By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A quarter of a century ago, President Vladimir Putin explained to President George W. Bush the way the warfighting world really works. “There is a contradiction between a new, young, aggressive financial Islamic capital and the old one,” Putin said.  “In reality, it is a financial issue. Religion is secondary. The […]

by Editor - Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Revealed for the first time in public is that President Vladimir Putin believes that international terrorism of the radical Islamic type is not the result of Middle Eastern conflict or of regional poverty or of Great Power proxy warfighting. Rather, he thinks it is a form of competition of the Marxist-Leninist […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On his way to meet Joseph Stalin in July 1941, Harry Hopkins (lead images, left) landed just out of range of German guns on a Moscow city airfield which, later, stretched a few hundred metres from my kitchen window. In Washington, DC, in 1976, his daughter Diana Hopkins (centre) sold her […]

by Editor - Friday, January 16th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For roughly half a millennium crows have come together in murders; foxes in skulks; cats in clowders; lions in prides; toads in knots; kangaroos in mobs. Podcasts appeared by name roughly twenty-one years ago,   and since then the medium, primarily a US one, has experienced a phenomenal rate of increase of listeners […]

by Editor - Thursday, January 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be,  a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that […]

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Pejorism is the idea that the world is getting worse so you should prepare yourself, your house, your country, your army. Meliorism — the opposite idea that the world is getting better, that time and history are on your side, etc. — has been so powerful for so long that it […]

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with For the time being the Trump Administration and its allies conduct their war against Russia on the high seas, outside defended territorial waters, against ship targets which are unarmed, threaten no resistance. This is piracy, effective if the sight of the skull-and-bones flag triggers fear, shock, immediate surrender. In the Caribbean […]

by Editor - Thursday, December 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The official record of three conversations President Vladimir Putin (lead images, right) had with President George W. Bush (lead images, left) in 2001, 2005, and 2008 has just been released in Washington. This follows a federal court lawsuit to compel the US National Archives to speed up the declassification process which […]

by Editor - Wednesday, December 24th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In the International System of Units, hertz is a unit of frequency for measuring the number of times a repeating event occurs per second, like waves, cycles or vibrations of pitch, sound, or electrical current.  The common multiples are kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz. Merz is the unit measuring the number of times German […]

by Editor - Monday, December 22nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Blowing the shofar, the Jewish ritual ram’s horn, has traditionally been the signal to start an attack or a war, and also to celebrate victory at the end of a war.   In the lead picture, two rabbis, Eli Schlanger (left) and Yossi Friedman (right) blew the shofar above Bondi Beach in […]

by Editor - Sunday, December 21st, 2025
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