Playing pirates on the high seas was once a bankrupt king’s scheme, then an empire schoolboy’s game — first for the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, and now the MAGA Americans.
From the Hollywood films he watched when he was in short pants, Donald Trump did not learn that the naval war the US waged from 1801 to 1805 against Yusuf Qaramanli, the Bey of Tripoli, and against his navy, the so-called Barbary pirates, ended in defeat for the US Navy — with the extra humiliation of US Navy ships captured and hostages taken.
Little Trump pretended that when he sang the Marines’ Hymn, he would be the “first to fight for right and freedom… From the Halls of Montezuma/To the shores of Tripoli… In the snow of far-off Northern lands/And in sunny tropic scenes.” Now that he’s in long pants, Trump is singing the song with slightly different geography – from the Halls of Panama to the shores of Gaza, and in the snow of far-off Canada and Greenland.
The sing-song idea is to prepare the Greenland shore for MAGA forays against the Russians moving eastward along their northern, Arctic shore; and with the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes to attack the Russians moving westward on the Baltic Sea to the Danish Straits. In MAGA strategy, this combination should stop the Russian oil and gas fleets from moving in either direction.
Unless the Russians fight back — and Trump retreats to sign a treaty of peace and amity. Just like Thomas Jefferson did with the Bey in 1805.
For their daily bread, Russians pay much less than the citizens of the US, the European Union, and other bread-eating states in the warfighting alliance.
At current prices, the Russian loaf of white bread is cheaper by almost seven times than the American; six times less than the Norwegian; four times less than the Italian and German; three times less than the French.
In the war between armies marching on their stomachs, the Russian Army has already won hands down; that’s the farmers’, millers’, and bakers’ hands.
On the home front, however, it is not this international comparison which counts for Russian consumers. They are suffering from the comparison they are obliged to make between the price they pay for bread today and the price last year, or before the Special Military Operation in February 2022. Before the war, between 2019 and 2021, the average rate of inflation for bread was between 5% and 7% per annum. In 2024, the bread price rose, according to the state statistics agency Rosstat, by 13.2%. In fact, according to published studies in Moscow, bread inflation was double that rate at about 27% for the year.
The sensitivity of voters to this inflation in food prices is so great, President Vladimir Putin and Agriculture Ministry officials are trying to talk down the bread price and ask consumers to eat promises. According to Putin on February 7, “annual inflation stands at 9.5 percent, though as of February 3, this had reached 9.9 percent year-on-year. This presents a challenge, necessitating comprehensive measures to ensure balanced economic expansion.”
In a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the President said inflation is a goods supply problem which can be solved by targeted state intervention, including subsidies to producers, restrictions on exports of Russian foodstuffs, and jawboning oligarchs and other business owners to hold their prices down temporarily. “One paramount priority remains the development of a supply-side economy,” Putin said. “During the coronavirus pandemic, the Government executed highly effective sector-specific interventions. As previously discussed, including during meetings with the business community – whose representatives have advocated for this approach – we agreed with the Government to reinstate such sectoral coordination. We must assess the prospects of individual industries, identify priorities, and provide targeted support where required.”
Deputy Agriculture Minister Maxim Titov explained last week that state intervention in the food sector will be limited to asking the supermarket retailers to limit their bread-price markups to the government’s announced rate of inflation. “In principle,” Titov said, “as we see the dynamics of the price of bread, the price increase for the grain group that exists today has already been recouped.”
Titov also issued a radical warning disguised by a negative. “The cost of bread production is constantly growing,” he said, “but grain is not the main component in the cost of bread production.” The deputy minister means that after two years of bumper wheat harvests for the farmers and record tonnage of flour from the millers, the real reason for bread price inflation isn’t supply side at all. Instead, as Moscow think-tank research confirms, it is profit-making by the bread-sellers. Their profit margin has been reported as several times the average profit margin of the producers.
This is profit rigging and price gouging, as Russians understand it. Deputy Minister Titov is pointing the finger at Magnit (Dixy), Pyaterochka (X5), Mercury (Red & White, Bristol), and Lenta (Billa, Monetka), and to the oligarch groups of Alexander Vinokurov, Mikhail Fridman and Igor Kesaev who control them. Lenta, however, is part-controlled by the US private equity firm TPG Capital, based in Texas. Together, these four retailers have been steadily increasing their control over the entire Russian food retail marketplace; at present, they have a market share of more than 30%. Reluctant as ministry officials and Russian agro-industry experts are to admit it, the reason for the acceleration in the price of bread is wartime profiteering. As a military source warns, “the picture is getting clearer; the outlook is getting dimmer.”
The last Chinese as clever, as profiteering, and as popular in the imagination of millions as DeepSeek was Dr Fu Manchu.
“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan,” wrote his creator Sax Rohmer, the alias of an Englishman: “invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present …Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.”
Appearing first in 1912, educated at several western universities, the “Chinese devil’s” plots were aimed at combating fascism, communism, and the British empire. His methods included honey-trap girls, poisons, germs, spiders, and unspeakable tortures. He was a caricature of western fear of the superiority of the Chinese race.
DeepSeek is his new name; the racism is the same.
According to a US government-backed report issued a few days ago, DeepSeek is “highly biased as well as highly vulnerable to generate insecure code, toxic, harmful and CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear] content.”
Open AI, the US government-connected company which owns the competing ChatGPT, has declared the Chinese villain is a thief. “DeepSeek may [sic] have inappropriately distilled our models…We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here.”
Last December the New York Times launched court action against Open AI, accusing it of the same plagiarism on which Open AI is now relying in its attack on DeepSeek. “Independent journalism is vital to our democracy,” the newspaper claimed. “For more than 170 years, The Times has given the world deeply reported, expert, independent journalism… Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more…The law does not permit the kind of systematic and competitive infringement that Defendants have committed. This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
This is the first time in US federal court history that the reproduction of government deception operations and propaganda by newspaper reporters has been subjected to a test, not of the espionage statute as in the Ellsberg and Assange cases, but of the copyright laws.
A month later, the New York Timesattacked DeepSeek, not for plagiarising the Times, but for reproducing Chinese government propaganda. “If you’re among the millions of people who have downloaded DeepSeek, the free new chatbot from China powered by artificial intelligence, know this: The answers it gives you will largely reflect the worldview of the Chinese Communist Party. Since the tool made its debut this month, rattling stock markets and more established tech giants like Nvidia, researchers testing its capabilities have found that the answers it gives not only spread Chinese propaganda but also parrot disinformation campaigns that China has used to undercut its critics around the world.”
This is no more than one press pot calling another media kettle black. But with billions of dollars at stake in the stock market capitalisation of the American and Chinese companies producing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, this is also a battle of the propaganda operations of the US government in the wars it is currently waging.
For a test of this warfighting, DeepSeek has been questioned on issues of the Russian war in the Ukraine and the US war against Russia. Its answers, which follow verbatim, reveal no evidence (repeat no evidence) of Chinese backing for the Russian side. Instead, surprise (repeat surprise) – there is evidence that DeepSeek is no more capable than Chat GPT of distinguishing between propaganda and truth.
So long as DeepSeek trains on the English language and answers questions from the current English-language database and large language model, this is inevitable.
Holding hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, US President Donald Trump has adopted genocide as his personal method for destroying the Arabs of Palestine.
“Really very unlucky”, Trump declared the Palestinians have been for being the wrong people in the wrong place. “Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck. This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth.”
Trump is proposing genocide as it has been defined since the Germans attempted it against the Russians and the Jews. Since 1948 the crime has been defined in Article II of the Geneva Convention.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it…create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.” This has been tagged Trump and his family’s plan for the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
In parallel, Trump is proposing to do the same “job” to the 57,000 people of Greenland, expanding the island as a US mining, property development, and military base for attacking Russia’s Arctic sea route for oil and gas exports to Asia. Once the US ally in the US war against Russia, Canada is facing a similar combination of Trump threats, including the extinction of Canadian sovereignty and identity.
This is the big stick which Chris Cook discusses today on Gorilla Radio.
On January 17, when the Presidents of Russia and Iran, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian, signed the Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation, they were standing at the front of a line of Russian and Iranian (Persian) tsars, shahs, generals, ministers, and ambassadors stretching back for two hundred years.
Putin and Pezeshkian are the novices, the new names. Their predecessors on the Russian side include Tsars Alexander 1 and Nicholas I, Ambassador Alexander Griboyedov (lead image, top left), General Alexei Yermolov (top, right), Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Yevgeny Primakov. The new document must be understood in the context of the precedents these Russian leaders have made in making war and also in making peace with Iran over this long period.
Interpreting what the 47 articles of the new treaty mean to the Russian and the Iranian sides, and also to the US, Israel, the UK and the NATO allies, all states at war with both Russia and Iran – for them the treaty was also composed and signed in English – requires understanding how the terms of the new pact deal with the longstanding suspicions the Russians have of the Iranians, and vice versa, and protect each other from the warmaking threats they face separately, and also together.
In this 200-year history, Moscow’s Griboyedov line (negotiation) and Yermolov line (force) have changed their practical application towards Teheran many times over. These lines, and the officials advocating them, clashed in the recent debate in Moscow between the General Staff, the Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin over whether to deter, to oppose, or to allow the Turkish-led attack on Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, and the partition of Syria.
The crucial reassurance between Moscow and Teheran is in Article 3. “In the event that either Contracting Party is subject to aggression, the other Contracting Party shall not provide any military or other assistance to the aggressor which would contribute to the continued aggression, and shall help to ensure that the differences that have arisen are settled on the basis of the United Nations Charter and other applicable rules of international law.”
To Pezeshkian and Ebrahim Raisi, the predecessor who negotiated the treaty terms from 2021 until his death in May 2024, this means that Putin will not directly or indirectly assist Israel, and behind Israel the US, to attack Iran; assassinate its commanders; and destroy its defences, including its nuclear and conventionally armed missile forces. To Putin, Article 3 means that Pezeshkian will not directly or indirectly assist the Americans, Turks, Azeris, Georgians, Armenians and anti-Russian groups they sponsor to attack Russia, especially in the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region.
For the time being then, Article 3 means different things to the two sides. It is also not new – the very same Article 3 was signed 24 years ago as the “Treaty on the basis for mutual relations and the principles of cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation”. This was signed under President Putin on March 12, 2001. The enemies of Russia and Iran in Washington and Tel Aviv have interpreted this identicality between the two treaties to signal that Iran and Russia have been unable to agree on more explicit mutual defence and security provisions, and that mutual suspicion remains their vulnerability.
In today’s hour-long podcast, Nima Alkhorshid and John Helmer open for discussion the contentious dimensions of Russian policy towards Iran, the Arab states, Israel, and the US – topics which have not been discussed in such detail in the media or the think tanks of either country since the treaty was signed.
The discussion also comes with an explicit warning against media interpretations which are as racist in their denigration of the Arabs and the Iranians as the American, European and Ukrainian warfighters are racist in their targeting of Russia and the Russians.
When Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was asked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence what she thought of Russia Today (RT), she replied: “RT News is a propaganda arm of the Russian state government and is not a reliable source of objective news reporting.”
This was one of the few unequivocal responses Gabbard gave to the hostile questioning she faced from the Russia warfighters on the Intelligence Committee last week.
She also implied – but stopped short of saying — that if a news medium, publication, tweet, or podcast is paid for by a government or one of its agencies – any government, any medium including the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation — it follows that whatever is reported is state propaganda, so its truth value is zero and should be dismissed. This is the 400-year old maxim that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
It’s not the rule for truth-telling which the Anglo-American courts observe – beyond reasonable doubt for capital crimes, balance of probabilities for civil offences. It is also not the rule of truth-telling in politics the world over. “It was worthwhile making sure of your potential friends,” the English science official and novelist C.P. Snow put into the mouth of an ambitious cabinet minister he knew in London a half-century ago. “As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your friends.”
In the present information war accompanying the military and economic campaigns against Russia, Snow’s rule should be understood to mean that telling the truth isn’t going to win over the enemy. Gabbard’s condemnation of RT at the Senate is a proof of that. Snow’s rule is also a warning that truth-telling risks alienating your allies – particularly those allies competing for reward from the Pied Piper.
In our first appearance together on Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid opens the discussion of how Russia is taking its fight to President Donald Trump – the best enemy Russia has ever had in the long US war because he is imperialist in ideology, pathological in mentality, and altogether predictable. (He is also 15 centimetres taller than Adolf Hitler.)
As this phase of the war comes out in the open after months of secret negotiations, President Vladimir Putin is obliged to address the revolutionary moment for the country — a 100-year war with the US, according to former president Dmitry Medvedev; the General Staff consensus for a campaign of acceleration, decapitation, and mobilization; and the efforts of the domestic oligarchs to block nationalization and capital controls, and to preserve their economic dominance and political power.
Over-confidence in the face of the adversary can be the death of kings.
In the two great battles whose outcomes turned a small, defensive Anglo-Saxon island into an offensive global empire, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the Battle of Bosworth Field of 1485, the ruling English kings, Harold Godwinson and Richard III, launched downhill cavalry charges which almost overpowered the invading forces; almost reached the challengers William of Normandy and Henry Tudor; almost killed them. But Harold and Richard were killed instead; their kingdoms were captured.
The lesson of those two cavalry charges led from the front by Harold and Richard has been erased in the story-telling which followed their deaths by the propagandists of William and Henry.
In the present battles with the US and the NATO allies on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russians could provide an object lesson to the Danes on what they should expect to be done to them by President Donald Trump as he rushes to capture Greenland, confident that the threat of his charge will be enough to force the Danes to surrender, the Greenlanders to capitulate
Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen heard it for herself. “It was horrendous,” said one of the sources in Copenhagen after she and Trump had spoken by telephone last week. Another source has added: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous…It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs.” This was what was heard and reported to a London newspaper. Prime Minister Fredericksen was shy; she told the Financial Times she does: “not recognise the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources”.
Officially, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman has declared Russia to be against both Fredericksen and Trump.
Their claims, Maria Zakharova said last Thursday, “neglect the crux of the issue.” That, she explained, is the concerted Danish campaign to destroy the indigenous identity, culture, and reproduction of the Inuit Greenlanders, combined with the theft and poisoning of their land by US nuclear bomber and submarine bases. “Given the extensive history of colonial exploitation by Denmark and the United States, it is unsurprising that Greenland seeks independence and the establishment of a sovereign state,” Zakharova said.
No Russian currently engaged in the serious fighting against the US believes in displaying enthusiasm for either the cavalry charge or the parley. Instead, the Russians are preparing to fight Trump’s Greenland move as the opening of a new front to attack Russia from the north.
No government can survive when it fails to control the cost in blood on the battlefield and the cost of potatoes, butter and bread on the home front. The combination at the same time is politically lethal.
US President Lyndon Johnson learned this between 1965 and 1968, when the rate of domestic inflation was quadrupling and the Killed in Action (KIA) numbers in the Vietnam War jumped ninefold. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential election later that year.*
President Vladimir Putin has managed the KIA half of the lethal equation by fighting a limited expeditionary campaign in the Ukraine, restricting the General Staff’s resources, plans, targets and operations; attacking with standoff, mostly airborne weapons; shifting the casualty burden of ground fighting to socially marginal groups; and keeping the majority of voters out of the line of fire. His success is in high and stable voter support.
For the time being, the president has escaped public blame for the inflationary surge in food prices over 2024. According to one report, beets were up by 71%; potatoes by 65.4%; eggs by 48.5%; garlic by 41%; salt by 27%; vegetable oil by 24%; butter by 22%. According to the AB Centre calculation, the price of potatoes jumped 65.2%; olive oil, 35.5%; butter, 35.2%; garlic, 24.7%; beets, 22.7%.
The state statistics agency Rosstat claims that the overall, official inflation rate for the country was 8.6% for 2024, while retail food price inflation, according to Rosstat was 9.5%. No one believes this, according to consumer polling and expert analyses. Consumer anticipation and expert forecasts are for the surge in food prices to continue this year at rates, depending on the food item, of between 50% and 100%.
Sergei Glazyev, a well-known public economist, presidential candidate in 2004, and a senior official of the Eurasian Economic Commission, is blunt on his attack. “Rising prices are hitting everyone’s pockets and making everyone poorer. Both citizens and businesses. Only banks are swollen with money.
“The Bank of Russia’s policy is driving the economy into a stagflationary trap, in which falling production, devaluation of the ruble and rising inflation are mutually reinforcing: an increase in the key rate [21%] compresses production lending, which leads to lower volumes and higher production costs, the technical level and production efficiency decline, the competitiveness of the economy decreases, which is offset by the devaluation of the ruble. That then causes a new surge of inflation, which the Bank of Russia is trying to pay off with another increase in the key rate. After ten years of ineffectual targeting of inflation, it is clear that the continuation of this insane policy has no prospects.” https://t.me/glazieview/6705
Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, is just as scathing. He says the official rate of inflation for 2024 was not 8.5%, as the government insists, but closer to 19%; he warns it may reach 29% this year. The Central Bank interest rate of 21% is to blame: “this, in my opinion, is more destructive than the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But there is some good news. If tactical nuclear weapons are suddenly used against us, it will certainly be a severe shock and many people will die, but for the economy as a whole it will not be a greater shock than the policy of Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina. And [Finance Minister] Anton Germanovich Siluanov, who should also not be forgotten.”
“However, as we know, at the December 20 [2024] meeting, the Central Bank did not raise the key rate to 23 percent once again, as many, including me, expected. This is probably a good signal, because by raising the key rate in conditions of a shortage of money supply, the Bank of Russia thereby accelerates inflation. So far, Elvira Sakhipzadovna has refused to further accelerate inflation, but there is no guarantee that she will not return to this practice at the beginning of next year.”
So serious has been the failure of Central Bank Governor Nabiullina to halt inflation, and so widespread is public suspicion of her competence and intentions, on January 13 the Central Bank issued a public release denying that Nabiullina is planning a freeze on Russian individual savings by blocking withdrawals from bank accounts. “It is quite obvious that in any market economy, of which bank lending is an integral part, such a step is unthinkable,” the Central Bank has announced on Telegram. “Firstly, it will immediately undermine confidence in the banking system and put an end to lending to the economy. Secondly, freezing deposits will not help reduce inflation. People will rush to invest money not in deposits, but in goods and real estate with the corresponding sad consequences for rising prices.”
National polling of public attitudes towards leading officials has never identified Nabiullina positively. In open-ended questioning of those whom voters trust, Nabiullina’s name has not come up. Instead, she appears fifteenth on the countrywide list of officials and politicians who are distrusted – she ranks equal to the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov; State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, and the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.
No critic of the domestic inflation and Central Bank policy mentions President Putin. He is understood, however, to be Nabiullina’s protector against her domestic critics. In the past month, however, he has been pressed to qualify this.
At his press conference on December 19, the day before the Central Bank met to decide whether to raise the interest rate to 23%, Putin said: “Only yesterday, while preparing for today’s event, I talked to the Central Bank Governor, and Elvira Nabiullina told me that the inflation rate has already reached about 9.2–9.3 percent year-to-date. That said, salaries have increased by 9 percent, and I am talking about an increase in real terms, minus inflation. In addition, disposable incomes have also increased. So, the overall situation is stable and, let me reiterate, solid.”
The Kremlin record claims there has been no official meeting between Putin and Nabiullina since September 2019.
At his December press conference, Putin acknowledged “there are certain challenges with inflation and with the economy heating up. Therefore, the Government and the Central Bank have been seeking to ensure a soft landing.” Asked by a reporter what the interest rate decision would be, Putin added: “she does not tell me what the rate will be. Perhaps she does not know this yet, because they discuss it at the board meeting, their Komsomol cell, and make the final decision in the course of the discussion. I hope that it will be balanced and will meet today’s requirements.”
“Balance” is Putin’s term for satisfying each of his oligarch, military, and voter constituencies at the same time as they contradict and oppose each other.
