Is it MAGA or is it MEGA? When President Donald Trump negotiated with President Vladimir Putin on Monday, May 19, was he aiming to lower the cost of the Ukraine war to the domestic US economy, or to enrich it by transferring the war cost to the Europeans, particularly Germany, so that most of their... Read More

On Monday President Donald Trump telephoned President Vladimir Putin and they talked for two hours before Trump put lunch in his mouth and Putin his dinner. On the White House schedule, there was no advance notice of the call and no record afterwards. The White House log is blank for Trump’s entire morning while the... Read More

In Soviet days Russians were famous for not smiling, at least not in public. In private, smiling was strictly between consenting adults. Now it is a marketing ploy of Sberbank — the state savings bank run by Yeltsin-era leftover, German Gref – to invite its customers to smile whenever they make payments. This combines several... Read More

In the outcome, it’s the old story come true again. That’s the one in which Tarquin, the ancient Roman king, wanted the Cumaean Sybil to sell him the nine books of prophecies known as the Sybilline Oracles. When the king dismissed the Sybil’s price for the nine, she burned three and asked the same price... Read More

On Monday, May 12, the United States pushed the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the aircraft safety watchdog, to vote behind closed doors to adopt a secret resolution convicting Russia of shooting-down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014. Unlike the Dutch show trial which in November 2022 convicted two Russians... Read More

In his 48-minute speech in Riyadh, President Donald Trump was applauded many times for rewriting the past of US wars in the Middle East, and also the future of US wars in the region, and elsewhere. From the Arab point of view, the outcome of these wars has been the destruction of Arab national ideology... Read More

When politicians fight wars to truce or ceasefire, there’s a mistake they often make. That is to give up escalation dominance, escalation control, to the adversary so that he gains confidence that when he is ready, he will resume fighting in a much stronger position than he was at the truce. In short, ceasefire doesn’t... Read More

By Lieutenant General P.R. Shankar & Brigadier Arun Sahgal, introduced by John Helmer @bears_with On April 22, an Islamic terrorist group, backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), attacked Indian civilians in Pahalgam, Kashmir, killing 26 and wounding 20. “Although the civilian government in Islamabad has denied involvement,” reports Chatham House, the semi-official British think tank,... Read More

After the Victory Day celebration later this week, President Vladimir Putin has agreed to hold a summit meeting with President Donald Trump. “The Americans have repeatedly asked for a summit and the Kremlin has finally decided,” according to a reliable Moscow source, “that there is no need to spurn the extended hand.” The source believes... Read More

President Donald Trump has pulled a fast one against the US Constitution, if not quite and not yet a coup d’état. “We have an idea of coups being external military assaults on the government,” a US constitutional law professor has reported. “But self-coups take place within the government, from within the executive branch in particular.”... Read More

This is not the comedy of the two Odessa conmen who travel across the Soviet Union trying to find a cache of jewellery hidden in twelve chairs, written in 1928. In the end, one murders the other, and then when he discovers the treasure has already been found and spent, he goes mad. This is... Read More

There is a good reason that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and it has nothing to do with heredity, dendrology, or gravity. The reason is that trees understand the further away the apple is dropped, the easier it is to steal. This is understood by the oligarchs who compose influential factions around... Read More

In Shelley’s most famous poem, the relics are described of Ozymandias, the ancient ruler with his “sneer of cold command” and his ill-fated power projection: Wess Mitchell, whose grand strategy for Trump was announced this week in Foreign Affairs, the platform of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, places Trump among the rulers... Read More

In this new podcast the word that podcasters are afraid to say aloud, for fear of sounding “lunatic leftists” – Donald Trump’s phrase – is imperialism. Listen to the presentation with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern here and for the compelling evidence, read on. At the end of Trump’s Wednesday, five hours after the podcast,... Read More

In the State Department’s readout of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s telephone call to NATO Secretary-General, Mark Rutte, Rubio said: “while our nation has been committed to helping end the war, if a clear path to peace does not emerge soon, the United States will step back from efforts to broker peace.” That was last... Read More

It’s Easter for Christians, and President Donald Trump’s message is a religious one. He aims to be one of the angels of deliverance whom the gospels report to have showed themselves at the tomb of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. Rolling the stone from the entrance to the tomb, and in place of his corpse,... Read More

At 10 on Monday morning this week, the official White House log shows that President Donald Trump was preparing himself to greet the President of Salvador who was arriving at the White House door in an hour’s time. But in a tweet Trump composed beforehand, he announced: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s... Read More

Kirill Dmtiriev (lead image) is the Stanford and Harvard educated official appointed by President Vladimir Putin to persuade American businessmen to invest in the profits to be made from dismantling US economic sanctions against Russia. Today at the Kremlin (April 11), he tried again in fresh talks with Putin and Stephen Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s... Read More

According to the official White House schedule, President Donald Trump doesn’t start his day until lunchtime when he sits down with his political heir, Vice President J.D. Vance, at 12:30. He has more lunches with Vance than he receives briefings from his secret services on the threats of his enemies. Trump knows to keep his... Read More

Until recently it was impossible to grow bananas in Russia except in the greenhouse of Count Pyotr Sheremetev at Kuskovo. That eighteenth-century establishment was so costly to operate, the fruit was a rarity meant for the tsar’s table, and not too tasty either. More than two hundred years of Russian banana history have elapsed since... Read More

In Hollywood as in Bollywood, filmmakers and the executive directors representing the production financiers know that the money shot is the climactic moment in the shooting script which is put there to excite the audience, and to persuade the investors there’s money to be made. In porno films, the money shot is the moment of... Read More

“Don’t you ever let me hear this again, or I’ll lose my temper.” That was Lucky Luciano’s (lead image, left) ultimatum to Vito Genovese (right) in 1946 when Luciano was in Havana, Cuba, organizing his business comeback in the US, as Genovese tried persuading him to delegate the operations to himself. “Right now, you work... Read More

President Vladimir Putin has solved the problem of how to conduct telephone calls with Donald Trump’s personality cult. Following Trump’s tweeted claim in the early morning of Tuesday that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to” the telephone call which took place over two hours of the early Moscow evening, ended without... Read More

NATO infantry operations veteran Major (retd) Mark Takacs (lead image) has published an animated map analysis of the battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces around Sudzha, in the Kursk region, between March 5 and 14. Nothing comparable has been reported by the Russian military bloggers; their US copyists; or the Ukrainian and British propaganda agencies.... Read More