From Grade School

There are only a few things I remember from my primary education. But one of them was in history class when we were learning about WWI and WWII. Now, I'm not certain if this is correct, maybe my teacher was a nimwit. But my teacher said that one of the big factors in WWI was all of the alliances. Germany, Italy and I can't remember who else versus's France, such and such ...

So this news of the second meeting of Russia, India and China on how to best redistribute the world's "power," makes me very, very nervous.

And I haven't said this here before, but I think Vladimir Putin is the scariest person on the planet. Unlike Chavez, Ahadinejad and Kim Jong Il, Putin is a behind the scenes bad guy. He has used his political power to take control of the media inside his country (all the television stations are run by his supporters) and 13 reporters have been murdered since he's taken office. 44 reporters have been murdered in Russia since 1992. Add to that the death of the Englishman from Pulonium 210, essentially nuclear radation, which is being based on Putin's door as well. All the while he's a member of the UN Security Council with veto authority, a sometime ally to the United States, and very good friends with France and Germany.

Add to that the Pulonium 210 guy and I just think Putin is a thug. His term is up in 2008 but I swear I saw something somewhere that he was trying to alter the law so he could stay in office longer.

Russia is also trying to corner the market in weapons sales, especially to rogue- and semi-rogue states. Russia is the largest arms supplier to China and Iran; it signed a $3 billion arms deal with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela over U.S. objections, and is courting Middle Eastern buyers.

This is the person that's allowing Iran and North Korea to garner weapons in the first place.

And as for a "successor" in 2008, those that know are claiming Putin already has him picked out; Dmitri Medvedev. I don't know much about him except that he is very close to Putin and that Putin likes him a lot.

I got to thinking about this today ... we're concentrating on who has the nuclear weapons now instead of who's giving the weapons to these people in the first place. And maybe that's how these things are done to avoid going to war. I don't pretend to be smart enough to know.

All I do know, is that if your people believe you capable of murder, and not just any kind of murder, a horribly painful death in which radiation destroys your organs from in the inside out ... that's not a good thing. Nor does it bode well for the rest of us. And while Putin's speech in Munich was scathing to the US ... the general consensus believes he did not garner any support for his cause by being so visceral and offensive.

At a superficial level, his remarks might sound like the standard plaints from Western liberals about American "unilateralism," which is how they were portrayed in some European news accounts. But coming from such an illiberal leader, these comments had a different mien — sinister and absurd at once.

These are scary times we live in. I'll post the remaining points of the article ... read the whole thing. I've highlighted the parts I find the most interesting. Also, here is the complete text of Putin's speech.

Putin, for instance, complained that a unipolar world order dominated by the U.S. was undemocratic. His concern might be touching if he hadn`t spent the last few years dismantling the vestiges of Russia`s own democracy. He dismissed questions about his increasingly despotic practices with doubletalk, claiming (falsely) that nongovernmental organizations haven`t complained about harassment and (accurately) that more journalists have been killed in Iraq than in Russia. That hardly reassures those who suspect that Putin`s security forces were behind the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and other investigative reporters.

Putin`s condemnation of the U.S.` "illegitimate" use of force was no more convincing,
given the scorched-earth campaign he has carried out in Chechnya. While insisting that the U.S. needs U.N. sanction for its military actions — which, he failed to note, was granted in Afghanistan and Iraq — he argued that Russia needed no such approval in Chechnya because it was acting in "self-defense." (Try telling that to a Chechen.)

Or consider Putin`s claim that the U.S. was starting a new "arms race" by deploying missile defenses to Eastern Europe. This from the largest exporter of arms to the developing world, with clients that include such charmers as Syria and Venezuela. Putin actually had the nerve to claim that Russia`s sale of $700 million worth of antiaircraft missiles to Iran, which will surely be used to defend Tehran`s nuclear program, was a public service: "We don`t want Iran to feel cornered. We want them to know they`ve got friends."

Putin did not win many friends in Munich with such remarks. He alienated the audience even more when he turned from criticizing the U.S. to deriding the innocuous Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which seeks to promote human rights and free elections, as a "vulgar instrument." In fact, Putin did the United States a favor by scaring the Europeans and showing why a transatlantic alliance remains necessary.

So why did Putin choose to bang his shoe, at least figuratively, on the podium? Many analysts hypothesized that his remarks were intended for domestic consumption. Some thought that he might even be signaling that he does not intend to give up power when his term expires next year. There is no doubt that most Russians eat up such nationalist rhetoric, if only because it distracts them from their own decline.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has gone from ruling 293 million people (not counting Eastern Europe) to 143 million, fewer than Bangladesh. Given Russia`s low birth rate and life expectancy (on average, men die at 60), its population is projected to fall to just 109 million by 2050, making it about the same size as Vietnam.