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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Diogenes of Sinope (lead image, centre), the still famous philosopher of ancient Greece, had an unusually long and exceptionally miserable life between 412 and 323 BC.  There’s no telling whether he inherited the profits of his father’s money manipulation business, but by the time he was captured by pirates,  enslaved,  and […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Quoting Mark Twain, President Vladimir Putin has made his first public statement on Syria during his Direct Line broadcast on Thursday. “Whoever wants to imagine Russia weakened…I want to recall the famous man and writer, who once said: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’”   During four and a […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch. That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with President Vladimir Putin gave a party rally speech in Moscow on Saturday in which he omitted to mention seven of the eight domestic issues most troubling Russian voters – inflation; high interest-rate caused stagnation in the economy; corruption;  low quality education;  poor public health care; terrorism; and illegal immigrants.   He […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The illustration of power coming out of the barrel of a gun is from a comic book. Contemplating the reality of Russia’s position in Syria, no one in a position to know believes in cartoon captions,  the credibility of the gun, or the direction in which the horse is now running. […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The defeat of the Russian army in war discredits, not the soldiers who fought and died, but the commander-in-chief and the generals who were in command. Defeat on the battlefield also destroys Russian military honour as a political force in the country, just as its opposite, victory on the battlefield,  threatens […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When former president Dmitry Medvedev (leading image, left), deputy head of the Security Council; the Russian military bloggers; and the GRU’s favoured journalist are as silent on Russian military action in Syria as they are at the moment, the signal they are sending is unmistakeably loud.  It is the sound of […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Charles Brown (lead image, right), has just revealed by press leak that he and the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, had talked by telephone last week, on November 27, and agreed not to disclose the contents […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with There has never been a transition between US presidential administrations which has been so replete with new Washington-directed violence across the world. That’s to say, the escalation of wars already under way and the instigation of new ones to the furthest limits of the US empire’s reach. As the Pentagon war-gaming […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence.   Yesterday, December 2, the hearings […]