What is going on in England?

I have no idea and hope you can explain it to me. But it is very worrying indeed.

Last week a mob of left-wing demonstrators attacked what the BBC News referred to as 'the controversial Churchill statue'.

Please pause and think about that. 

I didn't believe it till I clicked on the link. Please click on it for yourself, gentle reader.

Only 25% of Brits approve of the protestors who pulled down the statues -Opinium, today

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) June 13, 2020

Only?

Matthew Goodwin, whose tweet that was, is a bestselling author of a book about national populism.

Last weekend there were more protests and more rioting in England by Black Lives Matter supporters (essentially Antifa), because of the death in police custody of a man in Minnesota in the USA. (The case is sub judice and cannot be discussed for fear of prejudicing the jury, which doesn't stop people doing so, including Boris Johnson.)

The crowd defaced statues and attacked the police. 

In response, the British police got down on their knees to the crowd to show their approval for Black Lives Matter.

I am not making this up.

The authorities, the press, academics and big business have aligned themselves with Black Lives Matter. They do so not in order to calm the protesters in the street but from hatred of racism and from fear people might think them racist.

Nigel Farage lose his radio programme on LBC for comparing BLM to the Taliban. 

His dismissal was warmly applauded in several papers. The days are gone when journalists liked freedom of speech for professional reasons.

Of course, he was punished for making a very fair point.

A woman police officer was thrown from her horse and punctured her lung, but the BBC didn’t really talk about it on their news coverage.

A statue of a benefactor to Bristol was toppled into Bristol harbour by the mob because he had owned slaves. The police said they did not arrest protesters on the spot as it would have caused more disorder and disruption and that they understood the reasons for the crowd's action. The Chief Constable made a broadcast in which he asked viewers to imagine what the effect would have been of trying to fight back the crowd 

to protect a statue, the image of a man reputed to have made much of his fortune from the slave trade.

He said that Bristol should be proud that the incident happened without violence.

The Mayor of Bristol, who is of mixed race, said it was 

an act of historical poetry.

The statue of Churchill in Parliament Sq has had to be covered up, by order of the Mayor of London.

Yesterday men from a fringe party, Britain First, assembled to guard the statue of Churchill from left-wing demonstrators. The leader of the party said they were 

"extremely fed up with the way that the authorities have allowed two consecutive weekends of vandalism against our national monuments."

They were attacked by BLM protesters and this time the police intervened and made over a hundred arrests. 

The Prime Minister said

Racist thuggery has no place on our streets.

but said nothing about anti-racist thuggery.

I see tweets suggesting today was more violent than last week’s BLM protest.

I was there and filmed it. I can confirm it was not more violent.

The only reason you think that is because today’s violent footage was more widely reported by the mainstream media than last week.

— Mahyar Tousi (@MahyarTousi) June 13, 2020

When what the media call far right hooligans tried to leave London, as requested by the Metropolitan police, they were attacked at Waterloo station by the mob.

The tweet below is from a Russian stand-up comedian (whose politics are Liberal Democrat, should you worry lest he be a conservative). I saw him last summer at the Edinburgh Festival. Being Russian he knows a lot about the far left.

Watch all the people who said nothing about violence and destruction last week bravely speak out now.

Cowards, every single one of you.

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) June 13, 2020

Quotations

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?"
Benjamin Franklin in 1751


“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [slaves] shall be free, nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government.”
President Thomas Jefferson in a draft of his autobiography, 1821. The first half of the sentence (only) was inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, when it was built at the suggestion of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Former Trump advisor hopes activists will confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality

There are two Fiona Hills, both very clever young British women from poor families. The Glaswegian Fiona Hill was Theresa May's disastrous Svengali, the Geordie one is an expert on Russia and was adviser to Donald Trump. 

The Geordie lass became an American citizen and was recruited into the Trump administration by KT McFarland, a Fox News chat show hostess turned deputy national security adviser. Miss Hill had been on her show to talk about Russia.


Miss Hill became famous when she was questioned by a committee of the US Congress as part of the attempt to impeach Donald Trump. She memorably said the Trump White House felt like the Bolshevik revolution, which is pithy but tells you a lot abut her distaste for the President. 

She completely lost my respect when she told the committee that the word globalisation was an 'antisemitic trope'. 

She was evidently not a politically impartial civil servant. Plus the remark was obviously outrageous nonsense, the sort of nonsense that clever people with closed minds spout.

Now an interview with her that took place last month is published in the Guardian. In it, she talks about how she got to Oxford, Harvard and the White House and how she was tripped up literally at the Oxford interview, by a spiteful fellow interviewee.

I was told by someone who knew her that she is very clever. Very clever people have excellent memories and often have rigid, schematic views of the world, into which they slot their erudite learning. Lord Macaulay is a good example and Fiona Hill might be another one. 

Tories, even erudite ones (they do exist), by definition tend not to be schematic.

For her Boris Johnson is a populist, which is not true (or Corbyn and the Liberal Democrat girl were as much so). 

She thinks populism is a political movement used by unscrupulous politicians to take in badly educated people who are the victims of deindustrialisation. 

That is a perfectly arguable theory, but from a girl from a poor family it sounds very patronising. I'm from a working class family too and it makes me feel very patronised.


She blames the populists for the death toll from Covid-19 too.

“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities.

“It’s all about style and swagger and atmospherics, with superficial solutions to things, with lots of sloganeering, and obviously dealing with a pandemic is pretty methodical and boring. It requires an awful lot of planning and logistical organization and you can’t just sort of do it on the fly with an ad hoc coalition.”

At least she is not silly enough to believe the theory that President Trump is being blackmailed and controlled by Vladimir Putin, but she says the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries (what is she implying?) and that Donald Trump appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

This was a joke, for goodness' sake, and rather a good one.

She does sound like a student politician, but so do many academics these days.

The interview ends on this note.

Hill sees some hope for the future in citywide grassroots activism, to confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality. But those are more aspirations for the future. Right now, in Washington, London and Moscow, it is the populists who have the upper hand.

Fiona Hill is entitled to her political opinions and she is much better informed than people who are not paid to understand politics, but after this interview she is not entitled to be seen as an impartial witness. She is a political actor as much as anyone else, as much as Boris Johnson or Donald Trump.

Fiona Hill is a Russian expert and I am sure she is right when she says that Russians, "take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.” 

Putin, the KGB operative, has played Trump as he played George Bush the Younger and Hillary. 

I am reminded, though, of a conversation in 1943 between one half-American British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and a future half-American British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, about Oliver Cromwell. 

Churchill told Macmillan that Cromwell 

‘made one terrible mistake. Obsessed in his youth by the fear of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?’

It isn't often said of him, but it should be. Churchill, obsessed from his youth by fear of Germany, certainly failed to observe the danger from Russia. 

The half-American Fiona Hill fails to see the dangers to both her countries are no longer from Russia. The populists whom she despises do see that and quite a number of other obvious things that are hidden from her.

Retired senior State Department official criticises retired ambassadors' attack on Trump

From 2000 to 2003 Ed Stafford worked as 'policy advisor' at the US Embassy in Bucharest and was one of the very cleverest foreigners in Romania. He comes from a working-class Catholic family and was possibly one of the minority of permanent officials in the State Department who sides with the Republicans rather than the Democrats. I urged him to hang around and serve the Trump administration for a year, but he preferred to retire before the Donald took office. He has just written this.

A group of retired U.S. Ambassadors and others with a background of public service in foreign affairs or national security affairs published June 5 an open-letter on the Just Security website excoriating the President for his comments about the potential use of federal troops and federalized National Guard units to confront and suppress rioting and looting. After reading the letter, I was perplexed at what could have induced the authors to write or add their signatures to it, for it has several glaring faults that render it an unserious effort. Those faults, failures to take into account material information, would have been very easy to avoid, which raises the question: was it just sloppiness brought on by the rush to publish before the news cycle had moved on? Or, simple ignorance of material information? Or, was there a deliberate effort to misrepresent the President’s statement?

The Queen hid in the bushes from the Ceausescus

Journalist and royal biographer Robert Hardman told a story on a TV documentary called Our Queen: Inside the Crown about the occasion when the Ceaușescus stayed at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen took the corgis out for a walk in the palace gardens and she could see the Ceaușescus coming the other way. She thought, 'I really can't face talking to them,' so the first and only time in her life, she actually hid in a bush in the palace gardens to avoid her guests."

She has to meet all sorts. The Emperor Hirohito, whose army tortured so many British soldiers, was her guest, though he seems to have been welcome. When she was required to shake the hands of IRA murderer Martin McGuinness she wore gloves. She did, however, get out of knighting Mick Jagger, whom she doubtless associates with so many bad things about the 1960s, and deputed the job  to somebody else.

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.”'