“The CIA made a lot of mistakes during the Cold War but keeping a list of Soviet jokes was not one of them.”

Dr Gene Zubovich  — University of California Berkeley historian

“The US Embassy in Moscow would send in a ‘jokes cable,’ usually annually, listing some of the better jokes that they had picked up. At the end of year, they would do kind of an annual round-up, kind of a holiday gift if you will.”

Peter Clement — Deputy assistant director of CIA for Europe and Eurasia

“The story of Soviet humour isn’t an Orwellian nightmare of social atomisation and the crushing of the individual. It’s a fundamentally human story of survival and community.”

Jon Waterlow — It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin

Thank God, It is Sunday! The jokes were part of a 13-million-page release of declassified CIA documents. The CIA…

 Hot on the heels of a blatant technocratic takeover of the Brexit “negotiation”, it is apparent that one lifer senior security officer now holds the reins of both the Cabinet Office and the National Security Council. He has just accused senior rivals of the Prime Minister of criminal leaking of top secret discussions about the risks of employing Huawei on 5G. Why?

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Those of you paying attention will probably have noticed that we have (as a United Kingdom) already blown 8% of our allotted time of 204 days before the Brussels Bombasts come back to us and ask, “So then….yes or no?”

That might not seem like a lot. But bear in mind three things:

1. Only 5 days in 7 really count. Perish the thought that Whitehall or MPs might have to work over a weekend
2. Andrea Leadboots has already announced that there will not be any Parliamentary…

We’re all experts now. And Greta Thunberg’s accusations are tailor-made for lighting-up the fluffy brains of all those earnest believers in votes at sixteen. Greta is a girl with plenty to say, but nothing to offer, to the serious study of climate change.

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I have been observing the Greta Thunberg phenomenon with a mixture of bafflement and unease. I’m sure a lot of people are going to disagree with me about this, but after a week of doing so, it is hard to shake myself out of the strong conviction that the way she is being feted and exploited encapsulates just how profoundly depraved and utterly unwise our culture has become.

Miss Thunberg (I’m sorry, but she is far too young to be called a Ms) hails from Sweden, a country I used to know quite well. I formed the view at the time – I’ve seen little to…

Who looked the other way in Sri Lanka, and why? The Easter Sunday attacks are emerging as an inside job with international backers, and a thinly veiled attempt to oust a Western-facing Prime Minister. Both the security forces and the President are objects of deep suspicion.

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There is a rapidly developing outbreak of Truth in Sri Lanka that represents a refreshing change in atrocity coverage….and is in stark contrast to the lachrymose bollocks that typified its predecessor in New Zealand.

Blair-taught Kiwi Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern dutifully poured thick brown molasses over any clarity as to the perpetrators of the horror there, preferring her irritating Peacenik clichés in New Zealand’s hour of shock to any thought-through analysis of why on Earth its tiny Muslim population should have been targeted.

But the Sri Lankan authorities (or rather, various élites within it) have by contrast engaged in public breast-baring that is asking…

Partial reblog as Brendan O’Neill at Spiked Online gets stuck into the enviro-mentalists.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.