The lost art of aimless urban walking

The time I love Romania most is probably walking along the crumbling streets of Bucharest's allegedly historic centre. In fact it is late nineteenth century, so not very historic, but it has the patina of dereliction you get in cities that were allowed or forced to decay because of Marxist anti-economic policies: like Havana and, before tourism, Tbilisi. 

It feels half as old as time, while really old places in other countries are highly restored and look as if they were just built. People who read the Narnia books as children can think of the petrified city of Charn in The Magician's Nephew.

During the lockdown I took up my old hobby of aimless urban walking again and since the lockdown ended I continue the habit.

The first picture is of the church of St Nicholas Udricani, which I discovered today for the first time in a small uninteresting little street some way east of Piața Unirii.

The exterior wall painting dates from the late eighteenth century and miraculously escaped the Great Fire of 1847, so the priest told me. He gave me some delicious coliva, baked to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon yesterday.

He told me Udricani means inhabitants of Adrianople, a city that the Turkish republic renamed Edirne. It is graced by beautiful mosques and was capital of the Ottoman empire until Constantinople fell. The emigrants for whom this church was built would have mourned the previous Christian Adrianople.

Stavropoleos convent is my favourite church in Romania despite being restored. 

Covid-19 death

Interestingly George Floyd, the Minneapolis man whose death in police custody sparked protests and riots, was infected with Covid-19. 

Quotations

Peel's 4th principle of policing: "To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law." (Peelers, historians tell us, did not genuflect to Chartist protesters.)

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.”
Saki

"Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl." Stephen Leacock

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult." Stephen Leacock

'Now we know coronavirus is not a random killer, this one-size-fits-all lockdown must come to an end'

"When it is all over, we must do our best not to emerge into a ‘New Normal’ – in that dismal cliched phrase that suggests a dull, constrained future – but an ‘Old Normal’, as we seize back our former lives." 

Professor Karol Sikora, who says the virus seems to be petering out except in Latin America - which is obvious. He hopes it will all be over by September.

A British nurse friend of mine told me in March that it would be over in three or four weeks, 'but don't quote me'. I didn't believe him. I hope it is over before September and before a vaccine is developed, if one is. In Romania and Eastern Europe, including Greece but very possibly not including Russia, it should be over by the end of July.

1,296 deaths in Romania are recorded up to this morning of people who were infected with Covid-19. 80% of them, according to the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Health who has looked at each case closely, were not from Covid-19. Fewer than 300 deaths from Covid-19 then in almost ten weeks, mostly of old people with other serious health problems too. Thankfully this is nothing like the pandemic we feared, though a terrible pandemic will no doubt come one day. Let's hope we have better ideas about what to do when it does and let's hope they do not involve stopping the world.

By the way, YouTube removed an interview with Professor Sikora, before later reinstating it. (They also shadow banned Peter Hitchens, deleted an interview with Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of epidemiology at Rockefeller University, and removed a clip of Toby Young talking to Stanford Professor Michael Levitt. Imagine your telephone company cutting off your calls if you made remarks which contradicted WHO advice.)

'The coronavirus lockdowns have upended the lives of Americans to “protect” them from a virus with a 0.2 percent fatality rate, with the majority of those fatalities occurring in nursing homes and among people with chronic health conditions.' (Ron Paul five days ago.)

Facts about Covid-19

This tells you everything you wanted to know about Covid-19 but were afraid to ask. 

But a couple of caveats, at least. Though there is evidence that masks are useless there are also arguments that they might in some ways be useful. In any case, they make us feel safe and that the government is doing something to protect us.

Studies have indeed shown that the virus was not found on surfaces, but on one of the cruise ships hit by the virus the virus was found everywhere. I suspect though that you catch this thing by talking to people at length or singing with people indoors.

This, if you do not know it, is invaluable information, much better than that provided by the press.

No comment

A re-enactment of Mao's
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but with updated terminology. https://t.co/6d6N7ap9vq

— Kristian Niemietz has long given up on all that (@K_Niemietz) June 3, 2020

America’s colonial subjects now have to subscribe to its new woke ideology. https://t.co/qW3iZO6QvE

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) June 3, 2020

This one killing in America is the main news throughout the developed world

Ann Coulter has reminded us not to jump to conclusions about George Floyd's death, as we did with the case of Rodney King, all those years ago. The case is sub judice and a man has been charged with murder. If he is not convicted I hope he makes a fortune suing people who have said he is a murderer. Piers Morgan is one example.

Why this should interest anyone outside the USA it would be hard to explain to Martians, but this quarrel in a far away country holds the attention of the world. It was the same with OJ Simpson, of whom no-one outside the USA had ever heard until he was charged with having tried to murder his former wife. 

We know why. America rules the world. Even England is reduced to being a suburb of what was once our suburb.

This means that intellectual fashions that start there spread here, even via the EU apparatchiks to Romania in the end.

Give this lady a Nobel Peace Prize & a cabinet position in the White Housepic.twitter.com/pltUCpPsqB

— An0maly (@LegendaryEnergy) June 3, 2020

A Democrat Governor oversees a Democrat Attorney General, who oversees a Democrat Mayor, who appointed a Democrat Police Chief, who built the office culture that hired Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd.

But it's Trump's fault?

— Tom Dees (@ThomasWDees) June 3, 2020 

O Canada

Canada is the world's first postnational state. Justin Trudeau

Canada, the colony that stayed at home to look after mother. Anthony Burgess


Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. Douglas Adams

Canada is like a loft apartment over the world's greatest party. Robin Williams 

Quotations

'This virus will spread more. I have to say it with regret that there will be more deaths. If people do take care they can live with the virus.’
Prime Minister Imran Khan telling Pakistan that it cannot afford to lockdown any longer.

Kyle Harper's Fate of Rome is SO interesting about how the Plague of Cyprian hugely increased the power of Christianity, and then the Justinian plague radically reshaped Christianity (and led to the rise of Islam). we're seeing something similar https://t.co/9zbOD1dTWB

— Ed West (@edwest) June 3, 2020

Homicides in the USA

The internet is full of stories about endemic racism among American police. I suspect they are misinformation. This article in WSJ might tell me the truth, but it is hidden from me by a paywall.

Someone on Twitter says 42% of people responsible for police killings in the USA are black men, a category that makes up 6% of the population. I couldn't confirm this by searching the internet, though I only gave it five minutes. I did find that 43% of people who murdered (as opposed to killed) police officers in the USA between 1976 and 1998 were black.

An average of 85 police officers are 'feloniously killed' in the USA each year and between 1000 and 1500 people are killed by police officers.

All fatalities resulting from use of lethal force by on-duty law enforcement officers from 2009 to 2012 in 17 U.S. states were examined by researchers who found that 52% of the victims were white and 32% black. The states, since you ask, were Alaska; Colorado; Georgia; Kentucky; Maryland; Massachusetts; New Jersey; New Mexico; North Carolina; Oklahoma; Oregon; Rhode Island; South Carolina; Utah; Virginia; Wisconsin (2009–2012); and Ohio (2011–2012 only). So the biggest cities in the USA were ignored. 

Overwhelmingly, victims were reported to be armed (83%), though black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.

The big story is the murders by black Americans. They are 12 times more likely to commit homicide than whites, according to researchers at Pennsylvania State University, but only 8 times more likely to do so according to figures issued by the Obama administration. The reason for the discrepancy seems to be that in the government figures Hispanic murderers were usually counted as white. The Trump administration hasn't issued any figures. 

In 2013 African Americans, who by then accounted for 14% of the population, accounted for 52% of all murder arrests, Whites 45%, Hispanics 22%, Asians and 'Native Americans' together 2.5%.

Why are black people in the US disproportionately murderous? That's a very complicated question. Slavery is not the explanation. Slaves in the antebellum South were noted for their passivity. 

Note: Since writing this I have discovered that per capita many more black people than white people have been found guilty of murder in the USA from the 1830s to the present day.

Freedom in England

Great Britain still has a lockdown. A protest against it was dispersed by the police, but a big rally in Trafalgar Sq to protest the death of George Floyd in the USA was allowed to take place, with a complete absence of social distancing. 

Dominic Cummings driving his child and sick wife to somewhere where they could be taken care of is said to have destroyed the lockdown, but a tightly packed crowd protesting about a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom the English know nothing, is absolutely fine, even admirable. 

If the rally were in support of Donald Trump I wonder whether it would have been allowed by the police.

But at least, though unlike Dominic Cummings they broke the law, they were exercising an Englishman's time honoured freedom of expression. Three British youngsters, aged 18 and 19, posted a photograph of themselves recreating how the unarmed 46-year-old Floyd died at the hands of police in Minnesota. They have been arrested on 'suspicion of committing a hate crime' and have received threats of violence. 

So much for freedom of speech. The affair reminds me of these cases.

Riots in the USA

Listening to the BBC World Service means entering a depressing and infuriating presentation of a left of centre world view, paid for by the British Foreign Office. That's just how it is. It wasn't always nearly so bad. But nevertheless you learn things.

Yesterday an American who had worked for the Obama administration (of course) told the BBC that 1200-1500 people a year die in US at hands of police. Fewer than 20 police officers are prosecuted. This seems shocking and is what should concern Americans, not the colour of the many hundreds of people killed. 

But in fact these killings are not what concern Americans. The race question is what concerns them.

When a Somali-American policewoman killed a white women in Minnesota for what seemed like no good reason few cared. When a white policeman kills a black man riots happen.

And what is interesting is that much of what in England is called the middle class, meaning the comfortably off people with a good education, are on the side of the street and the protesters. Anti-racism is a huge social movement, but I suspect mostly among graduates.

The left-wing press misuse statistics to imply the killings of blacks are because of the colour of their skin, but the evidence is the other way.

Unsurprisingly it's people from the same milieu as the violent criminals who get arrested and sometimes killed.

Nevertheless, for every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, three are killed, while for every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, four are killed.

Vox found that blacks were 32 percent of those killed by police -- right in between blacks' proportion of the general population (about 13 percent) and blacks' proportion of homicide offenders whose race is known (52 percent).

The key variable is age: The ratio of blacks to whites killed by police is much higher among teens than among older adults. And so is the ratio of blacks to whites identified as homicide offenders, a decent measure of involvement in serious violent crime.

The Black Lives Matter movement was born on Facebook and made great strides during the 2016 election campaign until an African-American sniper at a BLM protest in Dallas on July 7, 2016 killed five police officers and injured nine others and two civilians. 

Today's protests are already violent and involve much looting. I imagine they are being planned by someone rather than spontaneous.

Back in the 1950s, when Americans pointed out the wickedness of Communist regimes, Communists had one reply which they repeated a lot and which Americans found hard to answer,

What about the negroes?

Now, once more, China, Russia and Iran are criticising the USA for its treatment of black people. Some things do not change.

Actually I think we should turn our attention to a much more important and much sadder story, the protests in Hong Kong, against a real evil, Chinese communism. 

The media are consummate hypocrites, but we knew that

“Labour MPs and woke leftists are kicking up a storm about the tactics being used by American police right now. But the exact same tactics were used by French police against the gilets jaunes every single weekend for a year and these people said nothing.” 

Brendan O’Neill on Sky today

The rioters in America are behaving with terrible violence which bears no comparison with the gilets jaunes, but the gilets jaunes were just uncool, mostly white and campaigning against environmentalism. The media instinctively disliked them. The media are hive-minded and as anxious to suppress as to discover news. They are above all astonishingly lacking in intellectual curiosity, something which should mean they chose the wrong profession. 

Or perhaps they are scared of the disapproval of their peers and potential employers. 

'It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living'. 

Bertrand Russell's remark applies to journalists more than most people but it's not just about being employable - though I am told people who have worked for Breitbart, unlike the Morning Star, are not - it's about being part of the club.

As Charles Moore said recently, about the Emily Maitlis affair,

Long ago, I remember the novelist Kingsley Amis telling me that the trouble with broadcasters, especially BBC ones, is that they were “much more concerned with ‘How will it go down at the club?’ than with the viewers.” His expression “the club” now sounds a bit old-fashioned, but the point holds.

Explosive Coronavirus report leaked from German Interior Ministry - the work of one maverick or a panel of experts?

Ron Paul's site publishes a report leaked from the German interior ministry. The site says the German government tried to dismiss the report as “the work of one employee” but

the 93-page report titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management” has been drafted by a scientific panel appointed by the interior ministry and composed by external medical experts from several German universities.

In fact this story made the pages of the Times, what Americans call the London Times, back on May 13.

Some of the report's key passages are:

- The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.

- The people who die from Corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).

- Worldwide, within a quarter of a year, there has been no more than 250,000 deaths from Covid-19, compared to 1.5 million deaths [25,100 in Germany] during the influenza wave 2017/18.

- The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.

- A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.

The report says that more people are dying because of state-imposed Corona-measures than are being killed by the virus.

New York lawyers charged with hurling Molotov Cocktail at police vehicle

Someone said that the French Revolution was not caused by hungry peasants but by hungry lawyers. The race riots in America allegedly involve lawyers who are far from hungry. 

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman have been charged with throwing a Molotov Cocktail at a police vehicle, an act that was caught on camera. Colinford Mattis graduated from Princeton University and is an associate with a Times Sq firm called Pryor Cashman, where he specializes in start-ups. The average associate salary in the firm is $237,000 p.a.


Colinford Mattis seems to embody a large element of the American left and of the zeitgeist and explain why Donald Trump got to the White House.

An anarchist is as an anarchist does. Old proverb. https://t.co/d4eeFUTrfw

— John O'Sullivan (@JohnOSullivanNR) June 1, 2020

We simply do not know why many more die from Covid-19 in some parts of the world than in others

This brings one to an inescapable conclusion that has been obvious since mid-March, at least to anyone who has been prepared to see it: that there is a fundamental difference in the way that this virus has behaved in the Far East compared with Europe and America. It has been far, far deadlier in the latter two, and in a way which cannot even nearly be explained by the way different governments have handled the epidemic. This raises two possibilities: either there is a difference in the virus that has been attacking Western countries or there is a difference in the human populations.

Ross Clark today in the Spectator.


I realise that the virus behaves very differently in different regions and we really do not know why. The virus was far less dangerous in the Far East, which is why only 0.6% of foreigners in Wuhan were infected.

Writing yesterday he quoted Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at UCL, saying Germany has not had relatively few deaths because of superior testing capacity. 

'There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological 'dark matter' – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance.'

What we do know, thank God, is that it is not anywhere nearly as dangerous as the WHO originally led us to believe. We do know that if you catch it your risk of dying is somewhere between 0.2% and 0.05%, not the 3.4% the WHO incompetently told the world was the rate in Wuhan (Donald Trump said his hunch was it was below 1%), and that if you are under 65 and in good health the risk is not non-existent but negligible.

Tom Holland who, like Emily Maitlis, went to my college

“Our wise men have said man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat & black nose with little or hardly any intelligence” - Voltaire

The development of scientific racism depended on European intellectuals losing faith in Genesis.

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) June 1, 2020

Tweets

Some of the most intelligent and learned accounts I interact with on this site are anonymous, because their owners know that expressing views seen as “conservative” may well make it impossible for them to get a job. What field are they in? Philosophy.

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) May 30, 2020

One thing about what’s happening in the US. Whatever your views on the rights or wrongs, if it continues Trump will walk to re-election.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) May 30, 2020

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Just when you thought nothing else could go wrong. https://t.co/NcDIZM0ppN

— Eccles (@BruvverEccles) May 29, 2020

Flu. https://t.co/i4HT5Grl9A

— Eccles (@BruvverEccles) May 29, 2020

Quotations

We know from history that in pandemics the countries that have not been hit early on can be hit in a second wave. What are we going to see in Africa and Eastern Europe?
Dr Hans Kluge, director for the WHO European region, in the Daily Telegraph

Johnson was, he [George Osborne] thinks, too slow to execute lockdown. But that mistake will look small in two years, “when we’re in a huge great recession, probably still living with the virus and the vaccine’s not yet there”.
Interview in the Times a week ago


Good manners are very simple to define: they mean putting other people before yourself without thinking about it. Actually, Christianity is good manners.

Taki, in this week's Spectator

Maybe saddling an entire generation of kids with debt & no hope of joining the property class while sending them to institutions that marinate them in neo-Marxist ideology wasn't such a good idea.

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) June 1, 2020

An amazing capture of a severe storm in a mature stage, over Tunari, Romania.

Photo by Cristian Bulugea. Posted with permission. pic.twitter.com/bBVjb45yZF

— severe-weather.EU (@severeweatherEU) May 31, 2020 

Robert Tombs on Ashoka Mody's EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts

A crisis like the present one tests everything—individuals, nations, states, governments, health systems, bureaucracies, businesses. Their solidarity is stretched, their bluffs called, their promises and reassurances tested. The rabbits are caught in the headlights. No frightened rabbit could be more petrified than the European Union, for the Covid-19 crisis has hammered all its weakest points: its democratic deficit, the fragility of its solidarity, and—most dangerous of all—the inherent faults in its financial and economic structure.

The lack of genuine democratic support—which its creators thought they could dispense with—makes it almost impossible to take hard decisions imposing sacrifice. Its solidarity was immediately shown as hollow when member states began acting in their own interests. 

....A European currency was suggested in the 1950s, and the French pushed it for nearly half a century with a persistence one might admire in other circumstances. They finally got their way. Their motive was and is to control Germany, their three-times invader. But beware of what you wish for: the outcome has been Germany controlling them. The fatal episode was the collapse of the USSR and German reunification. President François Mitterrand did a deal with the Germans, and did it ruthlessly: if Germany wanted unification, “you must show that you continue to believe in Europe”, or risk “a terrible backlash”. Chancellor Helmut Kohl readily gave in—he himself saw his mission as unifying both Germany and Europe, and he condemned objections as “nationalist”.

 The whole essay is here.

Professor John Ioannidis Reviews the Totality of the Evidence on Covid-19

This is from the latest essay on Coronavirus on the net from the distinguished Professor John Ioannidis. (I'd skip the first half of it if you are short of time.) He said, you remember, a while back that the risk to people under 65 of dying from Covid-19 were the same as dying on a very long drive to and from work. 

I can't help wondering if he is being completely candid when he says he thinks that lockdowns were initially justified because of our ignorance about the virus, since what he said back in March strongly suggested that we were overreacting.

On March 3 the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general introduced a media briefing with these distressing words: “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.” Others spoke of a very high reproduction number, of almost no asymptomatic infections, and of the high likelihood that the virus would infect most of the global population. Many, including the team led by Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, drew comparisons to the 1918 pandemic, which cost at least 50 million lives. These claims had a dramatic and arguably dangerous impact on public perception. Moreover, if these claims had been true, any EBM practitioner would call for swift and thoroughgoing lockdown measures. EBM is dead clear in such situations: if the risk is 50 million deaths, shutting the world for a month or two is nothing.

But it was my infectious disease side that had questions. A virus that spreads like wildfire, killing one out of thirty and infecting almost everyone in the absence of a vaccine, should have killed far more people in China and should have spread widely worldwide, perhaps with millions of fatalities, by mid-March. Hence, as I wrote in an op-ed in Stat News, I began to plead that we seek to obtain better data as quickly as possible to best inform our actions. I think lockdown was justified as an initial response, given what little we knew about this new virus, but I also think we needed better data to decide on next steps. And given what we know now, it is reasonable to consider alternatives to population-wide lockdown, even as we continue preventive hygiene measures, exercise local infection controls, focus on protecting those most at risk, and support health care systems to care for patients who are sick.
Two and a half months after COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, we lament a great and acute loss of life, especially in places like Lombardy and New York. Since the outbreak was detected in Wuhan in December 2019, the global death toll is estimated to be 346,000 as of this writing. But because our interventions can harm as well as help, it is not unreasonable to put this number in context.

We now know that the death toll is not comparable to that of the 1918 pandemic. We also now know that the virus has spread widely, but for the vast majority of people it is far less lethal than we thought: it kills far fewer than 3.4 percent of those who develop symptoms. Late last week the CDC adopted an estimated death rate of 0.4 percent for those who develop symptoms and acknowledged that there are many other infected people who develop no symptoms at all. These estimates will continue to improve as time goes on, but it is clear that the numbers are much lower than first feared. The exact infection fatality rate varies across populations and settings, but it appears that in most situations outside nursing homes and hospitals, it tends to be very low.

Sweden's Covid-19 death toll per capita is now 4 times bigger than Denmark's and 8 times bigger than Norway's

I decided about a month ago, based on comparisons between Sweden and Denmark, that as a very rough rule of thumb deaths with, not by any means necessarily of, the virus would have been three times higher without a lockdown, the average age of the decreased being eighty. I also saw that having taken care with care homes would have reduced the number considerably.

A month ago Sweden had three times more Covid-19 deaths than Denmark. She now has four times more but Sweden has eight times more deaths per capita than Norway, which is a much, much bigger difference. 

It's the reason why the last Swedish State Epidemiologist, who had backed her successor's policy, has recently changed her mind about it. 

Does this change my mind about lockdowns?

Not for Sweden, because the purpose of lockdowns was to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed and in Sweden they were not. 

Nor will huge numbers of people die in Sweden. The number dead with the virus in Sweden is very unlikely to exceed 5,000 out of 10 million. Many of these deaths were not caused BY the virus and many or most could have been prevented had care homes been isolated and care home workers properly equipped and guided as to what to do. 

Half the people in Sweden who died were eighty or over, as in many countries (but not in the USA where the median age is 70). In Sweden about two thirds were in care homes, much more than in France where half were or Britain where a third were. (Swedes were certainly very negligent about old people's homes but it might also mean the Swedes record deaths in care homes more accurately or it might mean they count too many deaths as with COVID-19.)

Fraser Myers in Spiked says:

Originally, the aim of lockdown was to ‘flatten the curve’ — that is, slow the spread of the virus sufficiently to avoid overwhelming hospital capacity. This horror scenario was the key justification for the suspension of civil liberties and the decimation of our economies. But in Sweden, this has not happened.

However, since the lockdowns began, the goalposts have been moved. Now lockdowns are promoted as a means for reducing cases and deaths outright. And even on these dishonest new terms, Sweden’s results are pretty average: whether in terms of raw numbers or taken per capita, it currently falls below the UK, France, Italy and Spain, all of which had lockdowns. At the time of writing, just over 4,000 people have died.

In fact, the head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH), now recognises that Norway should not have had a lockdown.

But since eight times more people have died with the virus in Sweden than in Norway, does this mean eight times more people would have died in other countries that had lockdowns had they copied the Swedish model? That would mean over 300,000 deaths in the UK and 800,000 deaths in the USA.

I do not think so, for these reasons. First although Sweden has eight times more deaths per capita she has four times as many as Denmark. Then Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford has shown that the peak of the UK’s infections came a full week before Boris Johnson initiated lockdown on March 23rd. Incidentally, Lyman Stone has shown that infections with the virus also began to fall in France and Spain before the lockdown. 

300,000 in the UK would exceed the estimate by Professor Ferguson of 250,000 deaths if a lockdown were not imposed. He added that two thirds of those people would have died anyway.

I think it is helpful to consider deaths in old people's homes and elsewhere separately and find out how each country has dealt with each category. Sweden, where eugenics was so popular until fairly recently, and New York City were very careless about lives in old people's homes. 

It's not Lutheranism that's to blame for Swedish laissez-faire attitudes. The Norwegians have been much more careful and caring. 

I thought Sweden provided a slam-dunk argument against lockdowns, but it is all much more complicated than it seemed a month ago.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis (TNT)

The Daily Telegraph in December published an interview with Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, the 1980s party girl now turned devout Catholic. She is friends with Pope Benedict XVI and Steve Bannon. Her views shock the man interviewing her, who I am sure is not a Catholic and presume isn't a conservative.

She believes, for example, that abortion is murder and that the State should pay a living wage to women who stay at home to have, and bring up, children - and the more children they have, the more money they should get. She believes not that there are too many people on the planet but too few, and is doubtful of the existence of man-made climate change. And, of course, she believes that the European Union is a 'Godless Tower of Babel' and, as such, doomed to collapse.

... Western civilisation is "on the brink of collapse", she tells me, because it has trashed Christian values. "We don't worship any more. We've beaten the cold, darkness, hunger, disease. We have everything and don't seem to need God any more. And as soon as we stop worshipping, we start eating ourselves up, just like the serpent that eats his own tail."

Quotations

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption"


“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…

“The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”

'Hysterical safety-ism is the mark of a society that has passed its peak. The West has subsided to a geriatric phase of high anxiety and low expectations.' Lionel Shriver, this week's Spectator

'We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?' Marginalia by Dr Benjamin Jowett ('All there is to know I know it.')

"crudelis ubique luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago. (Everywhere there is harsh tragedy, everywhere fear and countless visions of death.)" The Aeneid, Book 2, line 369, acknowledgments Laudator Temporis Acti

"I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I'll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most precious graveyard, that's the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I—this I know beforehand—will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them—being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that it has all long been a graveyard and nothing more." Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 3, Acknowledgments Laudator Temporis Acti

"We do not believe in artificial borders. We have a vision of unrestricted immigration and emigration, where people have the right to live and work wherever they please… We want Sweden to become an international role model by producing a plan to implement unrestricted immigration." Swedish Green Party website, 2010. 

"His unjust contempt for foreigners was, indeed, extreme. One evening, at Old Slaughter's Coffee-house, when a number of them were talking loud about little matters, he said 'Does not this confirm old Meynell's observation, For any thing I see, foreigners are fools?'"  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

"est generosius, in sua quidquid sede gignitur; insitum alienae terrae in id quo alitur, natura vertente se, degenerat.
(Whatever grows in its own soil has greater excellence; transplanted to another soil, its nature being modified to suit that in which it grows, it loses its virtue.)" Livy 38.17.13 , acknowledgments Laudator Temporis Acti

European Christian civilisation is in rather advanced decay

Fourteen bishops of the Church of England have condemned Dominic Cummings for driving his little son and sick wife to Country Durham where they could be cared for if his wife turned out to have Covid 19. She did and so did Mr Cummings. 

Yet no bishop said a word about the Prime Minister becoming father to a child born out of wedlock a few weeks ago, while married until a few days earlier to a woman whom he had deserted. 

Not even journalists who dislike Mr Johnson a great deal, and they really really do, so much as mentioned it. Only the Indian press mentioned the divorce and they did so because Mrs Johnson is half Indian.


The reality behind the attack on Mr Cummings is that it is an attack on Brexit, for which many filmgoers and others think he was responsible. Perhaps he was too. This is why bishops should be very careful before getting involved in politics, but they prefer talking about politics to talking about sin. 

You'd have thought the deaths from Covid 19 would have led to sermons about the four last things (death, judgment, hell and heaven, in case you'd forgotten). I am not in England but I doubt if there were many sermons on this theme. 

The left-wing but pro-Brexit clergyman-journalist the Rev Giles Fraser says the bishops are treating Mr Cummings in a most un-Christian way.

Zoom meetings reinforce heteronormativity

'On May 14, Michigan State University published an article highlighting claims from MSU Professor Amy Bonomi and University of Colorado Interim Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion Nelia Viveiros that there exists an “unconscious bias” in video conferencing meetings.

'The pair argues that these settings are a particularly ripe environment for people to unintentionally practice prejudice or stereotyping.
'Viveiros and Bomoni claim that common vessels for “bias” during video conference calls are virtual meeting backgrounds such as family photos, or icebreaker questions that can serve to reinforce dominant social norms or minoritize coworkers. Bonomi adds that microaggressions are now communicated in virtual meetings just as they are in in-person meetings.

'Unconscious bias includes using language, symbolism and nonverbal cues that reinforce normative social identities with respect to gender, race, sexual preference, and socioeconomic status,” said Bonomi. “For example, when the virtual background of a Zoom meeting attendee has pictures of his or her wedding, it unintentionally reinforces the idea that marriage is most fitting between opposite sexes.'

That's in America. I wonder how many Protestant or Catholic bishops complain about this sort of thing and say married couples consisting of a man and a woman are normal and admirable. They find time to talk a lot about climate change and refugees.


You see why the novelist Ruth Dudley Edwards has given up writing satirical novels. She said it is literally impossible to write satire any more. 

Twitter responds to Trump's executive order making it liable as a publisher for tweets

This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more

....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

It's all theatre, to distract people from reality, at least on Donald Trump's part. Twitter is serious about hating him..




The media war against Donald Trump is mirrored by another media war against the very liberal Dominic Cummings in the UK, who is blamed for Brexit, but in the latter war Twitter and Facebook seem to be neutral, as far as I can see.




Twitter doesn't need to be biased as their users are, heavily. In America 77% of Twitter users describe themselves as left-of-centre or extreme left. It might be the same in the UK, and might reflect the well known fact that left-wing people usually advertise their politics and right-wing people often keep quiet about theirs.




Why this is is an interesting question. It is partly because right-wingers are thought of by the left as snobby, shallow, selfish people, motivated by narrow economic interests. And also not very bright. Right-wingers, by contrast, who are much less judgmental, just think left-wingers misguided and very annoying, not wicked.

Harvard economics professor expects world economy to boom again this year

Politico.com carries the most cheerful news story I have read since Coronavirus, at first a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, came to cover the sky in darkness.

Professor Jason Furman of Harvard, a leading economist in the Obama administration thinks the US economy will quickly bounce back.


He thinks the data point to the kind of recovery that happens after a hurricane or similar catastrophe. (This is exactly what I have been saying, providing the lockdowns end quickly.)

This good news has gravely worried leading Democrats.

“This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”

Nobody believes the official spokesman but everyone believes the anonymous source. This anonymous source continued:

“Trump beats Biden on the economy even right now! This is going to be extremely difficult no matter what. It’s existential that we figure it out. In any of these economic scenarios Democrats are going to have to win the argument that our public health and economy are much worse off because of Donald Trump’s failure of leadership.”

“Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”

This is much of the reason why the Democrats continue to advocate lockdowns, to blame Republicans for ending them and to blame Donald Trump for not having stopped flights from China and Europe much sooner (policies they opposed as reactionary, but then they did not have the information the President had).

If the lockdowns look unnecessary, Democrat governors like Cuomo are accused of being responsible for unnecessary deaths in old people's homes and the economy surges, the Biden campaign is in big trouble, without even discussing Mr Biden himself, who unfortunately but unmistakably is in the early stages of senility.

I completely agree, as always, with Dr John Lee in the Spectator

'While there’s plenty we don’t know about Covid, the big-picture science has been settled for some time already. As epidemics go it’s not that bad. It kills mainly the very old and infirm; children and fit people under 60ish often get away with mild or asymptomatic infection. Those who become ill do not, in fact, die like flies. About 99 per cent of them get better quite quickly.

'....That we have now fully embarked on a phase of politics masquerading as science may be harder to spot. Nothing demonstrates it better than the Dominic Cummings story. I’m not really interested here in the rights or wrongs of what he did with respect to the 'rules'. The point is that if lockdown and social distancing actually have any effect at all on the virus, it is difficult to see how driving to a different, empty house could realistically spread it. Social distancing and lockdown are supposed to be the measures 'protecting' us from the virus. So if you move to another location in a socially distanced manner – in the bubble of your car for instance – and lock down once there, how can you have significantly contributed to viral spread?

'....Surely the relevant questions in this case, are not about the whys and wherefores of one individual, but about why on earth we are still continuing with measures that are massively harmful in their own right.

'....What we have been living through is not so much an epidemic, as a crisis of awareness. After 75 years of blessed peace and increasing prosperity, we were suddenly faced with something that took many out of their comfort zone. They were suddenly confronted with the potential of unavoidable death on a large scale, amplified dramatically in the echo-chamber of a largely uncritical media. The reality, fortunately, was different this time. But how did we respond? With fortitude and common sense? Unfortunately not. We responded with perhaps the biggest own goal in our recent history. And when our over-reaction had been clear for several weeks, what did we do then? Did we change course in a reasoned and timely manner? No. We devoted several days to hounding someone who tried to look after his family, at a time when each day longer on this path costs billions in economic loss and directly increases the lockdown-related morbidity and death toll.'

It all goes back to Douglas Murray's point about the West, but not Eastern Europe, having lost 'the tragic sense of life'. Instead of the tragic sense of life we have a pathetic and sentimental sense of life.