By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Massachusetts philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was making a mistake when he claimed “there are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.”  Although he grew pears himself, Emerson isn’t known to have made them into pear cider, also known as poiré in France, perry in England.

Russians understand how to prolong the pleasure of consuming pears by turning them into cider. And so, despite the efforts of the warmongering English, Poles, and Czechs to cut off the supply of pear concentrate from which, until the sanctions war began, Russian pear cider producers bottled their drinks, the Russian taste for it continues to grow. Known as пуаре after the French name, pear cider has been steadily gaining in sales volume of the market for light alcohol drinks.  Friendlier foreign sources of pear concentrate, sanctions-busting alternate trade, and state-backed  investment in the planting of new Russian pear varieties are all substituting in the domestic cider market.

According to Vadim Drobiz, “the import of pears concentrate has not been influenced too much [by the sanctions war].” Drobiz is the national expert on the alcohol market; he is the director of   the Centre for Federal and Regional Alcohol Markets (TsIFRRA). “There have been changes in domestic consumer tastes and preferences, and so the [cider] producers have followed them. There are many ways in which the sanctions and prohibitions on import of different goods can be avoided, and these are widely used.”

All the English, Poles and Czechs have managed to do is to make pear cider a state secret. This secret is profitable enough that the Russians don’t care if the enemy thinks the cider market is going pear-shaped. For that reason, no Russian poiré producer or bottler will talk on the record to a foreign correspondent reporting in English.  They say ваше здоровье! Cheers! instead.

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 8th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If the US Government, including the President and the Pentagon, have been telling the truth, the Chinese balloon incursion over US territory for a week has proved to be one of the most effective spy missions ever attempted against US air and missile defences in recent memory.

 If the Chinese Government has been telling the truth, and the balloon was nothing more than a “civilian unmanned airship” out of control due to force majeure, the outcome is exactly the same. It is also the same outcome if the Chinese have been lying, and the balloon was a military intelligence operation.

And if US officials have been lying, concealing what they knew and when they knew what they have publicly announced about the balloon’s mission, the conclusion remains the same: the balloon has exposed fundamental warfighting weaknesses of the US against both Russia and China to its enemies;  and equally to the US allies on the Ukrainian battlefield, in Japan, Korea, Canada and Australia to see for themselves.

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by Editor - Monday, February 6th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the war of the worlds which the US insists its allies fight on their territories in Asia and in Europe, the flight of the Chinese balloon demonstrates the reverse of the propaganda message on who in this war is strong; who is weak; who will prevail; who will survive.

Suppose the balloon payload now being secretly salvaged from the seabed off South Carolina is empty; or suppose it’s weather surveillance sensors; or suppose it’s spyware – we will never know which for certain —  the Chinese have proved they can float, they have floated a “civilian unmanned airship”, as the official Beijing statement calls it,  across the breadth of Canada and the United States. By accident or under direction and remote control, this Chinese “threat” has prevailed in enemy airspace, uncontested, for a full week, January 28 to February 4.

Even before detonation, China’s airship has inflicted multiple shock waves on US officials, their Canadian and Australian allies,  and destroyed the warfighting confidence they need for the battlefields of the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the Ukraine. The “force majeure” which the official Chinese statement explains to have been the reason for the balloon’s flight is indeed the force, legally as well as strategically, which has proved to be the superior one.

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by Editor - Monday, February 6th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Paper tiger German tanks, delivered on the insistence of lame-duck Ukrainian politicians, will become sitting ducks on the battlefield, while the economic front of the war against Russia is looking more and more like the story of over-confidence and guile as told by Uncle Remus to generations of American children. That’s the one about Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the tar baby.

Who’s fabulating whom? From the Donbass George Eliason asks the questions.

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 1st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is nothing like facing the gun muzzles of the Germans, British and Americans to teach Russians what to do to correct their past mistakes.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be the last US bank in the world to admit as much.

Nor would the IMF concede that everything it bribed the Kremlin to accept, when Boris Yeltsin was president and Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin were his economic ministers,  is now being reversed – at a speed unmatched since Joseph Stalin directed the relocation of heavy industry out of reach of German guns between August and December of 1941.  

This time round, the IMF is reporting that after Russia recorded a 2.2% drop in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurement in 2022 – 35% less than the IMF had been forecasting – by 2024, the second and third years of the war, the Russian growth rate will be more than double the US, British and Japanese rates; 33% better than Germany’s; 24% better than France; 29% better than Canada.    

This is the first official acknowledgement by the US and international banks that the long war against Russia is being lost.

They follow the evidence of last week and this in the stock markets of Frankfurt  and New York that institutional investors are cutting the share prices and market capitalizations of the major German and American weapons companies. This reflects the market expectation these arms makers will be defeated in the short war to  follow the deployment on the Ukrainian battlefield of the Abrams and Leopard tanks, together with more HIMARS and M777 artillery weapons.

Long distance is the race the Soviets dominated when Vladimir Kuts (lead image) was world champion over 5,000 and 10,000 metres. Watching him run in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia,  despite the anti-Soviet, pro-Hungarian, pro-British demonstrations in the stadium, was a lesson in marshalling strength, conserving it  over time, and exhausting the adversary. This lesson is now being taught in war.

The IMF report also confirms that the economic sanctions war pursued by the US and the European Union (EU) and their global allies is not only failing at the macro-economic level. The sanctions are  also causing the reorientation of Russian trade flows eastward towards China and southward towards India. These flows, as revealed in a new report published in Vzglyad in Moscow this week, are forcing the replacement of more than twenty-five years of oligarch-dominated Kremlin economic decision-making by state planning.

This quiet revolution is also Stalin-sized. It would have been impossible without the US and NATO adoption of war for the destruction of Russia.

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 31st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed proposals issued this week in Washington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland. Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova has confirmed that Russia’s military plan for the Ukraine will not be interrupted or delayed.

 “It is not necessary to talk about what will happen if someone does something [in the Ukraine],” Zakharova said. “There is a situation on the ground that we are solving. Everything. This is not a question of guesswork, but of our assessment of what is happening. This is based on the situation on the ground and direct political statements by Western politicians. Given that all negotiations have been terminated by Ukraine, this issue will be resolved on the ground. Under pressure or on its own, Kiev has banned any negotiations with Russia at the government level. So that’s it. The rest is for the military experts.”

Russia has also dismissed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the successor of the Nazi Wehrmacht and the puppet of the US Government. Scholz, according to Zakharova,  is one of the Germans who “lack[s] the spirit to make the right choice, not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, for which the people of Germany, among others, paid a huge price… We remember well what German tanks are. These are machines which have become a symbol,  not just of death and deadly ideology, but of hatred of humanity — a global, existential threat to the entire planet… What do they expect in Germany? That armoured vehicles in camouflage cover with iron crosses – symbols of the German armed forces both then and now will pass through our cities and villages? We remember how it ended then. Do they remember in Berlin?.. The day of the decision on the supply of Leopards to Ukraine…is also historic because [it is] the total loss of Germany’s sovereignty. [Olaf] Scholz has forever signed the rejection of an independent German foreign policy. He has abandoned everything that his predecessors had built for decades after the Second World War.”

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by Editor - Saturday, January 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Not since James Forrestal jumped off the sixteenth floor of a US Navy hospital in 1949,  has a US cabinet secretary displayed more psychopathological symptoms than Antony Blinken, the current Secretary of State.   Can Blinken’s announcement this week of terms for ending the Ukraine war be believed in a US military psychiatric clinic, let alone in the Kremlin in Moscow?

And what can be believed when, the day after Blinken’s remarks, Victoria Nuland, the most psychopathological Under Secretary of State in the record of the office, announced to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she and Blinken are ready “in the context of Russia’s decision to negotiate seriously and withdraw its troops from Ukraine and return territories, I would certainly support that [easing of sanctions].”

What Nuland meant by the Ukraine and the territories to be “returned”, Blinken had disclosed the day before. Crimea, Zaporozhye and “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”, meaning Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk,  will remain Russian and will not be negotiated or “returned” because, said Blinken, “an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.”   

For the time being there has been no Russian acknowledgement of either Blinken’s or Nuland’s statements.  

Listen now to the TNT Radio discussion of what is happening behind the scenes in Washington and Moscow – a breaking news story which has blindsided the mainstream media and also the alternative media.

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by Editor - Thursday, January 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

David Ignatius (lead image, left) has been a career-long mouthpiece for the US State Department. He has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right) to convey an urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council,  and the General Staff in Moscow.

For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.

The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the Washington Post.  The paywall can be avoided by reading on.  

The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhye,  Kherson “land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”. West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of “a demilitarized status” for the Ukraine. Also, US agreement to  restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks  to a point in western Ukraine from which they can “manoeuvre…as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.”

This is an offer for a tradeoff –  partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments,  and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call “a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.

Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on “an eventual postwar military balance”; “no World War III”; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with “security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5.”

Blinken has also told the Washington Post to announce the US will respect “Putin’s tripwire for nuclear escalation”, and accept the Russian “reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.”

President Putin has offered a hint of the Russian reply he discussed with the Stavka  and the Security Council last week.  

Putin told a meeting with university students on Wednesday, hours after Blinken’s publication.   “I think that people like you,” the president said,    “most clearly and most accurately understand the need for what Russia is now doing to support our citizens in these territories, including Lugansk, Donetsk, the Donbass area as a whole, and Kherson and Zaporozhye. The goal, as I have explained many times, is primarily to protect the people and Russia from the threats that they are trying to create for us in our own historical territories that are adjacent to us. We cannot allow this. So, it is extremely important when young people like you defend the interests of their small and large Motherland with arms in their hands and do so consciously.”

Read on, very carefully, understanding that nothing a US official says, least of all through the mouths of Blinken, Ignatius,  and the Washington Post is trusted by the Russians; and understanding that what Putin and the Stavka say they mean by Russia’s “adjacent historical territories” and the “small and large Motherland” has been quite clear.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 25th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Ask yourself — in what country of the so-called international rules-based order,  would the rules allow the head of state and the head of government to act together in secret to violate the state’s constitution, creating a secret junta unaccountable to parliament, the press, or the courts? And then after one secret has slipped out, one junta replaced by another junta, a new government chief has committed himself to continuing the same rule by force, fraud and propaganda – an  official whose name in Italian means sneak thief?

For answers, listen to the TNT Radio discussion of the rules-based order in Australia of head of state Army General (retired) David Hurley, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and the election test coming up for the Nazi uniform-wearing state politician, Dominic Perrottet. Also of the collabos in this regime – Crikey, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Murdoch media. And not forgetting Penguin Random House, the publisher which a US federal court recently ruled is too big to be safe under US law for American readers – the publisher which is filling every bookshop window in Australia with Prince Harry, grandson of the monarch who appointed Hurley and who approved every unconstitutional secret he signed.

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Even Leonardo da Vinci didn’t think it was possible.

A perpetual motion machine, that is, whose construction had been attempted by Indian fakirs for five hundred years before a handful of medieval European conmen got the idea. Then Leonardo  tried knocking it on its head: “O ye seekers after perpetual motion,” he scribbled in his notebook, “how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”

Old Lenny hadn’t met an inventor of artillery and a banker financing the warmakers’ market of his day. For those fellows had invented the perpetual money-making machine. All they needed to kick it off was a war – a long one, thirty years or one hundred years, was best for their balance-sheets.

Losing wars, however, is very bad for the business.

Right now American, British, German, and French gunmakers are fighting among themselves for the profitability of the Ukrainian battlefield. Re-sellers and smugglers from Kiev and Lvov,  too.

At the same time they have managed to drive the bad news of diminishing profit margins off the pages of the financial press. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit haven’t reported, for example, that the Russian Army has perfected the technology for targeting NATO artillery and rocket radars, killing their accompanying firing crews, and blinding the electronic reconnaissance systems flying above so that the Ukrainians don’t know what’s coming next in their direction, and what has hit them after it has.

One of the consequences is that the best of NATO anti-missile technology is being fired haplessly into the air and then coming down to destroy Ukrainian domestic buildings, kindergartens, etc. US and European gunmakers make the same profit from friendly fire; the friends don’t appreciate this. Another consequence is that the Ukrainian regime in Kiev is at war with itself – civilians versus generals – over acknowledging how blind they have become.  

Facing the Russian military, the US and NATO general staffs are re-learning Old Lenny’s  advice not to confuse their Russian-enemy wishful thinking, circa 2014-2021,  with the reality of losing the war on Russian-enemy terms — now and into the foreseeable future.  The US military industrial complex may believe it can afford to keep selling its alchemy for as long as the war can be prolonged on the Ukrainian battlefield. They and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington generals are calling this a “stalemate”. The German generals are not so sure American stalemate won’t amount to German rout in due course. Privately, they are trying to warn their friends and employers in the German military industrial complex. For a Swiss press report of these private talks, read this.  

In public, the outcome is a display of German generals struggling to balance their 1939-45 mindset towards Russia with the prospect of losing, not only the war on the Ukrainian battlefield, but the escalation of Russian strategy against German and US-made weapons, forward NATO commands and US bases in Germany – and the future balance-sheets of the German gunmakers – that’s Kraus-Maffei, Rheinmetall, Thyssen-Krupp.

Gorilla Radio opens the discussion on what the good Germans are afraid of — and what the bad Americans behind them are risking in this war.   

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 24th, 2023
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