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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with A politician becomes a psychopath when he or she acts without calculating the consequences for approval rating and voter support. The same thing goes for ministers and their advisers who urge military operations abroad which make voters feel unsafe at home. Fear and insecurity aren’t good for incumbents; at least not […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) isn’t likely to have heard the old Australian working-class expression that a man is too crooked to lie straight in bed. It meant that lying and  cheating are in the nature of a deformity, and can’t be operated on or cured.  “The Salisbury Poisonings”, the three-part, […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with June 12 marks the anniversary of Boris Yeltsin’s election as President of Russia. It is no moment for celebration. The government which he led successfully over the attempted putsch of last August and through the disintegration of the Soviet Union now lacks credible authority in the Russian federation and among its […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Just over a year ago, five New York Times reporters published lies about the dead ducks they were told had been killed by Russian assassins running amok in the English town of Salisbury with a poison they called Novichok. This was a lie which came from the deputy director of the […]

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by John Helmer with translation of report by Gevorg Mirzayan, Moscow   @bears_with If the war in Libya continues the way Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks it has gone in recent days, the Eastern Mediterranean will be a Turkish sea for the first time since Napoleon defeated the Ottomans and took Egypt and Syria between 1798 […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Covid-19 and corona psychosis are parallel attacks on your health, pandemic in scale for both at the moment.   Among the recognised symptoms of Covid-19 in the central nervous system, there is ageusia (loss of taste) and anosmia (loss of smell).   Newly discovered, there are also symptoms affecting eyesight, such conjunctival […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with All the well-known plague novels make the same mistake. So unexpected, inexplicable, incurable, and comprehensively lethal was the plague for those telling its story, their conclusion has been that there can be no getting back to normal.   Not so in Russia. “Over the past week”, President Vladimir Putin declared last […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Cardiology doesn’t expire when people die of heart attacks. Just so, no one should expect that when a man dies of the corona virus, or hundreds or thousands of men, the sociology of their pre-existing health, race, ethnicity, income, education, ideology – in short, their class in the old- fashioned meaning […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Death can be a coincidence, but not in the Russian aluminium business. So when Dmitry Bosov died of a pistol shot at his home near Moscow on the evening between May 5 and May 6, and Anatoly Bykov was arrested by federal agents in Krasnoyarsk on May 7, everyone with well […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s embarrassing to be caught publicly with a case of the crabs, especially if you are a media celebrity. That is, unless you are in the business of selling your celebrity status to advertise other people’s crabs, not your own. This is the case of Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite from St. […]