Black Lives Matter is a revolution

CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman resigns after facing criticism over George Floyd comments

It's FLOYD-19.

— Greg Glassman (@CrossFitCEO) June 6, 2020

The CEO of a Canadian loan lender company has resigned following a letter sent to staff saying they “should not support political groups like Black Lives Matter” and that they are contrary to the company’s culture to “live and let live.”

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced his resignation from his role on the board of directors and asked to be replaced with a black candidate. He has also donated one million dollars to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights campaign, and said he will funnel all future gains on his Reddit stock to benefit the black community.

BLACK LIVES MATTER: CORPORATE AMERICA HAS PLEDGED $1.678 BILLION SO FAR

Quotations

Anxious, bored, exhausted, eating cold cereal for dinner? This is OK. Now is the time to ditch the tyranny of perfectionism. Jason Gay, Wall St Journal

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. Hugh Keough, quoted by Damon Runyon

When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave. Orhan Pamuk, Snow

When I was a little girl, Beirut was dubbed “Paris of the Middle East.” Today, Paris is the Middle East of Europe and the “city of love,” has turned into the “city of chaos.”

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) December 16, 2018

A story I happened across completely by accident in USA Today

USA Today which I sometimes pick up in hotels is or used to be a bland, non-partisan mid-market newspaper, or so I thought. Perhaps it is. The website mediabiasfactcheck.com says it has a slight to moderate liberal (American for left-wing) bias.

A North Carolina professor who sparked outrage with his tweets still has his job. Why? It's called the First Amendment.

Jordan Culver USA TODAY

Published 12:22 PM EDT Jun 11, 2020

A professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington has recently sparked outrage with his words on Twitter, the latest educator to draw a rebuke from his own school.

Mike Adams, a professor of criminology at UNCW, said people who wear masks in public look like "fools," has called North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper a "fascist" (among other criticisms) for Cooper's response to the coronavirus pandemic, labeled women's studies a "nonessential major" and pushed for the separation of states from the county. 

That was just in May.

Are hyperloops an alternative to planes and trains?

Hyperloops, which use magnetic levitation to allow near-silent travel at airline speeds, might mean we can travel in pods speeding through vacuum tubes instead of taking short-haul flights, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The Corona virus panic is exactly that, a panic

The panic about Covid-19 is exactly that: a panic. Clearly the virus is not remotely as dangerous as at first feared. There are lots of reasons to be hopeful.

Professor Karol Sikora, a senior oncologist who has built a huge Twitter following for his optimistic views about the virus, said the real number of deaths from the virus in the UK may be half the recorded figures.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph's Planet Normal podcast, Professor Sikora said the virus would be mentioned on death certificates when there was "any hint" that it could have been the cause, as well as retrospectively over the telephone. The Germans are much more careful.

The Romanian Secretary of State, Dr. Horatiu Moldovan, who has looked closely at each reported death in Romania (now over 1300, but under 900 when he spoke) said only 20% of the recorded deaths were really deaths from the virus.

'Why you no longer recognize your country'

Ann Coulter has published a very provocative and interesting article. I wonder if it would be legal to publish it if America had the restrictions on freedom of speech that England and the EU have. I applaud her for first class trolling.

Herd immunity

This is an important read which suggests herd immunity  from Covid-19 is still achievable. Acknowledgements to Anglo-Swedish writer Pelle Nethrop Taylor.

There exist three types of anti body immunity, and some of these are detectable by current antibody tests only in severe infections.

Also, we have t cell immunity. ON TOP of that.

This article gets technical but basically the fact that antibody immunity tests that show for instance that only 8% of Stockholmers have antibodies severely understates Stockholm's real immunity. It may be five times higher than that. So, 40%.

"No blacks, no dogs, no Irish"

The cherished myth that English landladies used to have notices saying: "No blacks, no dogs, no Irish" is not accurate, according to Mary Kenny. Actually I already knew this. No photograph exists and no-one testifies to seeing such a sign.

"The academic Clair Wills wrote a very well-researched book about immigrants which examined this issue. There were "No Irish" signs (landladies thought the Irish too boozy): there were also some "No Australians" signs in Earl's Court (Ditto). There were "No Coloureds" signs, but there were also signs saying "Coloureds preferred." And "Indians only" (Indian medical students had a reputation for being quiet and diligent). May I add there were also "No children" signs, and young couples were terrified they'd be turned out if they had a baby. There were NEVER the "No Dogs" added to the other signs. That's an import from apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately, it has now been empowered by legend, and legend is hardly ever contradicted by fact, or academic research."

I wonder if the story that in 1968 'I.R.A. I Ran Away' was written in chalk on walls in Northern Ireland is true. It sounds highly probable.

Rod Dreher

'At UCLA, the university has removed a lecturer who refused a student’s request to give black students preferential treatment in grading, because they’re black.The lecturer, a white man, responded to the student’s request by saying that would be unfair. For this, the university has suspended him.'

The full story is here.

Why the Rich Are Revolting

"Today’s unrest involves two sections of US society, African-Americans and upper-middle-class whites, who together form the axis of the Democratic Party, but it is the latter who are far more engaged in racial activism. The “Great Awokening”, the mass movement focused on eradicating racism in America and with a quasi-religious, almost hysterical feel to it, is dominated by the upper middle class."

"Yet while there are huge differences between the 1968 and 2020 disturbances, the one continuous theme running through both uprisings, and indeed all revolutions down the years, is the prominent role of the middle class. In particular, the upper-middle-class, the haute bourgeoise, are the driving force behind revolt and disorder throughout history, especially — as with today — when they feel they have no future."

From an exceptionally interesting essay by Ed West, which teems with insights. Unlike Thomas Chatterton Williams, Ed West IS a marvellous boy.

Leftist says left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight

Thomas Chatterton Williams is not a marvellous boy like his poet namesake, but one of the most infuriatingly politically correct commentators there are. Still he's essentially right in his latest article headlined in the Guardian:

We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight

We don't know why George Floyd died but Mr Williams is surely completely wrong, of course, to say Floyd was killed for being black or being poor. Why do the papers who publish him let him get away with such nonsense? He is wrong about the US state of Georgia, which has been proved right to end its lockdown, despite ghoulish prophecies of doom, and wrong to say that not taking climate change seriously is unscientific, but the gist of the article is spot on. 

The (left-wing) media is shamelessly manipulating Americans and everyone else. Their claim to be concerned about the less well-off is shown to be false.

At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

Article in Los Angeles Times complains that Facebook didn't cancel Candace Owens’ fascist video

Note: The reason why the author of this article calls Candace Owens "a known Hitler apologist" is that she said, in answer to a question from the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee investigating hate speech, 

"If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine, the problem is ... he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German." 

Mr. Boyle (aptly named, you might think) and the Los Angeles Times consider calling her a Hitler apologist and a fascist good fair journalism, unlike her video clip or Senator Cotton's article in the New York Times. Mr Boyle complains that Facebook didn't fact check her video, remember. 

His real objection to her is that she is black and a Republican. 

Opinion: Fascists don’t need op-ed pages. They already have Facebook and Google

By BRIAN A. BOYLE
JUNE 9, 202011:01 AM

Last Wednesday, late into the afternoon, the New York Times published an op-ed essay in which Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called for the deployment of active-duty military forces into U.S. cities with the slippery, panicked and dangerous intention of “restoring order.”

At nearly the exact same time on the exact same day, Trumpist provocateur Candace Owens began a Facebook livestream of a nearly 20-minute-long tirade declaring George Floyd a “criminal” and a “horrible human being,” among other incendiary remarks attacking the Black Lives Matter movement writ large.

Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?

That headline is from August 03, 2012.

Eight years ago Peter Turchin produced a theory by which about every half century the USA goes through a period of violent disorder, starting with the Civil War.

'Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in violent political, social and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect a violent upheaval in the United States in a few years.

'It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut.'

I don't believe a word of it and note that the 1820s in the USA were known as the Era of Good Feelings. I read a book about it with that title by the great George Dangerfield.

On the other hand fifty years before the 1820s were the 1770s, when America was torn apart by what was in effect the first civil war.


Neagu Djuvara also, of course, believed history went in cycles. Europe's was finished, he told me, but America's still had a long way to run. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler thought the same thing. I very much want to read Spengler. 


On the net I found a Wikipedia entry about social cycle theories, which apparently are among the earliest social theories in sociology.

The slave trade 'rescued slaves from night-black Africa'

Slavery is highly topical so here is a post I wrote about it years ago. In it I quoted from a very good interview with the then (black) Governor-General of Jamaica in the Spectator:

As we waited for the tea, Cooke began to speak in patriotic terms of Jamaica as a colony of "marvellous antiquity", far older even than British India or Australia. "Now hear me on this. When Australia was just a convict settlement, Jamaica was an established outpost of British commerce and British civilisation. "Civilisation? "Yes," he replied. "Even during slavery the British were sending some very good people out to Jamaica . . . missionaries, reformers . . . but, as I said, to Australia, just convicts." "But Jamaica was a brutal place . . . the plantation," I said. Cooke was not going to condone slavery, was he? "Well, neither am I going to harp on about the wickedness of slavery. Jamaica's greatness was due entirely to slavery."

Quotations

Anxious, bored, exhausted, eating cold cereal for dinner? This is OK. Now is the time to ditch the tyranny of perfectionism. Jason Gay

When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave. Orhan Pamuk, Snow

When I was a little girl, Beirut was dubbed “Paris of the Middle East.” Today, Paris is the Middle East of Europe and the “city of love,” has turned into the “city of chaos.”

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) December 16, 2018

The New York Times tries to balance black lives against black lives

I just happened across this, which is from the New York Times Coronavirus Live Updates on Sunday. 

And on Sunday, infectious disease experts on Twitter debated how to supply a reliable estimate of the protests’ impact on virus transmission — or whether trying to do so may wrongly be seen as discouraging participation in the growing racial justice movement.

In what he called a back-of-the-envelope estimate, Trevor Bedford, an expert on the virus at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, wrote on Twitter that each day of protests could result in about 3,000 new cases and 50 to 500 deaths. Given the racial disparities seen during the pandemic, he noted, that surge would disproportionately affect black people. “Societal benefit of continued protests must be weighed against substantial potential impacts to health,” he wrote.

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard, agreed that Dr. Bedford’s projections were in the ballpark, and said in an email that he had done “a service’’ by making an approximate estimate with explicit assumptions.

But he also noted that if states where the virus was still spreading managed to rein it in, the number of lives saved would “massively overshadow the effects of the protests.” If all states were better able to detect new cases with tests and contact tracing, or reduce transmission by social-distancing and mask-wearing, it would mitigate a rise in infections acquired at protests.

Dr. Bedford wrote that his estimates contained a lot of uncertainty. There is no official estimate for how many people are protesting on an average day, for instance. Still, he thought it was important, he said, to provide a framework grounded in epidemiologic principles to counter the offhand assumptions being made by political pundits. But, in response, other scientists voiced concern that Dr. Bedford’s posts would “give fodder to those opposing civil rights.”

As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh. It's very black humour in the manner of Evelyn Waugh, perhaps of 'The Loved One', his satirical novel about the American way of death, with a dash of his 'Black Mischief'. 

I hope the protests and riots will prove in two or three weeks that social distancing doesn't save lives. We must all hope that, especially the protesters.

The last time I read a newspaper report so unintentionally funny was when I read aloud to a barrister with whom I worked Mr Justice Caulfield's summing-up in the Jeffrey Archer trial. 

'No, Paul, you are making that up' 

he said twice. Eventually he walked over to me with feline steps, twitched the Independent from my hands, read and said with astonishment 

'It's true.' 

Looking up the two experts quoted in the New York Times on Twitter I note they both loathe Donald Trump. 

I suddenly realise that almost all academics and Ivy League graduates probably detest him. Just as most Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates loathed Mrs Thatcher in the early 1980s, including me. 

I perfectly understand why they detest Trump, of course, but not why they take Black Lives Matter and many other things seriously. I know their lack of sense of the ridiculous and inability to be embarrassed are two of Americans' greatest strengths, along with (in the case of Republicans) religiosity, patriotism and parochialism. But I can't help feel enormous sadness and wonder if, despite the economic numbers, America is lost.  

And if so so is the world.

Candace Owens: Floyd was not a good person and it's a lie that police kill black people because of their colour

Candace Owens is an African-American Republican vlogger

In this vlog she beautifully explodes the idea that Floyd was a good man.

To be honest I am surprised that she needs to do so, but she does. 

She asks why her ethnic group is the only one in the USA which puts its criminals on pedestals. It is really worth spending 17 minutes on. 


Of George Floyd, who went to prison five times for some horrible offences and was on drugs when arrested and carrying counterfeit banknotes, she says:

“George Floyd was not a good person. I don’t care who wants to spin that, I don’t care how CNN wants to make you think that he had just turned his life around.”

“The fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me.”

“Was he really going to turn things around? It’s just not true.”

Much more important than George Floyd's character, of course, is the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that white American police officers are killing black people because of their colour. 

Yet there are many people who actually believe this and not only in the less intelligent 50% of Americans. Clever Americans whom I respect sort of think this.

As she says, the American left only cares about using black people to gain power.

It's a bit like the fall of the Bastille. It was a lie that the Bastille housed political prisoners. It was an old people's home. The old people were homeless after it fell. That's how it always is when progressives get worked up into a frenzy of indignation.

And yet every year the French, even the Catholics, celebrate this appalling crime. As the Americans celebrate their revolution which was also criminal and based on lies. So it goes.

Science, doubt and the ‘second wave’ of Covid

In his latest article for the Spectator, Dr John Lee depressingly tells us that once scientists (like everyone else) make up their minds they find evidence to fit their conclusions and this explains why the people advising the British government still believe lockdowns and social distancing are effective, despite evidence to the contrary.

'There’s really no clear signal (apart from modelling, which doesn’t count) that these interventions have had any significant effects on the epidemic curves, either on the way in or the way out of these rules, in many different variants and in many different countries.

'A second assumption is that, because a relatively low percentage of the population has had the disease, it will again be able to rapidly spread among us. But that depends, among other things, on us having no innate resistance to the virus. That was what the models originally assumed, and it looks like it’s just wrong.

'There’s a type of immunological cell called a T helper cell (or CD4 positive T cell) that helps coordinate the immune response to viruses. A recent study looked at blood taken a year ago and found T helper cells reactive to Sars-Cov-2 in 40 to 60 per cent of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactivity between the Covid coronavirus and other viruses already circulating that cause the common cold.

'The authors cautiously speculate that these reactive T cells may help to protect from Sars-Cov-2. But given our knowledge of other RNA viruses, the question we need to ask is why on earth wouldn’t they? If they’re reactive, they are highly likely to be protective. Cross-reactive T cells have been previously found to correlate with a less severe disease in H1N1 flu. And the important point is that already-present immunity could have a large effect on the spread and seriousness of Sars-Cov-2.'

Groupthink flourishes on the BBC and in the media, with the virus as with Black Lives Matter. This explains why the line on the BBC World Service is still pretty emphatically pro-lockdown, though I just heard with surprise an American small businessman tell the World Service  only 200 people had died in his county "since this all began" which showed lockdowns were an overreaction. He was obeying the law this time but would not if there were another lockdown. 

He was one voice in a programme where everyone else thought lockdowns a good idea. 

One blamed President Bolsonaro for the 30,000 virus deaths in Brazil. I wonder what the truth about Brazil is. I wonder how to find out, searching through reporting by Western journalists who to a man and woman hate what he stands for. If I had time, I'd look in the Brazilian press using Google Translate. Or maybe go to Breitbart.com 

Will American disengagement from Europe continue after Trump?

A Guardian article reports on a fierce debate in British diplomatic circles about whether Donald Trump merely marks the acceleration of a pre-existing trend to a more disengaged US, and whether President Biden would want to or be able to reverse the trend. 

I think American disengagement is inevitable. I know from a British diplomat in 2000 that the fear in the Foreign Office was that George W. Bush would be isolationist. If only he had been.

A senior former British ambassador is quoted in the Guardian.

“I think that if you have a different, more internationally minded leadership in the US then a lot of what has happened over the past few years can be reversed. If we get another four years of this leadership, then some of the bonds and some of the cement that holds the west together, and holds Europe and America together will be broken forever. If things change in November then we can recapture things if we get the right sort of leadership in Europe.”

"If you get a Joe Biden presidency in the US, then the relationship will focus again on Europe, on Germany and France, and we may feel a little neglected.”

“If Obama wanted to know what Europe thought about something his first call was to Merkel.”

The British Foreign Office is staffed by people who think Donald Trump appalling and who like the European Union but they have some clever people thinking about strategy. Clever but are they able to tear up fundamental assumptions when events change?

Csn they ask themselves if Great Britain should disengage from Europe and America? Trade with everyone but keep aloof from conflicts. 

I hope they do and come to realise that the threat of invasion comes from illegal migrants who arrive on our shores several times a week, not Russia or even China. The great threat to Europe and the USA is illegal immigration too.

Unlike Russia China is a huge problem, as Steve Bannon convinced Donald Trump, but whose problem? Britain can help, but not with armed interventions.

The UK's role east of Suez should simply be trading. I wish we had built desalination plants on Hong Kong Island and not given it to Communist China but we did. 

How do we help the people of Hong Kong? We cannot unless by offering to settle millions of them in England's green and pleasant land, as Boris has done. Obviously this is a remedy worse than the disease, but it wins the enthusiastic approval of the supposedly conservative press, eager to show that being Brexit does not mean being nativist.

The alternative to disengagement means following American foreign policy goals and they have been disastrous at least since George W. Bush. I still think intervening in Bosnia was good but, having been there, I now doubt if the intervention in Kosovo was. The place is now run by the mafia. As for EU foreign policy, it is just platitudes and miasma and furthers European not British interests.

In Donald Trump we should have had a soul mate who dislikes the EU and sending young men to die for values, but Boris is as globalist as Theresa May or Hillary and just as warlike as Hillary or his hero Churchill. He, like Hillary, wanted to bring about regime change in Syria. 

He is a Blairite except for two very important caveats: being a Brexiteer and a libertarian.  

He is also an outsider in love with the glamour of old-fashioned England. Tony Blair was an outsider who had no affection for all that, no sense of romance and was a progressive convinced he was on the winning side of history. 

Still, the differences between the men's ideas are not that great. Boris's great desire now is to prove how liberal he is to a world that confuses him with Donald Trump. This is very bad news.

What are the facts behind Black Lives Matter?

I explained in a post days ago that the idea that African-Americans are being shot dead by the police because of their colour is hooey, moonshine. 

Last year American police officers shot dead nine unarmed black people and fifteen unarmed white people, despite black people making up over half of all people arrested for robbery or murder  and, according to researchers at Pennsylvania State University being 12 times more likely to commit homicide than whites. 

I don't have time to write more but Ed West has done it for me in this useful list of facts.

Worth keeping to hand if you find you need to explain the truth to people who have been taken in by the media and the BLM scam.

Quotations

"Only by pulling down these statues can we make the space necessary for a meaningful and transformative re-education." Dalia Gebrial, a PhD student at LSE and co-editor of 'Decolonising the University'. When I was very little the word re-education was only used to refer to what the North Vietnamese did to prisoners whom they allowed to live. It was generally called brainwashing in the West.

"As North Americans, we don’t know what martyrdom is." Hans Boersma, Protestant theologian, writing in First Things.

"US military presence in Europe is first and foremost about US interests. Of course, the presence of US troops in Europe contributes to collective defense of allies but this is a consequence of, not the reason for, the troops. Don’t look at Europe. Look around it. From the Arctic to the Levant, from the Maghreb to Caucasus, Europe is at one of the most important crossroads of the world. US bases in Europe provide American leaders with flexibility, resilience and options in a dangerous multipolar world. The huge garrisons of American service personnel in Europe are no longer the fortresses of the Cold War, but the forward operating bases of the 21st century. The US needs to have the tools available to react to events in America’s interests. Our force posture in Europe does this." Luke Coffey

Someone working at MIT in the U.S. scientific community who asked for anonymity told me he couldn’t disagree on mass gatherings or anything related to the protests or he would get fired. “There’s nothing scientific about our community,” he added.

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) June 8, 2020

And another skittle falls

Until Saturday Stan Wischnowski, 58, had worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 20 years and been its executive editor for a decade. Under his leadership the paper won a Pulitzer prize and doubled the number of non-white employees.

He had to resign (it sounds like he was dismissed to me) because the paper published the headline

“Buildings Matter, Too”

over an article by the paper’s architecture critic, who expressed concern that damage to historic buildings during Black Lives Matter protests might “leave a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia”.

Inga Saffron apparently thought her article would be headlined “Black Lives Matter. Do Buildings?” In it she said,

“You can be appalled and heartbroken by our country’s deadly racism, and yet still quake at what the damage to downtown portends for Philadelphia. Racism is built on strong foundations. The momentary satisfaction of destroying a few buildings does nothing to remove those structures. All it does is weaken our city.”

More than 40 non-white journalists at the newspaper called in sick in protest on Thursday. In a message telling staff of Mr Wischnowski’s departure, Lisa Hughes, the Inquirer’s chief executive, said that the headline was “offensive and inappropriate”.  The paper apologised for a “horribly wrong” decision to use the headline. 

Toppling statues of slave owners has come to England from the USA

The mob has toppled a statue of a Bristol worthy who owned slaves and thrown it into the Bristol channel. If this were not enough the police approved of their action.

This is absolutely incredible. Even after Diana died England wasn't so insane and that is saying a lot.


I feel I am living in Paris in 1789.


All this is not an attack on the establishment but embodies the ideology of the establishment. The great majority (I hope) of English people who disapprove of throwing statues into the water are the ones who are considered dangerous.

Wow. The superintendent for @ASPolice says he understands why protestors toppled the statue and officers didn’t intervene in case it caused ‘tension’.

“The right thing to do was to allow it to happen.”

Quite remarkable. What are the police actually for? pic.twitter.com/YjiYB5ivX4

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) June 7, 2020

 

What's missing from these protests and the coverage thereof is any awareness or recognition that despite their superficially radical rhetoric and symbolism, they are fully supported by the government, corporate, cultural, media, and technocratic power centers of US society

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 6, 2020

Archbishop Vigano supports Donald Trump and the children of light against Archbishop Gregory

An extraordinary letter from the Archbishop has been published. I am not sure what to make of it. He recently accused the Pope of wanting to place himself at the head of a new syncretic world religion. This has perhaps a small sliver of truth in it, but I think the Archbishop is badly losing his sense of proportion and injuring his cause. 

Which is a shame because the evidence he provided that the Pope knew about wicked bishops and priests and did nothing about them was important and, alas, credible.

He now seems to see Covid-19 and these insane riots as part of a deep state plot and possibly part of the end of the world.

The US religious right will love this. Archbishop Wilton Gregory is a disgrace, as are many bishops. If the allegations against him on the internet are true he is more than a disgrace. But this letter is a big mistake.

Health ‘experts’ take contradictory stance on protests

Anti-racism is entwined with the story of Covid-19 at every stage. Think of left-wing politicians telling us to hug a Chinese. And now this, from America.

A letter signed by 1,288 self-proclaimed public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and undefined “community stakeholders” declares that anti-racist protests “must be supported” and should not be constrained by authorities due to COVID-19 concerns.



But the letter signers then say protests where participants call for lifting “stay at home” orders and reopening businesses and work opportunities should not be allowed, declaring those protests to be “rooted in white nationalism” that runs “contrary to respect for Black lives.”



The letter signers take that stance even though those who have lost jobs due to COVID-19 shutdowns have been disproportionately low-income minorities.
The letter declares that staying at home, social distancing, and public masking should be incorporated into “demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy,” but says such demonstrations should not be discouraged in the name of preventing COVID-19 spread.



“… [A]s public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission,” the letter states. “We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”



The letter goes on to say, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.” 

The emphasis is mine. 

This is not a joke.

Are 130,000 hospital patients in the UK killed each year?

A story in the Daily Mail suggests that euthanasia, which is illegal in the UK, is now "associated with 29 per cent of National Health Service deaths".

Finnish police continue to question politician about her booklet on homosexuality

For almost three centuries Europeans were not persecuted for their theological opinions, but that era has ended.

The magazine First Things reports that former Finnish Minister of the Interior Päivi Räsänen was interrogated for five and a half hours by the police about a booklet she wrote in 2004 explaining and defending the Lutheran church’s position on sexual ethics. It was titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual relations challenge the Christian concept of humanity.” Mrs Räsänen is a doctor and belongs to the Christian Democrats.

'Räsänen’s booklet was already investigated last autumn, at which time the police concluded that the contents were not criminal. Despite that, the Prosecutor General has reopened the case and directed the police to conduct another preliminary investigation of the booklet—along with fresh criminal investigations. Räsänen told me she will be subject to “at least two further interrogations” by the Helsinki Central Police, which could lead to formal prosecution. These investigations involve a TV appearance in which Räsänen discussed the Bible, Christ, and the concepts of sin and grace, and a talk show radio interview on the subject “What would Jesus think about homosexuals?” Both cases have been reopened despite the police previously concluding that “there was no reason to initiate a preliminary investigation as no crime has been committed.”'

This really does explain where the West is now

You can spend many years reading many books to try to understand liberal modernity, or you can just watch this 24-second video. pic.twitter.com/KyJLKAuzKM

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 2, 2020

Eastern Europeans look on baffled. 

A revolt by the Taliban against old-school liberalism in the New York Times

The New York Times is so extraordinarily biased these days that it cannot be trusted to separate opinion and facts or accurately report the facts about the US Administration or even Swedish death rates. It would hardly seem worth reading. As it is behind a paywall, the question does not arise often. 

Still, it did print an article by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, almost the only Republican with the possible exception of the President not grovelling to Black Lives Matter, who argued:

It's past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military "or any other means" in "cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws."

Publishing his article prompted a huge debate, if you can call it that, or at any rate a huge divide between journalists over forty, who believe in free speech and debating ideas, and the ones in their twenties who had been triggered. The story is here.

I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this. https://t.co/lU1KmhH2zH

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) June 4, 2020

Note 'not to say something would be immoral' - this is the puritanism that runs through America like Southend through a stick of Southend rock. It is responsible for so many bad things (think prohibition) and possibly one or two good ones. 

The puritans were, of course, the 17th century equivalent of the Taliban and so are their contemporary left-wing secular descendants.

Suppressing dissenters from the new religion

Look at those two faces. I never heard of either of them in my life but those are two journalists who pride themselves on having been around the block and having contrarian opinions on a lot of subjects. Characters, in a word, the sort of men you once found in every pub in every English village, though I am told that characters disappeared years ago. 

Now they are disappearing from the media. Characters are not wanted any more.

"We are actively working with the caller involved to develop some ideas to debate the issues involved." https://t.co/HWL9upxfX9 The last thing anyone wants is 'debate' - submit, or lose your job

— Ed West (@edwest) June 6, 2020

Book judge axed after criticising Black Lives Matter https://t.co/aowkerCFSz just kiss the royal emblem on my cloak, and you will feel no more

— Ed West (@edwest) June 6, 2020

Yes

If you ever wondered “how could that have happened” when reading about a period of history where people got hurt and bystanders just blindly went along with it, pay attention, because it’s happening right now.

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) June 7, 2020

The entire thread is very interesting. I must read the books mentioned.

I particularly liked this comment.

In recent years it's been fascinating to see how historians & psychologists have applied this to historical revolutionary movements

Only a very small fraction of the populace needs be fully committed to a cause to completely transform a society for better or worse

— Avid Commentator 🇦🇺 (@AvidCommentator) June 7, 2020

The BBC, though in some ways wonderful, is no longer an impartial news service and risibly woke

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London https://t.co/vIq1VL1aiT

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 7, 2020

I think the BBC does have to be privatised yet ,considering how anti-conservative and right-on private TV channels like Sky are, that will not be a real solution. 

Is there a solution? Porsche, inventor of the famous car, said that when a problem has no solution it ceases to be a  problem and becomes a fact.

It's interesting, for example, that @BBCNews didn't report the the 2019 protest in defence of Tommy Robinson as "largely peaceful". Only 20 were injured in that, yet it was described with terms such as 'violent disorder', despite it being just a minority who attacked the police.

— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) June 7, 2020

It depends entirely on the objective of the protest - if the protest was against, say, the rape of white girls by Pakistanis in provincial England or sexual assaults by migrants in Germany, one injury would make the protest violent.

A new religion supplants Christianity (but not Islam)

"For when a new sect—that is, a new religion—emerges, its first concern is to extinguish the old to give itself reputation." Machiavelli

Has the world gone mad over the last few years and especially this year? It looks like it because it is hard to find a rational explanation for what is happening. Perhaps we should be looking for irrational explanations instead.

Ed West writing in The Tablet is one of my few soul mates in the mainstream media and clearly thinking along very similar lines to mine. Human rights ideology is a religion, a Christian heresy like the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre and Marx. As a religion it cannot be understood rationally. and indeed mkes no sense rationally. Think instead of Albigensians, although they were not in fact Christian heretics but believed in an entirely different religion. Who will lead a crusade against this

As Christianity started to seriously haemorrhage support in the 1960s, so a new faith arose, with “privilege” a form of original sin and so-called “vulnerable groups” the new sacred. Once large sections of the population abandon Christianity, liberalism becomes their default setting. If you meet any well-meaning and highly moral person under the age of 45 today and they aren’t religious, the chances are that they will be heavily into social justice causes – people need that religious impulse, with all it brings.





Today just 16 per cent of liberals in the US think religious faith gives them a “great deal” of meaning in life, compared to 62 per cent of “very conservative” Americans, yet almost a third of those very liberal Americans find a “great deal” of meaning in political causes, compared to just 9 per cent of conservatives. Politics seems to satisfy the same thirst as religion, fuelling a new form of political sectarianism that is intense in the US and growing in the UK.

Testing for Covid-19 is useless says Knut Wittkowski

Whatever you think of his other opinions the Nut, as a friend of mine calls him, is pretty obviously right about the uselessness of testing for Covid-19. 

Where I suspect he is mistaken is when he says antibody testing can tell us how far we have progressed towards achieving herd immunity. The answer the tests give is that we are a very long way off it, but quite a lot of people suspect that many more people are immune than have antibodies, which may be why the virus seems to fade away after two or three months in each country infected.

Please watch this clip and decide if Joe Biden is in good enough mental health to be U.S. President

Please watch this clip and decide if Joe Biden is senile or could credibly win the presidency and discharge its functions. 

The women who are questioning him about sexual harassment are clearly on his side and willing him to clear up the issue with a show of words, but Joe is unable to concentrate on the matter or be at all coherent. The women are embarrassed for him. 

It may just be my fancy, but I imagine they are Democrats worried that performing like this he has no chance of beating Donald Trump.

He always made lots of 'gaffes', always waffled, got confused and strayed from the point, it is perfectly true, but if you doubt he is losing his grip this is how Joe Biden spoke in 1992, when he was in his prime. 

(By the way, in that clip from 1992 he was arguing that Congress should refuse to approve President George H.W. Bush's nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court before the forthcoming presidential election. When the Republicans followed his advice in 2016 he felt differently.)

Putting the kibosh on it - an etymological mystery now apparently solved

Professor Matthew Little suggests in Origin of Kibosh: Routledge Studies in Etymology that “kibosh may derive from the word kurbash, a long whip used for punishment in parts of the Muslim world. It originally appeared in Arabic and Turkish, borrowed into French as ‘courbache’ and into English as ‘kurbash’ and other variant spellings.”

Co-author Professor Stephen Goranson found a poem, “Penal Servitude!” from around 1830 using the phrase. 

“The key verse in the poem (supposedly written by a convict who has returned from imprisonment in Australia) [includes] the following clarification about ‘put on the kibosh’: ‘That is if they was to introduce the lash.’”

...A Cockney chimney sweep, hauled into court in 1834 with his companion for violating the 1834 Chimney Sweepers Act, had an outburst of frustration and anger after the trial. That outburst — delivered in an unmistakable Cockney dialect — contained a blast against ‘the Vigs’ (Whigs) and the sweep used the new expression put the kibosh on. The London Standard article reporting on the trial was widely reprinted in England, and now people all over the country were reading about 'putting the kibosh on the ‘Vigs.’”

I must say that if someone gave this explanation on Call My Bluff I'd not be convinced, but the true etymologies on Call My Bluff were often unconvincing. 

Death in Minnesota and Weather Underground

Black Lives Matter is a scam, of course. It is a pretext rather than a reason for the protests around the world but, at the same time, it is a heartfelt, passionate critique of an unjust world. It makes people who want to overthrow the established order feel they have an obvious justification, one with which everyone who is not malign must agree. 

It is genuinely revolutionary, like the protests and riots of 1968, but also the ideology of the authorities. No politician or journalist wants to look racist by questioning the protesters. Anti-racism is a permanent revolution, of the sort desired by Marx and Engels.

A lot of the reason for the protests and for the violence that often accompanies them is the frustration of the poor and the well-off due to lockdown. Yet before Covid-19 appeared there had been a mood around the world for protest, riot and violence: in Hong Kong, Beirut, Santiago, Catalonia, Iran. It's as if the world is ready for revolution.

A very long article in the Atlantic in January 2016 called 'Why America Is Moving Left' said the Democratic Party establishment's attitudes to the Black Lives Matter protests were evidence of how far left America, especially young America, had moved since the 1990s. 

It pointed out that Eisenhower in effect ratified the New Deal and expected Marco Rubio, if he became President, to ratify Obama's left-wing USA.

Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

Radu Vodă belltower and Bucur Ciobanu