cold cold war still raging while on the brink of wwiii

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It's too stupid to be borne, but we just sit in front of one screen or another and take it.

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And look at how much better Russia's coverage is....

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love, 99
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cold cold war will be heating up again

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Medvedev: Russia must tap Arctic resources
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer — Wed Mar 17, 6:26 pm ET

MOSCOW — Russia must defend its claims to mineral riches of the Arctic in increasing competition with other powers, President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday.

Medvedev said global climate change will likely fuel arguments between nations seeking access to energy and other resources.

"Other polar nations already have taken active steps to expand their scientific research as well as economic and even military presence in the Arctic," he told a session of the presidential Security Council.

Medvedev added that attempts have been made to limit Russia's access to Arctic resources, but he didn't name a specific nation.

"Regrettably, we have seen attempts to limit Russia's access to the exploration and development of the Arctic mineral resources," he said. "That's absolutely inadmissible from the legal viewpoint and unfair given our nation's geographical location and history."

Russia claims a large part of the Arctic seabed as its own, arguing that it is an extension of its continental shelf. In 2007, scientists staked a symbolic claim by dropping a canister containing the Russian flag onto the seabed from a small submarine.

The United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway have also been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic, which is believed to contain as much as a quarter of the Earth's undiscovered oil and gas.

The dispute has intensified amid growing evidence that global warming is shrinking polar ice, opening up new shipping lanes and new resource development opportunities.

Catherine Loubier, a spokeswoman for Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon, said Wednesday: "Canada's sovereignty over lands, islands and waters of the Canadian Arctic is long-standing, well-established and based on historical title."

"This government is dedicated to fulfilling the North's true potential as a healthy, prosperous and secure region within a strong and sovereign Canada. We take our responsibility for the future of the region seriously," she said in Canada.

Her country is hosting foreign ministers of the five Arctic states — Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the U.S. — in Chelsea, Quebec, on March 29.

Loubier noted that Canada has committed to building a High Arctic research station that will continue to map "our northern resources and waters."

Canada also has announced a new fleet of Arctic patrol ships, a deep water port, and is expanding and re-equipping the Canadian Rangers.

In 2008, Medvedev signed an Arctic strategy paper saying that the polar region must become Russia's "top strategic resource base" by the year 2020.

The document called for strengthening border guard forces in the region and updating their equipment, while creating a new group of military forces to "ensure military security under various military-political circumstances."

It said that by 2011 Russia must complete geological studies to prove its claim to Arctic resources and win international recognition of its Arctic borders. Moscow first submitted its claim in 2001 to the United Nations, but was rejected for lack of evidence.

But he's not forgetting about emissions reductions....
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and they never called off the cold cold war either... obviously

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Russian subs move toward Canadian East Coast
Thu | Aug 13 | 10:15 AM

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canadian aircraft that hunted Soviet submarines during the Cold War are now monitoring two Russian attack subs that have migrated north after being spotted last week off the US coast, an official said Wednesday.

It was not clear, however, when the submarines moved north.

"The submarines have not done anything threatening," Dan Dugas, spokesman for Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay, told AFP.

"They're in international waters" in the North Atlantic, he said. "They're allowed to be there. But our job is to ensure that our coastal perimeter and waters are respected."

"And so, an Aurora (aircraft) is on watch as we enforce our sovereignty and ensure that we know what is happening along our coastlines."

The Pentagon last week said one of the two Russian nuclear-powered Akula class vessels had been parked in international waters some 200 miles (320 kilometers) off the US coast. The exact location of the other was unclear.

US officials said their presence was not cause for concern and they posed no threat to the United States.

The episode, however, echoed the cat-and-mouse maneuvers of the Soviet and US militaries during the Cold War, when Moscow and Washington routinely sent submarines towards one another's coasts to gather intelligence and track fleet movements.

"As Minister MacKay and other observers have noted, it is part of a pattern of Russia flexing its muscles in a way that has not been seen in many years," Dugas commented.

"No one can deny that the Russian military is upping its profile," he said.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay recently criticized Moscow for preparing to drop paratroopers at the North Pole for military exercises, and last February after one of its bombers skirted Canada's northern frontier on the eve of a US presidential visit to Ottawa.

The CP-140 Aurora was deployed in the 1980s to hunt submarines in the northwest Atlantic sector as part of Canada's NATO obligations.

Since the end of the Cold War, these long range aircraft have been used mostly for coastal surveillance and sovereignty patrols.

Obummer's diplomacy at work....

[But their missing ship has been found, at least.]

cold cold war meets boiling cold war

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* is bent on wwiii

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...but were completed only as old memories and new fears surfaced in recent days.

Those fears were codified to some degree in what Polish and American officials characterized as unusual aspects of the final deal: that at least temporarily American soldiers would staff air defense sites in Poland oriented toward Russia, and that the United States would be obliged to defend Poland in case of an attack with greater speed than required under NATO, of which Poland is a member.

Polish officials said the agreement would strengthen the mutual commitment of the United States to defend Poland, and vice versa. “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later — it is no good when assistance comes to dead people,” the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Polish television. “Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of — knock on wood — any possible conflict.”

A case could be made that all of the saber rattling in Iran has been meant by those rattling the sabers, all except for Israel, who's just paying for it, to draw out Russia. And getting nowhere with this or their bullshit about missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, * and Fudd and friends encouraged the not tightly wrapped Saakashvili to piss off Russia enough to make their naked aggression missile bases and occupation of the Persian Gulf seem warranted.

I've been meaning to gripe about the stuffy old poops out there calling my Cold Cold War the "Arctic Cold War" and so I guess this is as good a time as any. Don't kid yourself it's just the Canadians and the Russians either. While I'd be happy enough to have our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it creeps me out that it would only be to be deployed to bases ringing Russia and China so that arms dealers and oil barons could continue to suck us dry.

These assholes are fucking stupid cave men, and think only in terms of greatest possible profit that they might rule the world throughout posterity, while there will be no posterity if they don't cut this shit out. The only possible sense in their actions is to kill off a big enough percentage of the population to obviate the need for both laws and new technology to reduce our carbon emmissions. And I'm sorry to always be yelling at you, but, you fuckers, you're not stopping them, and I'm beginning to think that, since liberal altruism is so fucking limp and bottomlessly lame in addressing the problems of inhumanity and global catastrophe, the filthy pig plutocrats should speed this shit up!

God DAMN it!

it's gonna be a fight no matter what

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this case gives me a headache

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Do they just call up and say, "We want to make enemies out of so and so, so draft a resolution, would you?" I'm crabby about this. There were too many creeps with too many double and triple ways to be seriously skunkish, and it's not even easy to tell purported killer from the definitely killed. But I don't want this woman having any say in our foreign policy. I don't want anyone in our government to have any say in our foreign policy. I want us to just drop all of it and start from scratch.

conflict

Quite a few have joined us since I brought this up last....

[Which reminds me, a little update on the progress of the Cold Cold War....]

russia takes the high road

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what really is their gripe?

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They don't hassle us about observing our elections and we'd flip if they did... though it would certainly seem to be in order. So what is this hassling of Putin who may or may not be rigging Russian elections? If it's dandy for them to ignore it here, what makes Putin worse in their eyes? Hmmmm? And is that rational or good? I rather think not.

And a despot who improves the lives of his people put up against a despot who never stops doing everything in his power to improve the bank accounts of a select few? No contest. Why are we contesting it then?

they keep badmouthing putin

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Granted his autocratic leanings are fairly pronounced, but I don't think people remember -- or knew to begin with -- quite the level of chaos that had taken over Russia in the 1990s. It was NOT mere confusion. It was the bad kind of anarchy, and corruption and crime rings ran completely unchecked. It was utterly unsafe and insecure to be a Russian, and I don't even know if scrupulous democrats could have had any success against the forces of entropy turning Russia into living hell for the common man. Putin's weird blend of democracy and autocracy may have been the best possible scenario for Russia.

We're so busy trying to call this shit government of ours "democracy" that we tend to use Putin as a whipping boy toward that end. I mean, I'm sure you've noticed that we are not practicing what we preach, and I think that has made us the more eager to be shrill about bossy doers who accomplish great things.

Plus, don't forget that I'm hoping that some kind of benefit can come from Putin, or next Medvedev, or Medvedev/Putin, turning the attention of our warmongers away from the slaughter in the streets of the Middle East to a new kind of cold war where people don't die from their incessant greed for the trillions they can pump out of our treasury.

That is, of course, failing an ability to slap every one of the fuckers in jail so we can have a gloriously peaceful planet while we all work our sorry butts off to save our planet from the mass extinctions our profligacy has made nearly certain....

just note the belt color and meditate

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okay, i'm pau... only so much a girl can take... updated again and again

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I started this post with a link to Iraq bad news, by way of explaining why I was pau and going to take a bath, but it got even worse, and so now it's all in the post immediately below this one.
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5:15pm -- Aw, fer crapsakes! I just had the bath from hell. I've got my intermittent loopy thing going on me lately and I'm in the tub, feeling my old butt firmly on the bottom of the tub, but it seems exactly like I'm bobbing on the surface instead. I GOT SEASICK IN THE FLIPPING BATHTUB!!!!!!!! Oh. My. God. I come reeling and staggering out of there with my face on fire, my stomach hopping and listing to port, all at the same time. DIAL 911!

Then I get back here to tell you about it and I have an email from "horace" asking me what the heck "pau" means and if I'm so fat maybe I shouldn't risk the tub... sheesh... ain't blogging grand? And... now he tells me!

Anyway, "horace", I'm not fat. I'm just a lot heavier than I usually am. It's actually kind of cute in places. What I am is a complete wreck! I've been at sea 24/7 for about two months, that bath just made it exponentially worse, and if the doctor doesn't help me figure out what the heck it is, I may have to be strapped down somewhere.

"Pau" means kaput, pft, finis, out, dead, done, over, history... in Hawaiian.

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6:15pm -- Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! "Musharraf's credibility!" OMG! It hurts to laugh. My knee is slapped off with this stuff. Notice how Rashid Rauf has been upgraded to AL QAEDA all of a sudden? These bastards have NO morals. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Next thing you know he'll be Rashid bin Laden....

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7:15pm -- Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

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10:45pm -- Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! One of the benefits of hangin' with codgers is a readily-available blood pressure cuff! My chronically-low blood pressure has reached the lower end of HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE. That tears it! I'm taking over the world. This shit has to stop!

silly boys

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My dad is freakin' out! "That Putin! He puts a gun to your head and says, 'Vote for me!'" I say, well, at any rate it's a lot better than pretending to be democratic, a lot better than letting people think they're voting when they aren't at all, which is what we do. My dad had to agree that being upfront about it is less frustrating. I also say that Putin has pulled Russia out of abject chaos and has done much to improve the lot of your basic Russian over his tenure, which is exactly opposite from what our president has done. Dad agrees with that too. I didn't get into the part about how Putin has positioned Russia to deter American aggression toward Iran, and how he has really been a force for world peace wherever feasible, and whenever he's not busy scaring the snot out of all the old Soviet haters with his wild assertions about things like, say, Russia owns the North Pole....

clever man

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winner

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I'm in favor of him because he has made life better in Russia, because the chaos has been made to form into something workable, because he both takes stands for Russia's strength and seeks peaceful resolutions to the threats posed by the war criminals running our country. When he warns of pro-Western opponents being jackals, he is in a very real sense trying to save his people from losing again to this relentless kleptocracy. And, as you know, I'm hoping that shifting to another cold war, the Cold Cold War, will stop the carnage in progress. Knowing as I do how badly we're screwing with Venezuela's political scene, I have no reason to doubt we are doing the same in Russia. I read a looooong piece on Kasparov recently and only his chess mastership seems remarkable to me. I didn't see any evidence of statesmanship, leadership... just obduracy and ego... someone entirely too easily played by, say, people like Karl Rove.

saudis fed up?

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I'm looking for the link that makes this particularly interesting....

Ah, yes, I had it listed under Perfidiousness Most Foul. Of course. How could I forget?

In the spring, [of 2002] Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.

Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he could do.

Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."

No Arab leader had ever spoken to Bush like that before, Leverett says. But Saudi Arabia was a key ally in the war on terror, vital to the continued U.S. oil supply, so Bush and Rice and Powell excused themselves into another room for a quick huddle.

When he came back, Bush gave Abdullah his word that he would deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

"Okay," Abdullah said. "The president of the United States has given me his word."

So the meeting continued, ending with a famous series of photographs of Bush and Abdullah riding around the ranch in Bush's pickup.

In a meeting at the White House a few days later, Leverett saw Powell shaking his head over Abdullah's threat. He called it "the near-death experience."

Bush rolled his eyes. "We sure don't want to go through anything like that again."

Then the king of Jordan came to Washington to see Bush. There had to be a road map for peace in Palestine, the king said. Despite the previous experience with Abdullah in Crawford, Bush seemed taken by surprise, Leverett remembers, but he listened and said that the idea of a road map seemed pretty reasonable.

So suddenly they were working on a road map. For moderate Arab states, the hope of a two-state solution would offer some political cover before Washington embarked on any invasion of Iraq. In a meeting with the king of Jordan, Leverett made a personal promise that it would be out by the end of 2002.

But nothing happened. In Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, opposition came from men like John Hannah, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. In Rice's office, there was Elliott Abrams. Again they said that negotiation was just a reward for bad behavior. First the Palestinians had to reject terrorism and practice democracy.

Finally, it was a bitter-cold day just after Thanksgiving and Leverett was on a family trip to the Washington Zoo, standing in front of the giraffe enclosure. The White House patched through a call from the foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, who said that Rice had just told him the road map was off. "Do you have any idea how this has pulled the rug out from under us, from under me?" Muasher said. "I'm the one that has to go into Arab League meetings and get beat up and say, 'No, there's going to be a plan out by the end of the year.' How can we ever trust you again?"

On Monday, Leverett went straight to Rice's office for an explanation. She told him that Ariel Sharon had called early elections in Israel and asked Bush to shelve any Palestinian plan. This time Leverett couldn't hide his exasperation. "You told the whole world you were going to put this out before Christmas," he said. "Because one Israeli politician told you it's going to make things politically difficult for him, you don't put it out? Do you realize how hard that makes things for all our Arab partners?"

Well, now it's certainly been more than one, no?

Yes.

So, you can see the Saudi poobahs have been really irked with us for quite a while. As you may have noticed, nothing has been done for the Palestinians in all this time, and the now officially King Abdullah's half-brother, Sultan -- father of the infamous "Bandar Bush" -- is talking arms deals with Peacemaker Putin. Maybe they want to go with someone who will keep his word?

peacekeeper putin

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uh-oh

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Boys!

we are so screwing with putin

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