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... Read More

Ragpicking is a serious women’s business, extracting value from rubbish. Cheerleading is the unserious business of girls waving pompoms at football games. There are those who claim the Kazan Declaration is today’s equivalent of the Bretton Woods Final Act (1944) and Bandung Declaration (1955), or a “a huge manifesto”, or “victory for all decent freedom-loving... Read More

There have been many revolutions in the technology and the geography of global cargo transportation. The Portuguese design of caravels to cross the Atlantic and Indian Oceans from the 15th century; the replacement of wind with coal-fired steam in the shipping of the British empire which followed; and the invention of the petroleum engine for... Read More

American, British and Canadian troops in NATO’s forward bases in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania are being told to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine next year. They are also being warned to expect to fight under heavy Russian artillery, missile, guided bomb, and drone strikes. This message is also intended to slip into the hands... Read More

If you think that Popeye beat Bluto because he ate spinach, this US presidential cartoon, I mean debate, was for you. That President Joseph Biden, handicapped as he was by Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy body dementia, won the 120-minute television fight with Donald Trump seems so obvious to Russians, they express surprise at the near-unanimity... Read More

A Russian military blog post posted on Thursday, December 21 at 11:33 Moscow time, has revealed the hitherto secret positions of all warships in the area which the Pentagon has announced for its OPERATION PROSPERITY GUARDIAN. The fresh data and the open map (lead image) were not available when yesterday’s report was published at 09:32... Read More