“When the ‘Spanish Flu’ took over 50 million people in just two years, it didn’t scare people half as much as Covid-19"

“After more than 70 years of peace, at least in Europe and with growing prosperity, this crisis could not have hit us any more unprepared. When the ‘Spanish Flu’ took over 50 million people in just two years from 1918 to 1920, it didn’t scare people half as much as the COVID-19 pandemic does today, as far as I can see — without all the lockdowns and masks and vaccination debates.”

“...Was it perhaps because the peoples at that time were by and large more at home in religion, and its consolations and resilience? I don’t know. From my family history, I only know that in the generation of my grandparents, death was still perceived and accepted, in a certain way, simply as a ‘part of life.’”

Pope Benedict XVI's private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, in a lecture online at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna.

Douglas Murray, talking in The Strange Death of Europe, says 'Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the “tragic sense of life.”' He was talking about the effects of mass immigration but also about the death of religious belief and the attempt to find substitutes for it. 

One of them is to put man firmly at the centre of the universe, as indeed he is if God does not exist. This carries the grave responsibility to do godlike things like control the climate and control viruses. 

It is odd, if you think about it, what things governments are expected to do, such as control viruses, take responsibility for human rights in Afghanistan and Burma, allow boys to become girls and vice versa, and things they are understood not to be able to do, such as close borders to illegal immigrants.

Had Charles married Marie Astrid he'd have spared himself and us a world of pain - and answered the Irish Question

I posted a very uncharitable attack on the egregious Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and intended to link to a very uncharitable and very just attack on her by the thrice blessed Douglas Murray, but I failed to do so. Here is the link to the article which appeared under the headline

Meghan Markle is a US culture-war missile aimed at the heart of Britain and Europe

In my post I said she is evil but so was the Duke's mother and almost all men marry their mothers.

I originally welcomed the match despite her being divorced, American and left-wing but my female Facebook friends all saw that she was a wrong 'un immediately and I saw it too in a while. She began at nine by writing a letter to a TV company complaining about an advert that showed a wife washing dishes and continued in her twenties complaining about being ogled.

The world must be peopled, ma'am.

I liked the fact that the duchess is mixed race, which seemed to strengthen the monarchy, but I should have kept to my opinion that princes should marry other princes. 

If only Charles had married Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, necessitating a change to the Act of Succession. I said this to Richard Overy at my admission interview for Cambridge when he asked me what is the answer to the Irish question. I said this would have led Paisley to take Northern Ireland out of the union. This was not something I desired to happen but he rewarded with with an open scholarship

Alas he had gone when I went up and I was left in the hands of an authority on mediaeval Burgundian numismatics.

What a world of pain the pretty blonde Marie-Astrid would have saved the Prince of Wales and England from. She would have conducted herself as she should, however the Prince behaved. And how nice to have Catholics on the throne again after so long.

Instead he married a godless Whig noblewoman with borderline personality disorder.

Belgium

Lord Curzon said that without India England would be a greater Belgium. A greater Belgium sounds to me very like modern Europe.

Julie Burchill said that in the 1970s Britain tried being Belgium and didn't like it.

Meghan and malignant narcissism

Douglas Murray beautifully expresses in this essay his very justified loathing and contempt for Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

I foolishly was first hopeful about the Duke's marriage despite the Duchess being an American and a divorcee and left-wing. My female Facebook friends saw she was a bad'un from the off.

The Duchess of Sussex may be evil, a word I almost never use of anyone, but so was the Duke's mother. 

Men generally marry their mothers, unless they do not marry at all.

I recently had some unpleasant interaction with a malignant narcissist which made me read up on a subject I once knew lots

32 studies find no evidence that lockdowns reduce the numbers of deaths from Covid-19

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is an American free-market think tank with its office in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which has issued publications which portray the risks of climate change as minor and manageable. In October it issued the "Great Barrington Declaration" which argued against lockdowns and for a strategy of achieving herd immunity to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Despite being written by eminent epidemiologists it was scarcely reported.

The AIER has listed 31 scientific studies into the efficacy of lockdowns published last year and this which conclude that there is no evidence, surprisingly enough, that lockdowns reduce the numbers of deaths. 

What our rulers really think

I have tried for years to understand why Brexit makes many people so very angry. 

I know why it makes many Eastern Europeans angry. They want the European Union, a deus ex machina, to rescue them from history and from domination by Russia or Germany. Their natural elites were destroyed by the Bolsheviks. They want anything rather than rule by their own politicians.

Germans think: tie me down before I kill again. Meanwhile the EU enables them to rule Europe (in tandem with France) despite themselves.

France has been enabled by the EEC and then the EU to rule Europe for 64 years, a much longer time than Louis XIV or Napoleon managed. Without England speaking up for the small state and for the small states, France is even more powerful.

But why do so many English people and, even more oddly, Americans feel this way?

It's not about pragmatic reasons, obviously. 

Knut Wittkowski today

"That lockdowns cause more harm then good was well known since end of March (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.28.20036715v1). In the meantime, we have learned about two more side effects: (1) universal mitigation causes more COVID deaths, because it deprives the vulnerable of the advantage from self-isolation while the virus spreads among the young and healthy until HI is reached. (2) Epidemics that last more than 3 months (from "flattening the curve") incubate the resistant strains that cause the next epidemics, which started in Oct/Nov 2020."

Technology and the decline of the nation state

Most people nowadays no longer live in villages, towns or cities but on the internet. 

On the internet nations are an abstract idea.

Some states restrict internet use (China, Vietnam, Russia, countries in the Middle East and in the future the European Union) but only three that I know of (Turkmenistan, Cuba and North Korea) more or less ban it altogether. 

In the democratic countries so far the internet is not linked to territory. 

I could be writing these lines from Bucharest, Bukhara or Timbuktoo. In fact, I am writing this in Bodrum in Turkey. 

Distance has been abolished. Have nations?

Abolishing distance creates many problems. Only the naive imagined that this might not be so. 

People are happy now to work at home, not realising that if they can do their jobs remotely so can people in poorer countries for less money.

An Englishman in Bucharest can live there for decades, speak English at work, with his friends, in shops and restaurants, inform himself through English language sites on the internet and through English language television and never learn Romanian.

I know hundreds of such people.

Americans do the same in Paris.

So do many Arabs in London, perhaps attending a local Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque, though not speaking English is much more limiting than only speaking English.

This state of affairs predates the internet, by the way. Major-General Richard Clutterbuck, the only sociologist I ever came across who was not left-wing, pointed out in the 1980s that because of satellite television and many other things there was no longer a culture in England to which immigrants could be hoped to assimilate.

It was also back in the 1980s that Steve Cohen, a leading English immigration lawyer and author of several books about racism "from a Marxist perspective", said that countries do not belong to the people living in them.

Yet not long ago the world was not globalised. From the first to the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was the only institution in the world that was universal. 

English writers talking about the Koran

Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim, that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage. The word of God, and of the apostle, was diligently recorded by his disciples on palm-leaves and the shoulder-bones of mutton; and the pages without order or connexion, were cast into a domestic chest in the custody of one of his wives.
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 50

Instead of inspiring the blessed inhabitants with a liberal taste for harmony and science, conversation and friendship, he [Mahomet] idly celebrates the pearls and diamonds, the robes of silk, palaces of marble, dishes of gold, rich wines, artificial dainties, numerous attendants, and the whole train of sensual and costly luxury, which becomes insipid to the owner, even in the short period of this mortal life. Seventy-two Houris, or black-eyed girls, of resplendent beauty, blooming youth, virgin purity, and exquisite sensibility, will be created for the use of the meanest believer; a moment of pleasure will be prolonged to a thousand years, and his faculties will be increased a hundred fold, to render him worthy of his felicity. Notwithstanding a vulgar prejudice, the gates of heaven will be open to both sexes, but Mahomet has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands, or disturb their felicity, by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage. 

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 50

Quotations

Laura Kipnes

Sure, there have always been offended people, but those people used to be conservatives. Who cared if they were offended, that was the point. At some point offendability moved its offices to the hip side of town.

Laura Kipnis

By the time #MeToo hit, transgression’s sheen was already feeling pretty tarnished. #MeToo was about a lot of things and among them was a cultural referendum on the myth of male genius, which as thousands of first-person accounts have elaborated over the decades, is pretty frequently accompanied by sexual grabbiness and bad breath. Sexual transgressiveness has always been the perquisite of gross men in power, but there is also an added perk, which is that treating the boundaries of less powerful people as minor annoyances makes insecure men feel like creative geniuses, like artists and rock stars. Post #MeToo, the emblematic transgressor was starting to look less like Vito Acconci at Sonnabend and more like Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Sofitel.

Margaret Thatcher on Today BBC Radio 4 6 June 1987.

‘The fundamental reason of being put on earth is so to improve your character that you are fit for the next world.'

Enoch Powell, Speech to the Royal Society of St George, on St George's Day, April 23rd 1961.

.
There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly,


"What do they know of England who only England know?"

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.

Ursula von der Leyen has “disgraced Europe”

'Die Zeit newspaper's Alan Posener said that “if the British were still EU citizens, they would be like us: instead of having vaccinations, simply waiting for Godot”. Der Spiegel said that the EU had attempted to secure the vaccines in a “hare-brained manner, as if it were a summer sale, a bargain hunt on a whim.” Peter Tiede of the daily Bild newspaper claimed that von der Leyen had “disgraced Europe”.

'Not everyone, however, shares these views. Ellen 't Hoen, is a lawyer and public health advocate at research group Medicines, Laws and Policy, and is former policy director for Médecins sans Frontières’ Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. Speaking to The Lancet, she said people should be cautious before envying the UK's approach. “What is the UK going to gain if other countries in Europe don’t have the vaccine?"'

From an article in The Lancet on Saturday. The answer to Ellen t'Hoen's question is obvious. A schoolboy or girl of six could answer it. A much more interesting question is what does her question mean and what makes her ask it.

Rereading novels

Nabokov said as soon as you have finished a novel you should immediately reread it. I am sure he is right. But I find it almost impossible to read a book at all.

One night in the summer of 2015 I left my telephone in the office and my WiFi wasn’t working at home. I couldn’t get on the internet on desktop or tablets and so I managed 2 chapters of War and Peace.

War and Peace IS ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL, very readable indeed, undoubtedly the best novel I ever read, but I had started it in February to get ready for visiting Russia in May and didn't finish it for almost two years.

The only other book I read in 2015 was a 150 page book with big type by Lucian Boia, "Cum s-a romanizat Romania", which I picked up in a tent selling books while hanging around Vama Veche. I read it while waiting for a friend who was two or three hours late because my telephone was almost out of battery.

Of making many books there is no end and much study wearies the body (Ecclesiastes 12.12), but at least when you read a book you do come to an end. The problem with the internet is that you never reach an end to it. There’s always something else to click on.

Even the pandemic has not led me to read many books, though I read very many articles about Donald Trump.

Does anyone have any tips as to how to read these days? 

I have one. I have given up social media and reading the news and anything political for Lent. 

It sort of works but do I have the willpower to continue it after Lent?

Holidays help. I picked up, packed and read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene for the third time when I went away last summer. 

I was in tears as always, though I almost never cry. 

This reminds me of a Romanian femme fatale, who once asked me if Englishmen ever felt emotion. 

I replied yes, certainly, when we think about the Queen.

I find reading books exceptionally difficult

It’s incredibly important to reread. Nabokov said as soon as you have finished a novel you should reread it. But I find it almost impossible to read a book at all.

One night in the summer of 2015 I left my telephone in the office and my WiFi wasn’t working at home so I couldn’t get on the internet on desktop or tablets and so I managed 2 chapters of War and Peace.

War and Peace IS ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL, very readable indeed, but I had started it in February to get ready for visiting Russia on 1st May and didn't finish it for almost two years.

The only other book I read in 2015 was a 150 page book by Lucian Boia, "Cum s-a romanizat Romania", which I picked up in a tent selling books while hanging around Vama Veche waiting for a friend who was two hours late.

The problem with the internet is that unlike books you never reach an end to it. There’s always something else to click on.

Does anyone have any tips as to how to read these days? I have given up social media and reading the news for Lent.

Governments did nothing about the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 which was much worse than Covid-19

Asian Flu emerged in China early in 1957 and spread by September to the UK, where doctors were “amazed at the extraordinary infectivity of the disease”. 

Some GPs called for the British government to issue a warning about the virus and coordinate measures to deal with it. 

One doctor writing to the BMJ in June 1957 said,

“The public seems under the impression that nothing can be done to prevent the calamity that is threatened by the advance of influenza in the Far East. On the contrary there is a great deal that the Government can do; by acting at once they may save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

These calls were ignored and the press did not make a big thing of the pandemic.

The flu burnt itself out by April 1958, after the deaths of about 20,000 people in the UK and more than 1 million deaths worldwide.

Between 1 and 4 million people died of the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, with half the deaths among individuals aged up to 65 — very much in contrast to Covid-19, 90% of whose victims are 65 or over.  

Life in 1968, as in 1958, continued as normal. 

Daddy and I spent two or three days in bed with the Hong Kong Flu, doing puzzles in my Rupert Bear annual.  

Romania leads the rest of the EU

The Romanian government chose not to impose another lockdown after the one that ended in May and the economy outperformed the rest of the European Union last quarter.

Output not only grew from the previous three months, but surged by more than 10 times what analysts had expected. The expansion of 5.3% puts it ahead of all other EU members to have reported data so far.

Boris is Hillary in drag

I keep saying that Boris Johnson is not Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton in drag, if you can imagine her with eloquence, a sense of humour and a quick mind, which obviously you can't. 

The things he has in common with the Donald are charisma (dread word, Wallace Arnold would say) and the ability to make good jokes, but not ideas or political philosophy.

After he bottled out of his initial, short-lived inclination to try the Swedish policy of going for herd immunity Boris has instituted three lockdowns.

In 2008 when he was Mayor of London he called for an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of (or maybe well over a million) illegal immigrants in London, saying that deporting them from the UK is "just not going to happen". He is right about that last bit. 

He repeated his call for an amnesty in 2013 and in 2015.

Now he has announced that he is in favour of three million Chinese in Hong Kong having the right to settle in the UK. 

Hillary Clinton, eight days before she lost the 2016 election, said that regime change in Syria was her 'top priority'. It was also Boris Johnson's policy as British Foreign Secretary back then and he would happily have helped her achieve it. He rowed back from it after Donald Trump became president and said President Assad could stay for a while. 

Lockdowns seem not to work

The best thing I read recently about the pandemic is this article about Sweden from Spiked. It seems to me pretty much to prove that Sweden did not lose by not having a lockdown.

When Sweden decided not to lockdown in March, we were told it would lead to nearly 100,000 deaths by 1 July. The actual total ended up being 5,490. Infections and deaths were falling from mid-April, pretty much at the same time as in most other European countries with strict lockdowns.

If you click on the link above, you see the estimate of nearly 100,000 Swedish Covid deaths comes from Yale University. Modelling by Professor Neil Ferguson's team at Imperial College, London predicted 85,000 Covid deaths.

Then in the winter Covid came back in Sweden and now is ebbing away again, again without a lockdown.

We have to assume that this illness is to some extent seasonal, which Professor Ferguson assumes it isn't.

By now, eleven months after lockdowns started, there should be proof that they work. There isn't.

"We should have hanged George Washington. He was the worst sort of populist."

I left Facebook and will leave Twitter tomorrow for Lent and perhaps for good. Today I got my first suspension from social media, for twelve hours, for commenting on a post by the  American political opportunist Nikki Haley, praising George Washington as the president in office when the US Constitution was written. 

I commented, as I always repeat, that it was a shame we didn't hang him. I showed some originality by adding that he was the worst sort of populist. In a split second I was suspended for twelve hours. Oh well. 

Magna est veritas et prævalet. Great is the truth, and it prevails.

Everyone else pointed out that Washington wasn't president when the constitution was written. How could the presidency be older than the constitution? She is another inhumanly stupid politician, more stupid than Old Man Biden, Ursula von der Leyen or possibly even Theresa May. 

Most people in Stockholm who died of or with Covid last spring would have died in a few months anyway

More than 70% of people who died with Covid-19 in Sweden, up to the middle of May 2020, were people in elderly care institutions. This is a much higher proportion than in other countries. More people died in Sweden than Norway and Denmark because Sweden had no lockdown, but a very big reason was the failure to look after people in nursing homes. 

As Anders Tegnell, the Swedish chief epidemiologist, pointed out, it is hard to see how a lockdown would have prevented the disease from entering the elderly care homes.

Those who died of Covid-19 in Stockholm’s nursing homes had a 'life-remaining median' somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. Median life expectancy means the age which half of people will die without reaching and half of people will live past.

Most people worldwide who died with Covid-19 were over 80. Many of those, perhaps most, would have died within months anyway. 

Most might not have died of Covid at all, but simply with Covid.

A report on deaths with Covid-19 mentioned on the death certificate in old people's facilities in another Swedish province showed that 75% of the deaths were not caused by Covid-19.

Dr Horatiu Moldovan, the Romanian secretary of state at the Ministry of Health, said back in May that he had examined in detail all Covid related deaths in Romania and 80% of Covid related deaths in Romania were not deaths from Covid. 

Old people, he explained, die because they are old and frail. Once their immune system breaks down they catch every infection going. If Covid-19 is going they catch that.

YouGov poll in Great Britain

 Britons think facing up to ten years in jail for lying on a passenger locator form in order to avoid quarantine is...

Too harsh - 30% About right - 51% Not harsh enough - 13%