Poisons Slow And Fast: Gambits Against Politically Inconvenient People

Where there's poison, there's politics...

With all this China war talk, I wanted to collect my research showing that Taiwan by itself can wreck China if the PRC was stupid enough to attack. Taiwan is turning into missile island and of course the Chinese know this when they make threats. But I need to postpone that to write about another trend I've noticed in the last decade: heart attack weapons, poisons, and other gambits used against politically inconvenient people.

What made me focus on heart attack weapons, poisons, and gambits? When I was researching news stories to cite, regarding Taiwanese missile production, I found out that Ou Yang Li-hsing (age 57) had died of a suspicious heart attack. He was Taiwan's deputy head of the military-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, maker of their missiles. (https://www.asiafinancial.com/taiwan-missile-production-expert-found-dead-in-hotel) This happened August 6, 2022. The week preceding his death, a flurry of news stories mentioned Taiwan developing hypersonic missiles. And that followed a press release almost a year earlier, stating that Taiwan would up its missile production.

If you can recall 2021, starting in April, US intelligence claimed that Russia was planning a major attack on Ukraine. By October, the news was saturated with stories regarding an imminent attack on Ukraine... here's one from May 2021 (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/world/europe/ukraine-russia-canal-crimea.html).Taiwan reacted to the Russian military build up preceding the attack on Ukraine by increasing its defense spending—especially on missile production. An article from October 2021 announced the spending increase. (https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/10/07/taiwan-is-spending-an-extra-9b-on-its-defense-heres-what-the-money-will-buy/) (Oct 7 2021) (https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/08/taiwan-wants-hypersonic-missiles/) (Aug 2, 2022). And up until August 4, 2022, it was in the news (https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/taiwan-has-big-plans-for-its-missiles-if-china-were-to-invade/). Taiwan doubled missile production in the last year and a half (https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/taiwan-has-big-plans-for-its-missiles-if-china-were-to-invade/) from 207 to 497 a year. (https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/03/04/taiwan-missile-china-tensions/). Ou Yang Li-hsing must have been doing a good job, because less than a year later, he died suspiciously. Again, there is no proof that he was assassinated, but the timing seems to suggest it was advantageous for China to kill him. Deputies are usually the ones doing the real work, so I bet he was the real genius behind the Taiwanese missile program.

Obviously China needed to do something. Taiwanese missiles are probably as good as their semiconductors, so they'll blow the crap out of the world's biggest mega-city, the Pearl River Delta Bay Area zone of Guangdong/Hong Kong/Macau. Any attack on Taiwan will be answered with missiles destroying the Pearl River Bay Area's infrastructure. An urban zone of 70+ million people can't afford to have the power or water go out. A major reason Russia attacked Ukraine was so Moscow would have more reaction time in case of missile attack. One must infer then that Taiwanese missiles do serve as a deterrent. China's economy would collapse if the Pearl River Delta Bay Area was seriously attacked. Not to mention that Taiwan's anti-ship missiles would probably kill so many Chinese soldiers, the attrition cost alone must give the PRC doubts about the viability of an invasion (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/03/08/taiwan-aims-to-sink-half-of-a-chinese-invasion-fleet-it-could-take-years-to-buy-enough-missiles/?sh=a99e6811aa00). Missiles are great for asymmetric warfare: it's how the Chinese expect to stop American air craft carriers. Taiwanese missiles deter invasion. Weakening that supply line is therefore a key offensive action. Doing it with plausible deniability is essential. Ambiguity exploits the bureaucratic need for certainty, and most governments require certainty before applying violence against a foreign power (See yesterday's article, Belarus As Proxy War Weapon...

Belarus As Proxy War Weapon Against NATO

). Ambiguity slows defensive responses. By the time a decision is reached, it looks like an 'overreaction' because the provocation was ambiguous.

Since Russia and China are sharing all sorts of military trade-craft, it's not a big leap to suspect that China is using the same tools as Russia to eliminate problematic people. As Stalin said, “no man, no problem.” The Russians use curare or some more sophisticated compound to induce heart attacks in a way that looks natural. Poisoning has been used as a policy tool in Russia since the Cold War. (https://www.liquisearch.com/poison_laboratory_of_the_soviet_secret_services/human_experimentation) They've been using poison to assassinate for years: Georgi Markov being the infamous one we studied in school (ricin pellet in a Penguin style weaponized umbrella). (https://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/01/07/terror.poison.bulgarian/) Polonium-210 was used to kill Russian defector/spy Alexander Litvinenko (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/world/europe/25poison.html). More recently, in 2016 Russian sports guy, Nikita Kamaev, died of a heart attack two months after resigning from Rusada, Russia's sports anti-doping agency: (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35575774)

“Russia was suspended from international athletics last November. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) accused Russian athletics of state-backed doping, corruption and extortion.”

After getting kicked out of the Olympics for widespread doping, the guy in charge of the Russian anti-doping agency quits, and 2 months later, dies. That's not fishy at all!

It's not just poison. An article I can't find (but hopefully you are starting to trust my memory, given the citations I use) mentioned that an inconvenient Russian was killed with a tampered-with air conditioning unit that leaked gas and killed him while he slept. This must have been in the 2005-2010 era. Boris Berezovsky was terrified of getting assassinated by Russian intelligence and there were many articles in the years leading up to his death where he said he's not suicidal and that if he is found dead of suicide it was a murder. This is not speculation, he wrote a letter to Putin begging to return to Russia (https://web.archive.org/web/20130407045435/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/russia/9966671/Boris-Berezovsky-sought-Putins-permission-to-return-to-Moscow.html). Assassination of the Russian oligarchs proved that billionaires are not gods in Russia, as they are in the West. The Wikipedia article on Berezovsky seems to suggest he was broke and that's why he killed himself. This is crap. He had $1 billion dollars in his bank account when he died, (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3011021/Exiled-oligarch-Boris-Berezovsky-murdered-hand-Putin-evidence-coup-plot-claims-former-head-security.html) but that wasn't the news narrative. The important thing here is the ambiguity. Ambiguity saturates critical reasoning skills. The more ambiguity one must process, the more resources one must spend to evaluate ambiguities.

Sergei Shoigu is another prominent example of this sort of gambit, but he appears to have survived the attack. (https://ukranews.com/en/news/849493-shoigu-has-heart-attack-20-defense-ministry-generals-arrested-in-russia-nevzlin)(https://www.wionews.com/world/russian-defence-minister-suffers-massive-heart-attack-from-unnatural-causes-claims-businessman-471273). Shoigu has become unpopular among Russian hard-liners and is blamed for every setback in Ukraine (https://charter97.org/en/news/2023/3/22/541015/). But Shoigu also seems to be Putin's man and we know from experience that Putin prefers to use an opponent's reaction against them (Sambo/Judo principles). Maybe Shoigu is just there to take flak and curare darts for Putin. I've read that some military types in Russia resent that this engineer is Russia's Minister Of Defense. Maybe he's Russia's Albert Speer? Only when we get evidence of war production totals will we know for sure. All we do know is that the hawks expressed their displeasure with poison. Where there's poison, there's politics.

The type of poisoning is the message. Litvinenko died in such agony, I remember it 17 years later. Both Boris Berezovsky and John McAfee have assassination in common. (https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/john-mcafee-once-said-if-he-was-ever-found-dead-in-suicide-he-didnt-kill-himself.html) McAfee even said, "I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm." Audacious, yet ambiguous murder is the message. Mark Ames, before he was chased out of Russia, wrote in one of the last editions of The Exile(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eXile), of the many ways he'd heard governments kill inconvenient people like him. Maybe he was the one who mentioned the air conditioner kill... I can't remember, but I do remember he mentioned how susceptible mental patients are used by intelligence agencies to fixate on 'problematic' individuals. This is why you have nuts from Seattle cross the country by one way bus ticket to kill someone they have no personal connection with, but who are 'somehow' key people in some dirty espionage drama. This is that MK Ultra stuff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra): we know it's there, but there's an interest in keeping it quiet. You should keep your eyes open for this kind of stuff. Journalists are mostly stupid or compromised, so they're not going to underline it for you. And really, you should try to remember as much as possible, because they're scrubbing the internet (see how big publishers are out to destroy Archive.org)(https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/20/internet_archive_lawsuit_latest/). If things really get bad, we're going to have to go back to microfilm and microfiche. I was bogged down writing this article looking for citations to news stories that I remember reading, but I couldn't find anymore. A large portion of my research method involves remembering things I read already and finding the citation to place into a narrative. This is why I can find what appear to be hidden news stories: they are hidden, but I remembered they existed and didn't stop looking until I found proof. Ambiguity is a weapon too and is used as a slow poison to destroy mental confidence: you can't find citation of something you vividly remember and are thus gaslit by the modern internet. This makes you easier to control, because you will trust the new news story, over your flawed human memory that no electronic page will corroborate. War occurs at slow speed in places we don't expect, so that the attacker doesn't trigger our defensive responses. Whether by tree frog poison or by suspicious suicide or by Yuri Bezmenov's subversive 'Active Measures' (

), modern warfare is fought in such a manner so as to not trigger an immune response. We as individuals need to be aware that we are military targets so that we may take defensive measures.