Russians went through an incredibly painful transformation since 1991, and most paid a big price for democracy, rights, and capitalism: the stability was gone, the social, however poor it was before, net was gone, hyperinflation wiped out people's life savings, jobs, etc. It was very very bad for most people.

But what's most tragic is that after having paid this INCREDIBLE price for something like a liberal democracy, Putin is taking all of those gains away. People lost their life savings for freedom of speech, and now that's taken away as well, so they lost them for NOTHING.

Yes, the oligarchs were bad, but Putin's Iron Fist is no better, and most Russians are just getting screwed out of their social and economic rights once again.

I found the interview fairly interesting, but not as well fact-checked as I would have liked.

When the famous expert in Science declares Polonium to have a short half life, apparently everyone agrees, including the editorial staff at Salon.

Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days, or a bit over 4 months. Yes, you would want to get a fresh batch if you were counting on the radiological effect to do the damage, it's true. However, you could get twice as much as you thought you needed, and have the better part of a year to wait for an opportunity to arise. "Very short" in the context of the article is misleading.

By contrast, Iodine-125 is a commonly used lab reagent, a strong gamma emitter, and you typically do want to do your experiments with it quickly. Still, I've used 125-I that had arrived more than a month before I was ready to use it.

The physical half-life of 125-I is 62 days, so it's twice as fast to decay as is 210-Po; a little-known thing about 125-I is that separate from the physical half-life is the biological half-life, and the biological half-life is substantially longer than the physical half-life, at 138 days. (nope, not a typo!) j

Is there a biological half-life as distinct from a physical half-life of 210-Po? I don't know. If there is, it might further impact the claim of the gentleman in the piece about precision timing.

How was the dosage administered?

How many lethal inhalants really work well without the subject knowing about them? Hell's bells, even if the subject *knows* about them, the inhalation method is dodgy. This is one of the reason it took so very much longer for anesthesia to be introduced than poisoning.

The issues around the gut are interesting, however. I'm not sure one needs to invoke nanotechnology, though; many metal salts are easily complexed to protein, and protein will, following digestion, be passed quickly into the bloodstream.

A misspent youtb fails yet again to pay for itself, but contact me via email if your shady underworld organization has an interest in tapping into my now long disused store of toxicological trivia.

Putin can't even squash opposition inside his own party.

Le Castor, are you saying that United Russia is evil? Are you accusing all of the members of United Russia as being evil? And all the people who vote for them.

You and your oligarch pals do a fantastic job of making it look like there are political parties in Russia and Putin doesn't belong to one and nobody voted for him at all.

You really do a good job of spinning this sutation to make it look like there's literally a one man rule in Russia.

But he's a lame duck now and after the party congress this weekend, it looks like he might not even have much say over who replaces him.

Le Castor, which bloc would you vote with: Libertarian, Communist, Ultra Nationalist or United Russia?

People don't want any more Libertarianism. The freewheeling car bombing tax shunning robber baron decadence of the nineties will never come back.

Iron Fist? Oh that's hilarious!

Putin can't even squash opposition inside his own party.

Le Castor, are you saying that United Russia is evil? Are you accusing all of the members of United Russia as being evil? And all the people who vote for them.

Um, calm down, I didn't call anyone evil, so if you could refrain from hysterically putting words in my mouth, I would appreciate it. :) People voted for idiots like Bush (and reelected him too) in this country, what makes you think that people in RUssia aren't just as capable of voting for and reelecting someone who is "no good" for them, their country, or the world?

You and your oligarch pals do a fantastic job of making it look like there are political parties in Russia and Putin doesn't belong to one and nobody voted for him at all.

Well, my friend, if there is one thing i'm not, it's an oligarch. There are no political parties left in Russia. Remember, Khodarkovsky was sponsoring the Yabloko party, and now he's doing hard labor, and puting was reelected with 80% of the vote.

You really do a good job of spinning this sutation to make it look like there's literally a one man rule in Russia.

Well, there is no parliamentary opposition to Putin. He appoints all the regional governors. He proposes laws that tighten what can be done during elections and allow state assasination, and they are approved. Is this all not true? It is.

But he's a lame duck now and after the party congress this weekend, it looks like he might not even have much say over who replaces him.

It seems, contrary to what you're saying, that Putin is one step away from eliminating term limits on the presidency, rather than a lame duck.

Le Castor, which bloc would you vote with: Libertarian, Communist, Ultra Nationalist or United Russia?

I'm no longer a Russian citizen (stripped of it by the KGB back in the soviet days), and I don't live there, so I don't and can't vote there. Who do you vote for?

People don't want any more Libertarianism. The freewheeling car bombing tax shunning robber baron decadence of the nineties will never come back.

Ok, i think I see what's happening here. Are you one of those idealistic leftists, like JP Sartre, for example, who were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union because you wanted, hope against hope and odds against odds, it to work out as a communist utopia, and now you're willing to excuse all sorts of outright atrocities (as sartre did with stalin and mao) to have a shred of hope that your dream may one day come true?

Let me tell you one thing, friend: i'm not going to argue with you about whether life in the Soviet Union was the paradise you imagine it was because, as far as i know, you have never lived in the Soviet Union as a soviet citizen, and I have. So i'm just going to ignore your pathetic defenses of it.

People do want libertarianism, at least in the civil rights, and Putin certainly doesn't support anything like that. Why is it that you think that the price to pay for reducing economic libertarianism in russia is reducing people's civil rights? That's what Putin wants you to believe, but you know damn well that one is not necessarily tied to the other. Get real.