Emily Maitlis must be fired, not Dominic Cummings

The BBC says a monologue by Emily Maitlis on the Dominic Cummings affair last night on Newsnight

 "did not meet our standards of due impartiality".

She opened last night's Newsnight programme with the words: 

"Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that and it’s shocked the Government cannot.”

She went to my college, after my time, and she reminds me a lot of annoying women I knew at Cambridge, but in my undergraduate days and for years afterwards I was open minded about leftists and admired them for eschewing convention. A Tory Cambridge woman friend however was right when she said the left-wingers were just as conventional in their own way. In fact they are more so - very closed minded, very hive minded.

My Cambridge Tory friend made it to a big house in Belgravia but ended as the most moaning of Remoaners. She voted Liberal Democrat in the last election.

Miss Maitlis behaved appallingly to the sainted Rod Liddle and the admirable Hungarian Foreign Minister. For these performances and her words about Dominic Cummings she should be fired. 

She also gave a touching but clearly left-wing speech about inequality and the virus, but the right seem to have accepted that inequality is for some reason a bad thing.

Ann Coulter told her less than 24 hours before the US presidential election in 2016 that Donald Trump was the only candidate who was standing up to the ruling class at his rallies. Miss Maitlis asked, with the patient look of someone trying to understand the mating habits of an unfamiliar species of grasshoppers, if it was the personality of Trump which made him an attractive option to voters.


Ann Coulter: 

“I think I just said the exact opposite. I’m talking about his issues. No-one is voting for Trump because of his personality.”

US media is desperate to turn good COVID-19 news into bad

Why is the left in favour of lockdowns? Why?

Some on the right are too, but everyone is on the left. In America the reason is that they want to use lockdowns to help defeat Donald Trump, who never believed in them and wants to end them (it's not in his power though).

Anti-Trump journalists (that is to say, almost all American journalists) convinced themselves that the virus and his chaotic response to it will make Mr. Trump unelectable. The contrary is much more likely. 

The public will remember with gratitude that he originally dismissed the virus as just a flu and later argued for ending lockdowns. In between he was scared by the virus, as everyone was.

Once the American quality papers were trustworthy, factual and very dull. Not any more. An article in the Spectator American edition about the way the American media distorts the virus news like everything else reader makes very funny reading. I quote.

On May 17, the New York Times crushed its competition with the most audacious effort yet to turn good news into bad. ‘NEW CASES IN US SLOW, POSING RISK OF COMPLACENCY,’ read the lead headline in the print edition. Sub headlines further limned the gloomy picture: ‘TRAJECTORY UNCERTAIN,’ ‘Spikes Feared As the Very Steps That Curbed the Virus Are Lifted.’ Do not stop being fearful, in other words. While the virus risk may go down, complacency risk replaces it, leaving us as threatened as before. The only proper posture is to shelter in place permanently.


The body of the Times’s story drove home the dangerous new reality. The nation had reached a ‘perilous moment,’ the paper alleged, since businesses were reopening ‘despite the risk of a resurgence.’ So it is ‘perilous’ when cases rise, and ‘perilous’ when they fall. One of the Times’s preferred epidemiologists, Columbia University’s Jeffrey Shaman, conceded that the decline ‘is something good to see.’ But what we are also seeing, Shaman said, is a ‘lot of places right on the edge of controlling the disease.’ The fact that some jurisdictions are registering sharp case declines while others are registering less or no decline is hardly a reason for fear. Differing points on the curve at any given time are to be expected.

The Times managed to eke out another cause for concern: communities that have succeeded in controlling their cases ‘have little idea how long [that success] will last.’ Ignorance of the future is the condition of all non-omniscient beings. Now, however, uncertainty about the future is a further reason that the reopenings were premature.

It wasn’t until the article was wrapping up that the Times got around to reporting that, oh, by the way, daily deaths are also declining. Deaths are the criterion that people care most about and one that is not influenced by testing rates. For the Times’s reporters, however, that drop is an afterthought.

The case against lockdowns must be won so that they never happen again

‘Our assessment now... is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures.’ Camilla Stoltenberg, the head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health

The Norwegian public health authority has published a report concluding the virus was never spreading as fast as feared and was on the way out before the lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and it would not take much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way out.’

In other words the lockdown was unnecessary. We know that the virus was also on the way out in Italy and Spain before the lockdown started.
What is essential is that when this is over the world recognises that lockdowns were a tragic mistake that must never happen again. 

Who is to decide this? The World Health Organisation would be the obvious body except they are responsible for this terrible tragedy.

The reason most of the world (but not the Far East outside China) went into lockdown is because the virus started in China, the Chinese Communists ordered a draconian lockdown and the Chinese lapdog, the the WHO, praised China for doing so on January 29th.

China had not imposed a travel ban till January 23rd, after possibly five million people had left Wuhan to spend the Chinese New Year elsewhere. 

According to the Chinese the epidemic was penned into the province of Hubei. This is obviously a lie, but if very large numbers had died across China presumably we'd have heard. Of the foreigners deported from Wuhan, quarantined in their respective countries and then tested only 0.6% tested positive.

What does this mean? That the virus was not nearly as contagious as we thought. It leapt from country to country quickly but did not spread in an exponential fashion, what we feared at the start.

Places that locked down late or ended lockdowns early like Georgia in the USA did not see big numbers of deaths. In Sweden the number of daily deaths is falling and Sweden never had a lockdown. The total number of deaths in Sweden will be no more than five thousand, out of a population of ten million, which proves lockdowns were unnecessary. 

It would be much lower had the Swedes isolated their old people's homes. It would be much lower in New York had the Governor of New York ensured this was done. Yet Governor Cuomo is a hero.That's how politics works.

I quote Toby White in a debate about the lockdown in the American edition of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator):

....it now looks almost certain that the outbreak in Germany, which Angela Merkel described as the worst crisis to afflict the country since the Second World War, will kill fewer people than flu did in Germany in 2017-18.

One reason COVID-19 has killed far fewer people in Germany than the UK in spite of it having a larger population is because the Germans have been better at protecting elderly people, particularly nursing home residents. That’s also one of the reasons Florida has fewer COVID fatalities per 100,000 than New York.

Unlike Andrew Cuomo, Ron DeSantis did not sanction discharging COVID patients back into care homes without testing them first to make sure they were negative. That practice has been widespread and the blame partly lies with epidemiologists touting apocalyptic computer models showing healthcare systems being overwhelmed. To give just one example, the shonky computer model cooked up by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College predicted that demand for critical care in Sweden would exceed supply fortyfold if the country didn’t shut down. As you know, Sweden never locked up its citizens and the healthcare system still hasn’t been overwhelmed.

I think your President will turn out to have got more calls right during this crisis than our Prime Minister, including singing the praises of hydroxychloroquine. His gut instincts about the virus — not that bad — and the shutdown — needless act of self-harm — are right.

 Toby Young is right on that last point. 

Cummings is thrashed

Dominic Cummings is best known to people outside the British Isles for being the man portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film Brexit: The Uncivil War as the architect of the victory by Leave in the Brexit referendum.  A Romanian data consultant told me it was essential viewing to discover the power of data and the uses that can be made of it. 

To some extent Dominic Cummings is the architect of the Leave victory, along with Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Angela Merkel and that now forgotten figure David Cameron. In the UK Dominic Cummings is therefore hated not only by the left but by the Remain establishment that rules the country.

He is now in very hot water for travelling 260 miles with his wife, the journalist Mary Wakefield, and their son to leave them at a cottage near his sister who had offered to look after the boy, because his mother showed symptoms of Covid-19. 

This is within the British lockdown rules. The deputy chief medical officer for England said from the start of the lockdown that ill parents with a small child created “exceptional circumstances” which justified leaving the house, which obviously must be right, but the media is out to get Dominic Cummings and has got much of the public on its side.

Dominic Cummings and his wife both went down badly with Covid-19. The strange thing is that had they driven four miles to leave their son with his aunt no-one would have cared, but 260 miles in the privacy of their car for some reason makes this a grave offence.

We learnt from Dominic Cummings' very nervous interview with the media in the rose garden at No 10 Downing St that he was always in favour of the lockdown, not opposed as the media had falsely claimed. This shows the media in a bad light and him in a bad one too.

What should be clear to everyone, in all parties, is that at this moment Dominic Cummings is badly needed. We saw how few talents the government has when Boris went into hospital. 

In the current emergency this is no time to make political capital but of course political journalists who have been forced to try and largely fail to understand epidemiology for months want a crisis to get their teeth into.

What matters when all this is over is that the lockdown is shown to have been a terrible mistake. Otherwise we shall have more lockdowns when more epidemics appear. Instead, the British seem to have a lust for enforcing lockdowns, spiced with chippiness and class prejudice.

An unknown junior minister at the Scotland Office resigned yesterday because Dominic Cumming's view of the lockdown rules was 'not shared by the vast majority of people'. He had backed Remain, of course. 35 Tory MPs have called on Cummings to consider his position but one told the Spectator they will not get rid of him until at least 70 do. 


I said when the father of the lockdown, Prof. Neal Ferguson, was caught breaking the lockdown to visit someone else's wife that that wouldn't matter if he were a useful government adviser (he wasn't and unlike Mr Cummings he broke the rules). I hope for the country's sake that Mr Cummings stays, but Tories are terrified of being considered elitists who consider they are exempt from the rules with which they bind ordinary people.

The “head of site integrity” at Twitter

Twitter spokesman Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) justifies labeling @realDonaldTrump tweets as misinformation: "Our goal is... to limit the spread of potentially harmful & misleading content."

The problem is, Yoel Roth once called Trump "actual Nazis" & a "racist tangerine." pic.twitter.com/dlbHI0qNCm

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) May 27, 2020

Washington (CNN Business):

For the first time, Twitter called tweets from Donald Trump "potentially misleading" — a decision that prompted the president to accuse the social media platform of election meddling. 
On Tuesday, Twitter highlighted two of Trump's tweets that falsely claimed mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud, appending a message the company has introduced to combat misinformation and disputed or unverified claims.
"Get the facts about mail-in ballots," read the message beneath each tweet. It linked to a curated fact-check page the platform had created filled with further links and summaries of news articles debunking the assertion.

Reading the international press from 2016 onwards or listening to the BBC you would think raising questions about postal ballot voter fraud is wicked demagoguery on the part of Donald Trump, intended to 'suppress voting' by non-whites and other Democrats. In fact, voter fraud does happen with postal votes in the USA and the UK. It is a very big problem, as is the way Twitter deals with conservative opinions. 

Donald Trump is not just fighting the media, academia, Wall St and Hollywood, he is also fighting the social media. The left's weapon, whose effectiveness is proven, is to accuse the right of racism or sexism or other forms of discrimination. Instead of fighting this the right retaliates by accusing the left of those things too, which is not a good strategy.

Mr Roth is now being accused by someone on Twitter of sending racist tweets. And so it goes.

Yoel Roth, head of site integrity for Twitter, has posted several racist tweets. This man should not be in this position

— Valaria Constantino (@junkfruit77) May 27, 2020

Illegal immigration and national security

"The crisis caused by mass immigration has a decisive effect on Hungary's security. The crisis has made it clear that unexpected, uncontrolled, mass and illegal migration is a new type of challenge that can even jeopardize the security and stability of the European continent, while posing a range of risks to national security, public safety and public health. Given global processes, the challenge must be met in the long run." Hungary's newly published National Security Strategy

My Syrian refugee friends, who are Christians, told me years ago that refugees are the biggest threat to European security. I wrote about this in 2015 and quote from the article I wrote.

Admiral Christopher Parry, one of the Royal Navy’s cleverest strategists, warned in a paper in 2006 that Britain and Europe faced being overrun by mass migration from the Third World within 30 years, because of population growth and environmental destruction. The Internet, cheap flights and free international phone calls would hinder assimilation. (Is there anything left to assimilate to, nowadays?)
He compared the plight of the West to that of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The Blair Government liked to encourage senior public servants to indulge in blue sky thinking but Admiral Parry had taken it too far. He was silenced and accused of racism.

Aris Roussinos on the man who predicted 2020

I forgot to recommend this essay in Unherd about a leading intellectual of the French New Right of whom I had scarcely heard called Guillaume Faye. One of his books was on Michael Gove's shelf, alongside a David Irving book which incensed leftists on Twitter. How unpleasant, sanctimonious and vindictive much of the Left is. 

I have quit the Augean stables of Twitter. It is useful, I suppose, but very depressing to realise how many fools there are in the world. I quit Facebook too, which is the thief of time.

In case you don't click on the rather long article here are some key quotations.

'Actively supporting Third World national liberation movements, decrying globalisation for its homogenising effects, and sounding urgent warnings of looming ecological collapse, de Benoist and Faye anticipated the anti-globalisation movement of the millennium, before it petered out into commodified pseudo-protest.

Sweden now has highest daily number of Covid-19 deaths in the world

Sweden which did not have a lockdown now has the highest daily number of deaths of people who have the Covid-19 virus. What is more important is the total number is not unacceptably high (under 4,000 for a country of 10 million inhabitants) and the number of daily deaths from Covid-19 is falling. 

Anglo-Swedish journalist Pelle Neroth Taylor tells me:

Swedish deaths are falling, though maybe not quite as fast as the lockdown countries. About a 50 day died [last] week, which is maybe half the April figure. If you scale up it's about 300 at UK Italy pop levels. The point is if you add up all these deaths during the period of decline it won't add up to much on total numbers, even if it is higher for the next three weeks than rest of Europe. Doesn't invalidate the case against lockdown. Wittkowski and the sceptics are more is less right. It comes and goes in about six weeks or eight weeks and that's it.

When I first blogged about Knut Wittkowski I did not do so because I thought he was right but simply because I thought he was interesting. In fact at one point weeks later I worried that his interesting ideas might be dangerous and I considered archiving the post about him, which attracted a lot of clicks. I don't think he is right about everything now, but it is now obvious to me that he is certainly a lot closer to the truth than the newspapers. 

Adevarul makes a good point today when it says:

The problem with the “Swedish model” was not that citizens were able to take to the streets freely, but that officials did not properly train nursing home staff, did and still do too few tests, and were wrong when they decided not to place in quarantine tourists returning to the country from skiing in March. The consequence of these decisions was a higher number of deaths, according to an analysis by the newspaper Expressen, based on the opinions of Swedish experts.

By the way, Knut Wittkowski would strongly agree about nursing homes. He has made the same point about the USA.

Adrian Tirca on the Serbian roots of Wallachian architecture

'The roots of the Wallachian style of architecture are Serbian. In Romania it is generally regarded as Byzantine, but Byzantine architecture had many flavours and adaptations. The one that made it to the Principality of Wallachia was the Serbo-Byzantine variant, imported probably also along with several Serbian monks and craftsmen after the fall of the Serbian Empire (the most famous of whom is Nicodemus of Tismana).

'The earliest Orthodox church in the Principality of Wallachia, which is still extant, is St Nicholas of the Princely Court in Curtea de Argeș, built in the 1350s. It is built in the Serbo-Byzantine style and it set the standard from which the subsequent Wallachian style developed, with the added veranda and the steeples stylized in Armenian-Georgian fashion.


'It is perhaps natural that the locus of prestige for Wallachian architecture was the Serbian Empire, since it started in the 1350s when the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a small territory around Constantinople and the Bulgarian Empire was just being broken into fiefdoms by the Ottoman advance. It was in that brief period that the Orthodox hegemon was Serbia, since the Russian principalities were under the Golden Horde and the Byzantine and Bulgarian empires were crumbling to the Ottomans.'

Quotations

"Eternity is not the very ancient, which existed before time began, but the entirely other, which is related to every passing age as its today and is really contemporary with it; it is not barred off into a 'before' and 'after'; it is much more the power of the present in all time." Pope Benedict XVI

“This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.” Oscar Wilde's last words

"No man should marry who does not expect to propagate intelligence." Dr. Johnson

“I didn’t think it would take only three months for me to be proved absolutely right.” Jeremy Corbyn, who thinks the Conservative government's spending plans to cope with Coronavirus have vindicated his spending plans at the general election

Mother tells that her 11 y-o, who likes fairies and My Little Pony, was made to define "hardcore pornography" and similar terms in school. The principle defends the material, saying it's in accordance with government sex ed guidelines.https://t.co/ojL5mtB1Yx

— Tiina Wiik 🇫🇮 (@SwanOfTuonela) May 24, 2020

If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg

I share Churchill's admiration for Robert E. Lee. I am always attracted to lost causes.

In an article written in the 1930s Churchill writes as a historian in an imaginary world in which the Confederates won the US Civil War, reflecting on what might have happened had they not. I read it with delight when I was 8, in a bound copy of several issues of a history magazine which I bought cheap at a market.

Last time I looked only extracts were on the net but and by chance I just found that it is now available complete. 

It is a very clever exercise in imaginary history and a perfectly plausible one. Reading it now in 2020 I see it contains lines which would almost certainly not be published in a respectable magazine these days.

There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the colour question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honourable status in a common wealth, destined eventually to become almost world-wide.

Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had at that time been followed immediately by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpet-bagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored coloured vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honoured forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry farce of black legislatures attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”

Churchill was always an Edwardian progressive and imperialist and therefore certainly was a racist by the standards of his own day, as Andrew Roberts pointed out in his wonderful essay on Churchill's immigration policy in Eminent Churchillians. 

By the way, Andrew Roberts quotes (from Harold Macmillan's diary) Churchill saying in cabinet in January 1955

Keep England white - that would be a good election slogan.

However, thinking the Confederate cause was right is not racist. To me it is simply common sense and humanity. I think it was unforgivable that Lincoln launched a war that cost 700,000 lives to keep the South in the USA against its will. It should not be forgiven him, at any rate. Slavery is one of the sins on which the USA is built, but the bloody subjugation of the South by the North is another. It was the moment when the USA ceased to be a republic, except in form, and became an empire. Everything changed after that.

Quotations

'Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul'. Margaret Thatcher talking to the Sunday Times on 1 May 1981

'The profound thing that Cardinal Manning said to me was this: all human conflict is ultimately theological.' Belloc

'All philosophy is disguised psychology.' Nietzsche


'Politics, as opposed to science, does not reward the correction of
mistakes, given that correcting a mistake also entails admitting to

The end of the strangest period in world history since when?

The terraces reopen in Romania on Monday week, June 1. On June 15, the interiors of restaurants will re-open with special rules about distancing. The madness is coming to an end.

The numbers of infections and deaths are falling almost everywhere, whether or not they have lockdowns.

Interestingly, the US states that haven’t imposed lockdowns - there are 5 of them, I think - are coming clear of the virus at pretty much the same rate and at the same time as those that did.

The number of reported cases (an unreliable statistic in any country) only continues to increase by more than 2% per day in the Indian sub-continent, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia and Mexico. We shall see what happens there.

It may be that in the end the loathed and derided President Bolsonaro of Brazil will look justified in his attempt to prevent his country having a lockdown (the states imposed one anyway).

In some ways allocating blame for the Corona-19 panic is pointless, but it is also necessary to understand how this folly, worthy of the ironic pen of Gibbon, happened. 

The people most to blame for this world catastrophe, even more than the Chinese Communists, are the WHO, which idiotically and unforgivably said the virus in Wuhan had a 3% mortality rate, and the Western media which simply refused to report distinguished epidemologists and others who dissented from the need for lockdown.

Another quiz

Here is another quiz. This is Bucharest this afternoon. The biggest building in Europe is on the horizon and you can just make out a cupola of the half-built cathedral. Can you spot the spaceman?

Gad Saad is a Canadian evolutionary psychologist and philosopher

We need to stay locked up until we have a vaccine against all existing viruses and all possible viruses that we've yet to discover. Short of that, @realDonaldTrump is Himmler. Because remember, science.

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) May 14, 2020

The Political Refugee from the Global Village's (post-)lockdown quiz

I was invited to a virtual pub quiz on SKYPE on Sunday. Everyone was British except one American Anglophile and the questions were weighted accordingly. 

We all had to find and ask the others ten questions. These were mine. 

If you want to do the quiz please do so and please don't Google. I'll give the answers in 24 hours.

1. What is the only word in the English language of Lithuanian origin?

2. When the painter Whistler was told that he and Velasquez were the two greatest painters in history, what was his reply?

3. Which American general advised always be polite, be professional and have a plan for killing everybody in the room?

4. Which three British prime ministers have written and published novels?

5. What do Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan), Bela Lugosi (Dracula) and Edward G Robinson have in common, apart from being Hollywood film stars from long ago?

6. Which famous world leader deflowered Zsa Zsa Gabor, so she said?

7. Prince Charles is the second oldest heir to the throne in English history. Which heir to the throne was older than he is now?

8. Had Napoleon invaded England who would have commanded the British army that confronted him - and who would have been second in command?

9. Who was the last British king to lead troops into battle?

10. Who was the last European king to lead troops into battle?

I tried to make them about as hard as University Challenge in 1984 but was told they are harder. The others scored pretty badly on my round. I scored badly on theirs which asked questions like who was in Oasis. Only the American asked civilised University Challenge type questions. Quizes have become more democratic since 1984, like Jermyn St, Savile Row and, I am told, handbags.


I remember Bamber Gascoigne telling me that general knowledge was a very narrow field but I think it has morphed and is less about kings and Greek gods than in 1984. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni, as we used to say on University Challenge when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister consule Planco.

One is not a monarchist for reasons

'A monarchy is its own ideology.' Mark Steyn

One is not a monarchist for reasons. Monarchists despise reasons just as no-one has a reason for loving sunsets or the paintings of Claude Lorrain. But practical reasons for a monarchy are as many as the grains of Libyan sands. If you exhaust all the others, Romania supplies another desertful.

Quotations

Marijuana is legal and haircuts are against the law. It took half a century but Hippies finally won.

— RUTH BUZZI (@Ruth_A_Buzzi) May 16, 2020

The city lies sleeping;
The morn, to deplore it,
May dawn on it weeping:
Sullenly, slowly,
The black plague flew o'er it,—
Thousands lie lowly;
Tens of thousands shall perish—
The living shall fly from
The sick they should cherish:

The future is Belgian

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

Julie Burchill in the early 1980s said Britain tried being Belgium and didn't like it. But even after Brexit we and every European country are headed towards cantonisation between different ethnic groups. At least Great Britain has a strong culture which will absorb incomers, which Belgium lacks.

Covid's Metamorphoses

If the Covid-19 virus had not been identified would the deaths from it have passed unnoticed?

It's just an interesting and important question. I don't have an answer. I do know that few noticed the 40,000 excess deaths from respiratory disease in the UK two years ago. 

Dr Wolfgang Wodarg said that the deaths would have passed unnoticed had there not been a test for the virus, back at the start of all this. I thought he sounded very cranky indeed then, and he may well be, but people like him seem to have got a lot right and the experts whom governments follow may have been the cranks. Think Neil Ferguson's very cranky and indecipherable modelling, which scared Boris into locking down the UK. (Allegedly, Professor Ferguson then piled Pelion on Ossa by giving the virus to Boris, the Secretary of State for Health and the Cabinet Secretary.)

If the Covid-19 virus had not been identified, the doctors in Italy would not have panicked and dragged infected people unnecessarily into hospitals. Eastern European care workers would not have fled Italy leaving care homes short of staff. A crisis in geriatric care in Lombardy would still have happened and some thousands of old people would have died, but there was such a crisis two years ago when lots of old people died of a bad flu.

Dr Wodarg says the WHO is a very corrupt organisation and he is right about that. He says pharma companies are very corrupt and that is true, but I do not see how big pharma is to blame for the virus panic. Romanians like conspiracy theories and many tell me they think big pharma likes the virus scare in order to sell a vaccine. I certainly do not buy that. 

Dr Wodarg, however, says the virus will change before a vaccine is found. That sounds very likely.

Dr John Lee is a recently retired professor of pathology. His article in the Spectator on May 8, Ten reasons to end the lockdown now, is worth reading. Here are some nuggets. 

We don’t really know how many people die of flu each year, because the surveillance relies mainly on surrogate measures rather than actual testing, but the estimated number for 2014/15, the highest of recent years, was 28,330. So yes, Covid is a nasty new disease. But even if you assume 40,000 Covid deaths, its death toll is in the same ballpark as diseases we live with, not something so extraordinary as to justify the lockdown reaction. 

The majority of cases are asymptomatic. The most common symptoms are not fever, cough, headache and respiratory symptoms; they are no symptoms at all. The typical case does not suffer respiratory fibrosis; the disease leaves no mark. Somewhere around 99.9 per cent of those who catch the disease recover. Of those unlucky enough to die, over 90 per cent have pre-existing conditions and were anyway approaching the end of their lives. To say this is not being uncaring: it is simply a fact of life that older people are more likely to die in any event, and especially more likely to die from new types of infection.

Many counties with very different approaches to lockdown seem to have similar curves, in so far as their different testing and recording of the virus allows meaningful comparison. Are the curves a result of our actions or are they just a manifestation of the way this virus is coming into equilibrium with its new human hosts? The curves on ships affected by the virus seem similar to the population curves too. It’s easy to make plausible-sounding arguments that what we are doing 'must' be slowing the spread. But Sweden’s model of voluntary social distancing seems equally effective, but with much lower costs. 

The vast majority of people under 65, and almost everyone under 50, will be no more inconvenienced by this disease than by a cold.

An earlier article by Dr Lee pointed out how the purpose of lockdowns morphed from preventing a crisis in hospitals to preventing deaths and was published under a headline which was a glorious pun, Covid's Metamorphoses. I  nicked it. Plagiarism is not only committed by Romanian politicians.

Many people think we are all going to catch this virus - Knut Wittkowski for example. Frau Merkel said at the start of this strange historical event that 70 percent of people would get it and the British Chief Medical Officer seemed to expect something like that. 

Dr Lee says it was assumed that 80 per cent of the population would rapidly catch the disease, when in fact 15 per cent seems nearer the mark. He doesn't say whether he thinks somewhere around 15 percent will be the final figure, possibly for the good and sufficient reason that he does not know. It could be so.

My hunch is that the virus is receding for reasons we do not know and which might be because of warm weather. (Singapore near the equator has cases, yes I know.) 

If we end the lockdowns in Europe now things can still be saved. Europe takes two weeks off work at Christmas nowadays - this six week pause can be made up. 

But politicians must admit they got things wrong, no doubt for defensible reasons, and must set the people free now.

I can't believe this is happening again after that awful lockdown in 2018. Everybody seems to have forgotten it. pic.twitter.com/3h2HHSeDiD

— Martin (@timpers7) May 17, 2020

YouTube removed a video of Knut Wittkowski

As a footnote (headnote) to the last two paragraphs of my last post, I now learn Knut Wittkowski has told the New York Times that YouTube removed a video of him expressing his views about the virus, after it had achieved more than 1.3 million views.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has told CNN.

“Anything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy,” 

Facebook has been working with state governments in California, New Jersey and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-quarantine events. 

Twitter removed two tweets by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Dr Wittkowski is not a political figure in any way and his views have no political colour. I do not know if people like him will benefit from whatever President Trump had in mind when he tweeted today, in reply to the irrepressible conservative journalist Michelle Malkin.

The lockdown has been a big mistake, obviously

A protest is taking place in Piata Victoriei, in front of the Romanian government building, against the lockdown which ended yesterday. 

The police have no law with which to disperse the crowds of unmasked citizens, not observing social distancing, who would have been arrested on Thursday. The government had not been expecting this.

Romanians were very obedient during the lockdown, not because they are a law abiding people but because they fear the authorities (something quite different) and have a lot of experience in obeying orders. But they also value freedom far more than the English, who want the lockdown to carry on, it seems indefinitely, and inform on their neighbours who go out to meet people illegally.

Americans too believe in freedom (think of gun control) and this is one of the many things Western Europeans find incomprehensible and repulsive about them.

In Holland the death rate (numbers of people in the population who die of or with the virus) only reaches 0.1% of the population when we get to those aged 70 or over. 

Is this because they stayed at home? Apparently not, if New York's experience is a guide. 

Governor Cuomo of New York State has said:

“This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly,the people [hospitalised with the virus] were at home. We thought maybe they were taking public transportation and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

By this he meant they were infected while observing the lockdown strictly and not leaving the house.

Governments say they are following ‘the science’, but the scientists are bitterly at odds with one another. This is not remarkable. It is the human condition, but politicians rarely studied the hard sciences and do not know that.

Many epidemologists have said that the lockdown is a waste of time and these ideas are nothing if not newsworthy, but the mainstream media simply do not mention them. Why not?

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski, for example, about whom I have blogged, has been completely ignored. He has now finally been interviewed by the ex-Trotskyite, sort of libertarian magazine Spiked, saying we should open up completely and forget abut the virus panic. 

They only interview him now that his ideas no longer seem dangerous or crazy. 

Nick Robinson of the BBC has tweeted about the value of journalists who ask searching questions. This is exactly what they rarely do. 

They are fallen creatures, as we all are, but their sloth, timidity, fear of causing offence among their peers and lack of intellectual curiosity is incredible.

We shall miss the office if it dies

Will the Coronavirus pandemic (apparently it is not a pandemic, because too few people have been infected so far, but let that pass) be something everyone will remember for generations? 

Yes. 

Will it make huge changes to the world economy, to politics, to human nature? Virginia Woolf said, "On or around December 1910, human character changed". Will it change again?

Who knows?

What we can be sure of is that it will accelerate changes that were happening anyway. Sales of newspapers will never recover, for example, and anyway they were anachronistic. 

In Romania they never caught on in a big way after the revolution and people used to get their news from television. Now they get it from the internet. This terrifies those who rule us because they cannot control the internet, mostly thanks to the US First Amendment protecting free speech.

It will also change forever the old fashioned habit of people travelling into offices. 

Will offices as we know them even exist in ten years? The old offices of filing cabinets, tea ladies, people smoking at their desks and drinking at lunch are gone. The old Romanian offices of twenty years ago, pullulating with flirtation and office affairs, where cognac was offered to guests at business meetings, are also gone. 

I wrote about 1990s Romanian office life here.

Lucy Kellaway, who used to mock office life in a column in the Financial Times (I never found her funny), now says we shall miss it if it dies. She makes some very good points. The office imposes discipline on the most undisciplined (I know this), even if the firm is a very small one and it creates rituals. Rituals are essential to life and give it its meaning.

The most important thing — which should make the office less an employer’s white elephant than its biggest bargain — is that it gives work its meaning. Most of what passes for work in offices is pretty meaningless, and the best way to kid yourself it matters is to do it alongside other people intent on doing the same.

Hidden in the plaster in a wall in the Constanta Casino

I wish the evil deeds of the far left were as well known as those of the far right.

Workers restoring the casino in Constanta have found a 70-year-old message from political prisoners hidden in the plaster. It simply said that on 31 December, 1951, political prisoners were restoring the casino, naming the architect in charge, Joja Constantin, the chief builder, and a dozen other workers.


“This was a cry for help, written between tears and suffering by 14 of the 100 prisoners who worked to restore the casino after it was bombed during World War II,” the city hall said.


“This is testimony for the future, written on a piece of paper ripped from a bag of cement and incontestable proof of the past (which was) left behind in the hope that one day the families and friends will know that on December 31, 1951, these people were alive and working to rebuild the casino.”

"This is testimony for the future, written on a piece of paper ripped from a bag of cement and incontestable proof of the past, left behind in the hope that one day the families and friends will know that on December 31, 1951, these people were alive and working to rebuild the casino."

Quotations

'I think Britain is a much, much better place than when I first came here [in 1973]. It’s more cosmopolitan and worldly, and I love that. So I was disappointed they voted to leave, but on the other hand… I keep reading these opinion pieces saying Britain shot itself in the head and I think, actually, no. Britain handled Brexit really, really well given that it was such a 50-50 thing. Where are the gilets jaunes? We can disagree ferociously but we are not going to start punching each other. Considering how finely divided the country was, I think it has been pretty civilised. It’s got a little fractious at times but… Look at the Basque separatists. Here, there weren’t any violent protests, we didn’t have to get tear gas out or rubber bullets or anything. Every-body was pretty good about it.'
Bill Bryson talking to Leaf Arbuthnot in the Spectator

Coleridge said 'the theologians tell us that souls have no sex, but I wonder. I very much wonder.'

Great quote from @RobertWargas ‘If I walk into a DC cocktail party I can instantly tell who the conservative is because he’s not saying anything.’ Too risky. https://t.co/j0h0yCob1n

— Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) May 13, 2020

Odd that in all the Coronavirus coverage and commentary (most of it utterly tedious) we have had no theological discussion of what it all means.

— Xander Lucie-Smith (@ALucieSmith) May 15, 2020

What fools we have been

Toma commented on my blog that deaths in Romania in March 2020 were 298 lower than in March 2019 and 411 lower in February 2020 compared to February 2019.

This puts the reported one thousand Covid-19 related deaths into proportion. It would have been probably three thousand without lockdown. I am told that people are saying loved ones died of Covid-19 to get free burials paid for by EU and that the WHO tells Romania to count all deaths of people who have Coronavirus as deaths from Coronavirus.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is an excellent medicine against all viruses, especially in the yummy form of sun dried tomatoes and, little as I like wearing them in towns, long walks wearing shorts. 

I remember a man writing to the Times that he had told his son that he had to wear short trousers to get Vitamin D. He found himself faced by his son refusing to eat green vegetables because he got all the Vitamin D he needed from his arms and legs - and begging his father to wear shorts. 

That was in the early 80s but even then some patresfamilias were accustomed to bestriding the world in shorts and cooking barbecues on patios.

The biggest problem Europe faces goes unmentioned

“We are losing a city of 15,000, 16,000 people per year just by the fact that we have 15,000, 16,000 more deaths than births. For a country of around 4m, that is a lot, right? Plus we have freedom of movement now."

'"We really did a lot in terms of demographic politics, tax, childcare, amounts of money that we give to parents for motherhood, etc — we are doing as much as we can. But I think we should do something at the European level."

These words are those of Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković in an interview at the end of last year with the Financial Times. You may be forgiven for not knowing that Croatia holds the EU presidency. Croatia is the fifth-fastest shrinking country in the world and wanted to put demographics and declining birth-rates at the centre of her presidency but no-one noticed, even before the virus came upon us. They gave a party and nobody came.

The average age of women in the EU at first childbirth is 29. Only in Romania and Bulgaria is it as low as 26. In Spain and Italy it is 31.  Greece 30. The post-Communist countries have the youngest average ages. In Russia, by marked contrast, it is 24.6.

In 1990 it was 25 in Romania, Hungary, East Germany, 26 in Greece, Poland, the USSR and Czechoslovakia and lowest in Bulgaria at 25.

Yesterday

Free at last! Naturally an overcast cool morning. I wandered into the Mavrogheni church by the National Peasant Museum, a place with unhappy associations for me. A service was going on. I didn't know that the church dates from 1787 or rather the very beautiful iconostasis does. How blessed the Orthodox are to have so beautiful a liturgy and not have sermons about economics or the climate. Brâncuși sang in the choir as a student. 

'Using lockdown as an excuse to choke the human spirit'

News coverage of the virus pandemic in the West is entwined with the contemporary Western obsession about race. Here is an example of race-baiting in the New York Times. I quote from the footnote to an article in Unherd by Matthew Crawford who is described, which means he describes himself, as a philosopher and mechanic. The footnote is more interesting than the article.

"On 1 May, the New York Times featured a slide show at the top of its homepage with eight images of Covid. Of these, four showed persons of color in the developing world wearing masks, in scenes tinged with despair yet showing heroic mutual care. One more was of a lonely transit worker disinfecting the New York subway, acting in the public interest. The remaining three showed the following: 1. Mask-less white males in a gym in the backward state of Georgia, lifting weights — to maintain their toxic masculinity, presumably. 2. A telephoto-crowded beach in Orange County littered with careless, mask-less people frolicking in a sea of white privilege. 3. A sputtering redneck in Michigan, again maskless, confronting a line of masked police and no doubt spewing the ‘rona straight into their faces. However novel the novel Corona virus may be, the objective of the Nation’s Newspaper of Record appears to be to fold this emergency into the longstanding pseudo-emergency of race that has been their pole star since about 2014."

Lockdowns have been proven to be a terrible mistake

'And thorough research in New York City, where there has been the greatest concentration of occurrences of the illness in North America, well beyond that city’s proportionate share of the U.S. population, reveals that two-thirds of infections have been contracted by people who have been observing the shutdown and staying at home.'

'We know from Sweden what happens when the population is adequately warned and restaurants and theatres and sporting events are somewhat thinned but essentially everything goes on close to normal: the fatality rate rises to about 2.5 times the rate of Canada and perhaps 20 per cent above the United States, and 90 per cent of Sweden’s deaths from this virus occur in people 70 years old or above. Every death is a sadness and premature and avoidable deaths are tragedies, but putting between a fifth and a third of the population in grave financial danger and at risk of ancillary conditions that can also be deadly, to reduce the mortal incidence of the virus from 320 people in one million over the whole population to 200, is not a justifiable measure.' 

Conrad Black, as usual, was very sensible on Friday in the National Post

If there were to be 100k higher deaths this year than normal, that would be the worst year for per capita deaths in the UK since 1999. That'd be bad - losing 20 years of progress in reducing mortality. But would it be worth overturning our way of life for *years* on end to avoid?

— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) May 10, 2020

80% of Romanians reported to have died with Covid-19 may have died of something else

Horațiu Moldovan, Secretary of State (junior minister) in the Romanian Ministry of Health, said on Wednesday that the official Romanian balance of Covid-19 deaths [927 today] does not accurately reflect reality.

"Many deaths are reported [as deaths from Covid 19] of patients who die of another cause. We follow the deaths every day, punctually, case by case, and 80 percent are patients who have comorbidities, who would have died anyway, who have terminal cancer.... The phenomenon of death is a complex phenomenon from a medical point of view. It's a whole scientific discipline that deals with this thing, it's called thanatology. At the time of death or, please, at the onset of terminal suffering, the patient develops multiple complications. The patient becomes infected, loses his immunity and eventually, in a Covid epidemic gets Covid But he dies of terminal heart failure, he dies of cancer with advanced metastasis, he dies of cirrhosis of the liver, things which are associated with extreme old age, 90 or so, and so on."