By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with During the Americanization of Russian popular culture in the 1990s, the meaning of the word класс (pronounced kl-ah-ss) was dismantled – reformed was the political term in fashion then. The word had come into the Russian language when Tsar Peter the Great (1682-1725) borrowed it from the German, French,  and Latin […]

by Editor - Sunday, October 4th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In the long history of political thinking in the world, the great Russian contributions have been to the recognition of human oppression and the mind required to fight it. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin: these names are no longer absent from Moscow bookshop shelves, but their lessons are not taught in […]

by Editor - Saturday, October 3rd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s not surprising when JP Morgan, the largest bank in the US, and the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) under Elvira Nabiullina agree on the future and what’s to be done to get there profitably. However, when JP Morgan’s commodities research team – composed of three Russian émigrés to the US […]

by Editor - Thursday, October 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The 73-year old President Xi Jinping, and 80-year old President Donald Trump said too much to each other in Washington last week. Russian President Vladimir Putin, turning 74 next week, left several things unsaid but meant. Whose voice is of the stronger man? According to Trump, Xi, “looks strong, vibrant, and […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 29th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with An international  platform for national upstarts to upstage each other – trained roosters clawing at each other in a cockpit surrounded by money bettors. This comes every September when the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) holds what it calls High-Level Week and the General Debate. Lame ducks can pretend to be […]

by Editor - Thursday, September 24th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Greenland is to be the newest US and NATO drone and missile launcher against Russia. According to the preamble of the agreement with Denmark and the Prime Minister of Greenland, signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday (September 22), Russia is now an outsider in the Arctic region ruled by the […]

by Editor - Thursday, September 24th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Blind man’s buff is an old game of parlour warfare in which the combatants try to tag the blind one, the buffer, and then hide. If they are caught, they are out of the game. The buffer wins when he’s tagged them all out. Hiding in plain sight, making deceptive noises […]

by Editor - Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A new drone has appeared on the European battlefield. With lightweight warhead and jet propulsion, it has almost unlimited range, and Circular Error Probability (CEP) of less than 10 millimetres. When it strikes the brain, it doesn’t kill or maim. It preserves the target’s motor functions but renders it senseless. That’s […]

by Editor - Monday, September 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Nothing succeeds so consistently and so badly at changing the hearts, minds, and votes of people than bombing them. It’s a conclusion that the 316 volumes of the US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1944-45  came to about the enemies of that time, the Germans and Japanese, very reluctantly.   In announcing […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with From which direction does the sun come up each day? That was one of the questions in the battery of tests which was  used on patients to diagnose the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. An answer confusing east and west was a symptom of that brain disease. The question comes up today […]

by Editor - Friday, September 18th, 2026
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