Here's Russia in microcosm: One minute it announces it intends to make the Sochi Winter Olympics if awarded to Russia for 2014, the environmentally greenest on record. The next, we find out that Russia has lifted the protection on polar bears, one of the species most threatened by global warming, and will allow them to be hunted to exinction. In other words, in classic neo-Soviet fashion Russians, believing they are so much clever than ignorant foreigners, conclude they can tell any ridiculous lie and the foreigners will be fooled and believe them. Exactly this kind of thinking brought the USSR to ruin.

Kazakhstan is studying the prospects for a Caspian pipeline that would allow it to deliver energy to Europe while bypassing Russia.

Russia has talked about setting up a colony on Mars, and now it has another grand scheme: to build a pipeline and tunnel across the Bering Strait to connect with America. Assuming Russia actually intends to give America a land link to Russia, what is it's purpose? To win back Alaska as Vladimir Zhirinovsky has always wished? To place America in a position to defend Russia if China seizes Siberia which would by then include this pipeline?

Russia's Interior Ministry claims to have exposed 148 "terrorist" websites in 2007 so far. RIA Novosti reports, but doesn't list a single one of them. Does anybody have the list? According to the Ministry, one-third of the sites were located on U.S. servers. Perhaps it considers this blog to be one of them? We know for sure that Hamas and Hezbollah don't count, since the Kremlin is funding them. The most so-called terrorist sites, of course, were found in Russia -- nearly half the list.