack/boycott/drive out Kashmiris (because, somehow, it was all the fault simultaneously of both Pakistan and Kashmiris; don’t ask me how, I’m not a Hindunazi). Kashmiri students in other parts of India were harassed, evicted from their lodgings, and so on, until the Supreme Court of India had to order their protection, and the CRPF itself had to condemn the attacks on Kashmiris in its name.

Modi, meanwhile, after taking time to go on another foreign trip on taxpayer money (this time to South Korea; this was the 94^th country he had visited in five years on the public exchequer), ordered Pakistan to be “isolated”. The pinnacle of this “isolation” was when the murderous dictator of Saudi Barbaria, Mohammad bin Salman, made a high profile visit to Pakistan before coming to India, where Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi was there to hug him at the airport. Not the most effective of “isolations”, it wasn’t.

And with every day that passed, the window of opportunity that Modi had to make use of this casus belli was fading. Also, further clashes between rebels and Indian forces had killed several more Indian troops; far from looking like someone who would “put Pakistan in its place”, the Gujarati Globetrotter was beginning to look vulnerable to jibes about being weak. Something had to be done.

So it was that on the morning of the 26^th February, Indian media suddenly announced that Indian Air Force Mirage 2000 planes had flown into Pakistan and “bombed a JeM training camp” killing “300 terrorists”. I heard this fairy tale in the early afternoon, and, not being an imbecile, rejected it immediately.

Some of you know I worked (as a dentist) for the Indian Air Force for five years. During this time I had a ringside view of the antagonisms, frustrations, and outright mendacity of officialdom there. I have, for instance, seen an Amerikastani USAF delegation given free access, complete with cameras, to a section of the Eastern Air Command headquarters off limits even to Indian Air Force officers without special clearance. I have met sergeants and junior warrant officers so desperate to quit and move to better paying jobs in the civilian sector that they were merely going through the motions.

It even extended to history. Back during the last full scale declared war between India and Pakistan, in 1971, according to Indian sources, India had destroyed 94 Pakistani planes while losing 45 of its own. According to Pakistan – and its figures were “confirmed” by the Amerikastani air force general Charles Yeager, who claimed to have visited and tabulated wreckage on the battlefields – the figure was about 30 Pakistani planes to 120 Indian. So when I was at the Air Force’s Eastern Air Command headquarters, I decided to settle the issue. Surely, I thought, one could find some kind of official confirmation for the 45:94 figure, at least?

Well, guess what? I only found total silence. The actual figures seemed to be some kind of state secret. And after that to this day I have learnt to never believe anything told me by any Indian military official. Not that the Pakistanis are any better, of course.

But, when one lies, one should at least have some idea where to draw the line. The “300 terrorists killed” number – which soon inflated to “350” – was absurd. Does JeM even have that many members? Did they all line up obligingly to be bombed? Who counted the corpses?

That the whole affair had nothing to do with terrorism or Kashmir was obvious right away. Modi at once moved to take credit for the bombing; it was at once obvious to everyone that it was going to be his election campaign plank. So obvious was it that 21 opposition parties got together on 27^th February and condemned his transparent attempt to make it into a personal vote catching exercise.

In case anyone imagines that it is too cynical to think that Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi would hesitate to start a war just to win an election: no, it is not too cynical. Psychopaths are not very concerned about other people, never have been, and never will be.

All the chest thumping was accompanied by a video of “Indian planes over Islamabad” which turned out to be a years-old video from YouTube of, you guessed it, Pakistani planes over Islamabad. And the Pakistanis then went on to say that while Indian planes had passed over the frontier, they had turned tail and fled back into India after Pakistani air force opposition, and dropped bombs into forest, destroying some trees and wounding one civilian. They also showed the craters caused by the four bombs India claimed to have dropped – and the trees those bombs had destroyed.

Given the disparity between “350 terrorists killed” and “one civilian injured”, it was impossible to reconcile both tales. One or the other side was lying through its teeth. Both sides were known to be habitual liars, but in this case, it was more difficult to believe one.

Can you guess which one?

This led to this ridiculous statement by a former classmate of mine, a Modi-supporting chicken hawk who lives safely in Amerikastan, and my response:

Oh yes, on 27^th February Pakistani planes crossed over to this side of the border and dropped bombs on Indian territory. The Pakistanis said they deliberately bombed empty ground to make the point that they could have done damage but chose not to do so. This may or may not be the truth; as I said the Pakistanis are not any greater friends of the truth than Indians are. According to Indian claims, one Pakistani F 16 was shot down by Indian planes over Pakistani territory – no evidence, of course, was provided for this claim.

As for the Pakistani claims? That’s where it got interesting. According to Pakistan, their aircraft had shot down “two Indian planes”, one of which fell over Pakistani territory and the other over Indian territory, and “captured two pilots”, one of whom was “hospitalised”. The Indian Air Force totally denied losing any planes at all...except, oh yes, almost as an afterthought, an Indian helicopter had “crashed” in Kashmir, killing two pilots. Everyone else was accounted for.

This lasted until the afternoon, when Pakistan released a video of a blindfolded man in an Indian flying suit, who identified himself as Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. Modi’s paid trolls denounced the video as “fake”, apparently unfamiliar with the fact that YouTube videos are marked with Amerikastani time, not Indian. The Indian Air Force continued to maintain that all its planes and pilots were “accounted for”, even while Varthaman’s own friends and acquaintances confirmed that it was indeed he and that he was a MiG 21 pilot. It was evening before the external affairs ministry of the Indian government finally brought itself to admit that one MiG 21 had been lost in action and the pilot was “missing” – it still did not identify Varthaman by name, let alone admit that the Pakistanis had taken him prisoner.

Later on in the evening, by some unspoken consensus, it was apparently agreed that Varthaman had indeed been shot down and taken prisoner. By then the Pakistanis had changed their story to say only one pilot had been captured. This, of course, was inevitable if they had only shot down one plane on their side of the border, because the plane was a MiG 21 Bison – which is a single seater. And by then another video had begun circulating that showed Varthaman just after capture, being kicked and punched by civilians on the bank of a stream, before he was rescued by Pakistani army troops.

This video had a delicious irony that most people would miss.

According to the claims of those who circulated the video, “Paki (sic) civilians” had been beating Varthaman. But Varthaman came down, not in Pakistan, but Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, which India claims is Indian territory. Therefore those “Pakistani civilians” weren’t Pakistani at all, but Indians. According to whom? According to India. And it was the Pakistani Army which rescued that Indian pilot from those Indian civilians.

Nice, isn’t it?

The last time an Indian pilot was taken prisoner was in 1999, during the Kargil battles, when K Nachiketa was captured after his MiG 27 either crashed after engine failure or after being shot down (depending on whom you believe) over Pakistani lines. Nachiketa was treated well and repatriated even before the end of hostilities, and is still flying planes (albeit transports) for the Indian Air Force today. If Modi chooses not to escalate further, I am as certain as can be that Varthaman would be back within days. But Modi can’t afford to not escalate further; not if he wants to win the election. As I said, it’s all about him.

So the same external affairs ministry of the Gujarati globetrotter’s government has demanded the immediate return of Varthaman, as though it were in a position to demand anything, and as though Pakistan can afford to look weak by giving in. So Varthaman is probably in for a lengthy stay in a Pakistani prison camp, and he can thank Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi for that.

As I write this, this is where things stand:

Normal human beings in both India and Pakistan have taken to the internet demanding peace and a drawdown in hostilities. They are making their voices heard, and they cannot be fully ignored. Nor has Modi’s paid army of trolls and lapdog media managed to paint them as “traitors.” Not so far, anyway.

Modi has painted himself into a corner. He can’t back down without looking weak. He can’t escalate further without risking war. He can’t stay where he is, halfway. According to the latest news, he has “given the military a free hand”. All Indian airspace north of Delhi is closed to civilian air traffic. Pakistan has also closed its airspace.

In my story written back in 2013, Modi planned for a short sharp war lasting a very few days, meaning to declare a quick “victory” before the Pakistanis could fight back meaningfully. Unfortunately, the Pakistanis failed to react as they had been scripted to.

Real life never follows scripts. This time is the same. The Pakistanis were supposed to digest Modi’s “air strike” and let him strut around like a victor. They weren’t supposed to hit back. Whatever will poor Modi do?

Given the impossibility of Modi's backing down and losing the jingoistic vote and the elections, I can see three options.

First, raise the stakes and start an aggressive confrontation with further air strikes and possibly an attempted blockade of Pakistani ports. This would be a very bad idea, because it would entail inevitable losses. A destroyer or two at the bottom of the Arabian Sea would be very, very bad publicity for Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi.

Second, go in for my scenario: a ground campaign with an attack across the border into Pakistan. The Pakistanis have been preparing for this, and they will have their own plans, which might not conveniently suit Indian ones. And Pakistani doctrine does call for using tactical nuclear weapons against Indian attacks.

Third, declare an emergency, silence all dissenters, lock up the opposition parties, and call off the elections. The situation is so horrible right now that this would probably be the least bad option before us.

And, meanwhile, racist Amerikastani and Brutish armchair warriors on such cesspits as unz.com are cheering on nuclear war between India and Pakistan, because they want "400 million snake charmers, code coolies, dots and Muzzies" to be killed. You'd think Indians and Pakistanis would by now realise who their real enemies are.

At the top of this article is today's cartoon, for what it's worth. Hopefully it's not the last I'll draw.

If it gets all mushroom cloudy, well, it’s been nice knowing you.

Unconscionable Appeasement: Vladimir Putin and the Shooting Down of the Russian Il 20 Off Latakia

By now everyone is aware, or should be, of the shooting down of a Russian Ilyushin 20 maritime reconnaissance aircraft off the coast of Syria, and the presumed deaths of its 15 man crew.

There are four “explanations” for what happened.

First, and immediately advanced by the Imperialist States of Amerikastan: Syrian air defence artillery shot down the plane in error while trying to shoot down “Israeli” (zionazi) missiles that were at that moment attacking a “missile factory” in the coastal city of Latakia, right next to the Russian Hmeimim air base. When it became apparent that the plane was 35 kilometres offshore, this “explanation” quietly disappeared down the memory hole.

Second, a Syrian S200 surface to air missile, aimed at the zionazi F16 jets which fired the aforementioned missiles, accidentally shot down the Russian plane. This swiftly became the Amerikastani account. We will return to this in a moment.

Third, just before the Il20 disappeared from the radar screens, its crew reported missiles being fired from a French frigate in the vicinity. The French criminal regime of the gerontophiliac Emmanuel Macron had already threatened to attack Syria, and was plainly itching for an opportunity to do so. The kind of missiles fired was not mentioned; whether they were surface to air missiles aimed at the Russian plane, or surface to surface missiles to join in the zionazi attack, or a mix of both, is unknown. Therefore these missiles may or may not have shot down the Russian plane.

Fourth, the zionazis, four of whose F16 jets were carrying out the attack, deliberately shot down the Russian plane or engineered its shooting down.

How would the zionazis engineer the Il20’s shooting down, you ask? To know the answer we need to understand what the hell the zionazis were doing there in the first place.

Ever since the terrorist invasion of Syria has started to be rolled back, with Iranian, Hezbollah, and Russian help, the zionazis have been regularly attacking targets in Syria, either from Lebanese airspace or from the sea. The Putin regime in Russia, which enjoys extraordinarily close relations with the zionazi pseudostate, has allowed this to happen with impunity, to the extent that the zionazis have recently become emboldened to bomb targets right adjacent to the Damascus Trade Fair (packed with civilians) and now Latakia, next to the Russian Hmeimim air base. And not once has the Putin regime done a thing about it.

In theory, the zionazis were supposed to warn the Russians in advance of their (totally illegal, of course) bombing attacks, so that Russian personnel could get out of the way. In this instance, according to Russian sources themselves, they stuck to that agreement and warned the Russians of the attack...a whole, humongous, sixty seconds in advance.

Sixty seconds. That’s one minute. Even if the crew of the Il20 had been informed instantly, it was far too short a time for the lumbering four engine plane to get out of the way.

The zionazi thinking, of course, was clear: what were the Russians going to do, make trouble for Putin’s incestuous relationship with Binyamin Nazinyahu? No? Then they could do what they wanted. The Russians weren’t going to shoot at them.

But what if the accursed Syrians did? What then?

In that case, well, the huge Russian reconnaissance plane, much larger than the zionazi F16s, offered a perfect shield. They would simply hide in its radar shadow, and if the Syrians fired, well, they would hit the Russians, not the zios.

If this was the plan, of course, it arouses another important question. The S 200 is an old system, dating back to 1967; it is a semi active radar guided system, which homes in on its target first by a radar beam from its launcher, and then by its own radar, carried on the missile itself. The thing is that even by the 1950s, all radars had something called Identify Friend Or Foe (IFF) which was designed to ensure that the missile did not strike a friendly target, because it would register as friendly on the launcher’s (and missile’s) radar. Since the Russians had reportedly integrated their air defence system with the Syrians, Russian IFF would work on Syrian radars, and vice versa. So it is rather difficult for me, personally, to believe that the Russian plane could been accidentally struck by a Syrian missile. But then earlier iterations of the S200 were allegedly programmed to head for the largest available target, and with the zionazi F16s sheltering in the radar shadow of the Il20, that would be the “largest target”.  I’m not saying that I believe this happened for a moment (in fact I do not), but let’s admit this possibility.

In fact, that is now the official story. The zionazi F16s hid in the radar shadow of the Il20, and the S200 hit the larger plane instead. A perfectly innocent accident.

A perfectly innocent accident? Are you joking?!?

A few hours after the (hastily revised) Amerikastani claim that the Syrians had themselves shot down the Russian plane in error (something that CNN blared in its headlines right away), the Russians themselves said the same thing. I am not the only person somewhat less than satisfied with the hasty Russian acceptance of this tale.

But let’s say this was correct; let’s say the zionazis hid behind the Russian plane, which was shot down by accident. Where does this get us?

Regardless of whether Russia is lying about Syria accidentally shooting down the Il20 in order to avoid having to grow the intestinal fortitude to retaliate against the zionazi pseudostate - and I'm convinced it is - the zionazis cannot claim innocence. They are in the position of bank robbers who took a hostage to use as a human shield, who cannot claim innocence if the hostage is subsequently killed by police fire directed at them. Now imagine what the reaction would be to a police commander in that situation who absolves the bank robbers of all blame, including for the bank robbery itself.

Who did that? Why, Vladimir Putin. Even before expressing condolences to the families of the fifteen missing, presumably dead, crewmen, he was already on the phone to his dear friend Nazinyahu, to smooth ruffled feathers and ensure that things would go on as usual.

In an article I wrote in June 2017, I said this:

 Our hero is a certain man, we'll call him Mr P, who lives in a large house with a front garden and a gate. Some way down the lane there lives a Mr A, who is a known Mafia criminal with a history of violent crime. Mr A has paid off the police chief, so there is no point complaining to the law about Mr A's crimes. He owns the law.
Now, Mr A covets Mr P's nice house and garden. He doesn't need either, but he covets them. Also, the fact that Mr P doesn't obey his every whim, like everyone else on the street, rankles with Mr A. And Mr P is not unaware of any of this.
One of the reasons that Mr A can get away with his crimes is that he has a gun. It is a big gun, a machine gun of 14.7mm calibre, and just about everyone else on the street is either unarmed or has only muzzle loaders. The only exception is Mr P, who happens to own a machine gun himself. Not as big as that owned by Mr A, 12.7mm rather than 14.7, but not far behind.
Now one day Mr A comes out of his house carrying his machine gun, comes up the lane, and uses it to shoot the lock off Mr P's gate. Mr P, watching from his window, does nothing. Mr A, seeing that his actions have brought no punishment, walks into the garden, trampling over Mr P's flower beds, and shoots Mr P's pet rabbits. Mr P still watches, doing nothing.
Then Mr A begins hammering on Mr P's front door, to which Mr P's response is to....pull down the shutters on his windows and shout that Mr A's activities are unacceptable and an affront to society.
What would you think of Mr P, here? Would you commend his restraint in not starting a gunfight that would shoot up the street? When Mr A breaks into his living room, isn't Mr P going to have to start that gunfight if he isn't to be robbed of hearth and home?
And what if, as soon as Mr A had emerged on to the lane, Mr P had come out of his house with his machine gun, leaned casually on his gate, and pointed the gun in A's general direction? Would or would not have A got the message? 

Now, here is what I have to say, fifteen months later:

How long will the Russian people and the Russian military continue to tolerate Putin's absurd soft approach towards Amerikastani and ZioNATO aggression? How long until the military decides enough is enough, that it will no longer tolerate its soldiers and airmen being sacrificed at the altar of Putin still pretending that he's going to someday improve relations with the West? Each time Russia shows "restraint" by absorbing a slap in the face, its enemies get encouraged and slap it again. What happens when the Ukranazi regime inevitably invades Donbass? Will Putin show the same "restraint" then? How long will the Russian people and the Russian military allow this?

If you think I'm saying that there will be a coup, or a "soft coup" (foreign policy taken out of Putin's hands) in Russia if things go on like this, yes, that's what I am saying. Whether that is desirable or not is a question for the Russian people to decide.

To anyone who says that Putin's "restraint" is better than nuclear war, here is an unpleasant fact:

At the rate Putin is going he's going to be left with no option but a nuclear war.

There's an old Indian fable about a snake which terrorised people in a village. It lived in a cave in a hill near the village and everyone was terrified to come anywhere near the hill because it would bite and kill them.

Then one day a great sage who happened to be passing saw the snake, and, instead of being frightened, he told it about kindness and compassion to everyone. Overcome with remorse for its past actions, the snake promised that it would never bite anyone again. Soon afterwards, some people passing at a distance from the hill saw the snake outside its cave and instead of it attacking them it just bent its head in submission and friendship. Seeing this, the men took courage, grabbed sticks and stones, and beat the snake, leaving it for dead.

The old sage returned that way shortly after, and, finding the poor snake near death, nursed it back to health. When it was recovered, he asked it what had happened.

"You told me not to bite anyone," the snake responded. "So I approached the men in friendship, and this is what they did to me."

"Oh stupid snake," the sage replied, "I told you not to bite people. I never told you not to hiss and frighten them away!"

The usual argument of Putin apologists, and the internet is rife with them, is that Putin is “showing restraint” because otherwise he would provoke World War Three.

Rubbish. All he is doing is making Russia look absurdly weak, and emboldening Russia’s enemies, thus making WWIII more likely, not less.

Let me be very clear on what I think.

1.Russia's "restraint" isn't any such thing. It is either an admission of fear and weakness or an absurd and indefensible grovelling before the zionazi pseudostate and NATO.

2.Whatever Putinites keep repeating about the virtues of his "restraint" strengthening Russia's position, the reality is that only when he applied military force, in Chechnya in 1999, Crimea in 2014, and in Syria in 2015-18, was Russia's position "strengthened". His "restraint" as in Ukraine in 2014- today, and in Syria right now, immensely weakened Russia's strategic position.

3.Do not for a moment imagine that potential Russian allies are not watching the situation in Syria and concluding that Russian "restraint" means using its allies as disposable pawns. Russia has, for example, given away Idlib to Erdogan of Turkey,

4.Putin's "restraint" is, right now, causing colossal harm to the morale of the Russian military; his eagerness to absolve the zionazis for killing his own military's airmen is craven, disgusting, and indefensible.

5.Putin is a capitalist owned by capitalists. That he is less of a capitalist flunky than Yeltsin, by whom he was handpicked and whom he immediately gave immunity to prosecution for his endless crimes, does not make him any kind of hero. The average Russian is still struggling under him. Struggling less than under Yeltsin, but nowhere near the standard of living he/she would have had under a more equitable, even mildly socialist, system.

6. Putin's "restraint" is emboldening Russia's enemies, and allowing them to think that they can get away with anything. And they are right. At what point will Putin stop showing "restraint"? When Poroshenko, with NATO help, destroys the Donbass republics? When NATO bombs Russian forces in Kaliningrad to "protect the Baltic republics from invasion"? (Don't for a millisecond imagine they won't if they think they can get away with it.) When NATO invades Russia itself? When does "avoiding WWIII" and "showing statesmanship" turn into abject surrender?

7. Vladimir Putin has done all he could for Russia. It is time he leaves power. Whether that leaving is by a military coup or a mass uprising, it has to be done, and a nationalist government take over, if Russia is to be saved.

And, as far as Russia’s current stance in Syria is concerned, here is what I think:

An "ally" does not stand aside and watch while an enemy bombs your territory with impunity. An "ally" does not go over your head to negotiate with another enemy to occupy your territory and continue to arm, train and protect hordes of Jihadi terrorists infesting your country and holding your citizens hostage. An "ally" does not rush to reassure your enemy before even expressing condolences for its own servicemen murdered by that same enemy. Is it time for Assad to ask Russia to leave Syria? Russia has conclusively proved that unlike the Soviet Union, which stood by its allies in weather foul or fair, it only plays its own game and treats allies as pawns. For Assad, Iran is an infinitely more reliable partner.

How much Putin is off the right path is clearly seen in only one statement: after his defence minister, the far more principled Sergei Shoigu, blamed the zionazi pseudostate for the shooting down opf the Russian plane, and said it would not “remain unanswered”, the zionazi “prime minister”, Binyamin Nazinyahu, threatened to bomb Russian air defences if they dared strike back against future zionazi attacks. The response from Putin? Dead silence.

With that, here’s my cartoon for the occasion:

Right, I’m done.