A UK police constable has been deluged with mockery and Hitler memes after arguing it's every resident's duty to turn in neighbors and local businesses for breaking lockdown rules and complaining British culture reviles snitches.

UK residents who report their neighbors and local businesses to the police for violating the country's increasingly stringent Covid-19 control measures are just doing their "civic duty" and should be praised, not ostracized, Merseyside chief constable Andy Cooke told the Daily Mail on Wednesday.

"People are doing a civic duty in contacting us for the right reasons," he stated, insisting "the vast majority of people across the country are really concerned about this" and "any information that you can give us in relation to breaches will save lives, and that's why people are [reporting to the police]."

After his government imposed some of the world's harshest measures to suppress the spread of coronavirus last spring, Vladimir Putin made it clear on Thursday that there are no plans in place for a repeat lockdown this winter.

Speaking remotely to an audience at VTB Bank's 'Russia Calling' event in Moscow, on the day the country posted its highest one-day total for new infections (17,717) since the pandemic began, the president said the economy must be protected. He pointed out, in jest, that Russia has no 'kind aunt' to tap for money in the event of a financial crisis.

"We do not plan to introduce restrictive measures across the board, or launch a so-called 'nation-wide lockdown,' when the economy, the operation of business is actually halted completely," the president said. "Despite the challenging epidemiological situation, we are much better prepared now to work in the epidemic environment."

The true story behind the New York Times's 2018 anonymous opinion article is exceptionally sleazy.

Indeed, based on what we know now, everyone involved in this sad episode comes across as remarkably unethical, most especially the op-ed's author, former Department of Homeland Security employee Miles Taylor.

For starters, Taylor and the New York Times grossly exaggerated his credentials as a "senior" member of the Trump administration. Taylor served as a "Deputy Chief of Staff" at the time he submitted his op-ed to the paper. He did not hold the position of chief of staff until later. Yet, the New York Times billed him anyway as a "senior official in the Trump administration," an overblown descriptor that Taylor himself made no effort to correct.

The Biden Family wants America to believe that they are the typical hard working American family, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Joe Biden said his son Hunter had done "nothing but good things his whole life" per the Daily Mail in a report on Valentine's day earlier this year:

Joe Biden on Thursday defended his son, Hunter Biden, saying he was a 'good' guy who 'has done nothing but good things his whole life' even after he was made to pay child support to a stripper he impregnated out of wedlock.

Last month, Hunter Biden agreed to pay child support to an Arkansas woman, Lunden Roberts, who was a stripper at a Washington, DC, club that he frequented.

In November, DNA testing proved Biden, 49, as the father of Roberts' child, after she filed a paternity suit in May 2019 in Independence County, Arkansas.

I won't even bother repeating it all here, those who are interested in my views of this entire Charlie Hebdo canard can read my article "I am NOT Charlie" here.

No, what I want to do is to ask a simple question: do you think the French leaders are simply stupid, suicidal or naive? I submit that they are neither stupid, nor suicidal nor naive. In fact, they are using a well practiced technique which goes with some variation of this:

• Infiltrate some pseudo-Islamic gang of cutthroats (literally!)
• Keep them under close scrutiny ostensibly for counter-terrorism purposes
• Inside the group, try to promote your confidential informers
• Have your analysts work on the following question: "how could we best provoke these nutcases into a bloody terrorist act?"
• Once the plan is decided, simply execute it, say by organizing the posting fantastically offensive caricatures
• Once the cutthroats strike, blame Islam and double down
• By then, you have infuriated most of the immense Muslim world out there and you can rest assured that the process is launched and will continue on its own. You can now relax and get the pop-corn
• Have your propaganda machine declare that Islam is incompatible with western civilization (whatever that means in 2020, both Descartes and Conchita Wurst I suppose...)
• Shed some crocodile tears when the cutthroats murder some completely innocent Christian bystander
• And announce a new crusade against "Islamism" (also a vague and, frankly, meaningless term!) and crack down on true Muslim communities and ideas while continuing to lovingly arm, train, finance and direct the "good terrorists" who have now become your own, personal, cutthroats.

Cui bono?

A new report by a British nongovernmental organization (NGO) has found that in Yemen, the four years of Donald Trump's presidency were by far the most violent of the past three US administrations, and might have totaled more operations than his two predecessors combined.

In the weeks after Trump took office in January 2017, he vastly accelerated the US war in Yemen, which was ostensibly part of a larger, global fight against al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Despite the Pentagon's strategic shift toward "great power confrontation" with Russia and China in the years since, the US war in Yemen has continued unabated, and the scale possibly exceeds both the years of former US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama combined.

Airwars, an NGO connected to the University of London, has issued a damning new report revealing the scope of the war, waged by the world's wealthiest country against one of its poorest.

"This new Airwars dataset and analysis, published on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, sheds fresh light on the most recent period of US direct action in Yemen, the term in office of President Donald Trump - a period in which the Executive has sought to portray itself as reducing US military involvement abroad; but has also significantly reduced both the restrictions imposed on, and transparency for, direct action in Yemen and elsewhere," the researchers say in the report.

The 'liberal-left' narrative that the UK Tory government wanted to pursue Covid-19 'herd immunity' instead of a lockdown has been shattered by official filings which appears to show the opposite was the case.

The phrase 'smoking gun' is oft-overused, but it is surely appropriate in relation to the report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper that the UK government struck a deal worth £119m with an American advertising company, OMD Group, urging people to 'Stay Home, Stay Safe' a full three weeks before Boris Johnson ordered a lockdown.

Think about what this means. It's safe to assume that if this big money deal was struck on 2nd March, the preparations began a lot earlier - in February, or more likely, even earlier than that. You don't just set up an advertising campaign with a major US agency in a couple of hours.

This review has been banned from publication in Australia. (Get the book here.)

The MH17 was brought down over six years ago. John Helmer, with others, has compiled a book on the farce that has attended the pursuit of cause and culprits. Australia's involvement is peculiarly both integral and marginal.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was brought down over Eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. All 298 people on board lost their lives - including 196 Dutch, 43 Malaysians and 38 Australian.

Overseen by the Dutch, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was established in August 2014, formally comprising personnel from the Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia and Belgium. Malaysia itself was not admitted to the JIT until late November, reputedly because of its scepticism towards the Ukrainian version of the cause of the shoot-down and who was responsible.

Before anybody had inspected the site, that line was that Russia and/or pro-Russian rebels against Kiev did it. The weapon was a Buk ground-to-air missile, the launcher brought in from Russia and returned after the dirty deed.

The JIT investigation and Dutch court case is effectively a Dutch-Ukrainian affair. As Helmer et al. (henceforth Helmer) note, Ukraine possesses the 'right as a JIT member to veto what is investigated, what is disclosed, who to convict' (Ch.6). Belgium (4 nationals dead) is out of picture. Australia is both inside and outside the tent.

Site material reclaimed is partial, and evidence is spotty. Ukrainian air traffic control data have not been released. However, two forms of evidence, Australian-linked, appears to be atypically decisive, at least in a negative sense.

Coming off the worst quarter in history, the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace ever in the third quarter as a nation battered by an unprecedented pandemic started to put itself back together, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

Third-quarter gross domestic product, a measure of the total goods and services produced in the July-to-September period, expanded at a 33.1% annualized pace, according to the department's initial estimate for the period.

The gain came after a 31.4% plunge in the second quarter and was better than the 32% estimate from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The previous post-World War II record was the 16.7% burst in the first quarter of 1950.

Markets reacted positively to the news, with Wall Street erasing a loss at the open and turning mostly positive.

"Boris Johnson? Who is he?" asked Lucy.
"Why, it is he that has got all Covidia under his thumb," said Mr Tumnus. "It's he that makes it always Covid. Always Covid and never Christmas; think of that!"
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis (with a few changes)

Were he around today, I have no doubt that C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th Century's greatest intellects, would be utterly scathing of what the British Government has done to this country over the past 7 months, given that it has been the very epitome of the scientific and technocratic oligarchy he warned us about decades ago. And so I feel somewhat at liberty to take his comment about the White Witch turning Narnia into perpetual winter without joy and without Christmas, and apply it to our own situation in the land of Covidia (which is where you now live) - a place of perpetual fear and misery, where ordinary life is impossible, and where any hints of joy breaking out must be nipped in the bud before they are allowed to grow to challenge the new winter normal that is settling fast around us.

The words may even turn out to be literally true. In Scotland, they are already talking about what they call a digital Christmas, whatever absurdity that is, whilst in England a psychological game of Good Cop/Bad Cop is going on, with Comrade de Pfeffel Johnson apparently desperately hoping that we'll all have a normal Christmas, but with members of the ironically named SAGE committee saying this is wishful thinking. Who will win out? Of course the Bad Cops will win out, but no doubt carefully managed and cleverly messaged to present it as a kind of victory for Good Cop, whereby he wangles some concessions for us, such as a relaxation of the Rule of 6 to the Rule of 6+1 for a day, so that Great Aunt Maud doesn't have to spend the day alone, and with Rishi Sunak perhaps pledging some more of his magic beans to fund subsidised turkeys. Come to think of it, cut-price turkeys would be a fairly apt metaphor for those in charge of this debacle. But lest they try to befuddle us with silly details over the next few weeks, hold this thought front and centre: The idea that anyone should need permission from the likes of de Pfeffel Johnson and his crew to be able to celebrate with their family and relations the coming of the King of Kings into the world is beyond parody.