Romanian Shepherd Family from the Sibiu area

A Romanian Shepherd Family from the Sibiu area, wearing very similar clothes to what the Getae wore on Trajan's Column and in statues found in Italy. The painting is XIXth century, by Hungarian painter Miklos Barabas.

I like it very much and it reminds me of the English writer John Paget and his interesting book Travels in Hungary and Transylvania. I read it when I was at university, even though Hungarian and Romanian history were only a tenth of a question on the 1848 revolutions. It's available on Google Books free.

From today's Spectator Covid-19 update: Is London now virtually Covid-19-free?

'Barely three months ago, face mask adverts were banned by the UK Advertising Standards Agency for ‘misleading’ claims that they help protect against Covid-19. Now, we have police enforcing such masks, and without any debate in parliament about the need for such a measure. Whether this will boost confidence or undermine it remains to be seen.'

Man is imprisoned for urinating near a statue - BLM protesters who defaced statues and threw one into Bristol harbour not charged

A man who was photographed urinating against or through the wall of the Houses of Parliament has been sent to prison for two weeks. The fact that trial and sentence was so quick and that somebody called the Chief Magistrate (a title devised by New Labour in 2000) delivered the sentence suggests an example is being made. 

I don't like the way England has become a nation of police informers but he did deserve to be arrested and charged and did deserve a not too heavy fine. Poor man, after many pints of beer he had little choice. 

The BLM protesters who defaced statues and even threw one into the sea meanwhile have not been charged.

The Avon and Somerset Constabulary made clear their sympathy with the reasons for which the statue in Bristol was thrown into the sea, even though they regretted law-breaking.

The Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said: 

Better to ban cars, not shops and restaurants, if Romanian lives matter

In 2019 Romania had the highest road fatality rate in the European Union, 96 deaths per 1 million inhabitants, according to preliminary figures published on June 11 by the European Commission. It marks a big improvement on 2010 though, when there were 110 deaths per million.


Almost 2,000 deaths. How much better had the Romanian government not had a lockdown but banned all journeys by motor vehicle for a year, with exceptions only for police, ambulance, fire engines and girlfriends of politicians.


It would have caused huge inconvenience, it's true, but it would have saved two thousand lives to make up for any excess deaths from Covid-19 caused by not having a lockdown ('carantina' in Romanian). 

Unlike the people dying of Covid-19, the people whose lives would have been saved would be of all ages and mostly in good health. It would have caused infinitely less damage to the economy and infinitely less suffering in the long term.

Raining on the parade - and mentioning Drummer Lee Rigby

The British media makes much of the incident of the anti-BLM protester who allegedly urinated on (in fact not on, but close to) the statue of murdered P.C. Palmer, at the wall of the Houses of Parlament.

Labour Party (socialist) leader Sir Keir Starmer called it 'beneath contempt', but the media said little and he said nothing about BLM men urinating on, not beside, the Cenotaph and Churchill's statue. This happened the weekend before last.

The BLM protesters who attacked the police last weekend were treated with tenderness by the press, in contrast. The BBC headline said

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.

The media distort the truth and lie about the BLM protests/riots

The untrustworthiness and bias of the New York Times and Washington Post beggar belief. There is simply no reason to read them. But the British media are not so much better when it comes to Black Lives Matter.

A white protester was snapped urinating on the curtilage wall of the Palace of Westminster, which is bad behaviour and contempt of Parliament, but all the urinals had been closed by order of the Mayor. He no doubt did not notice that beside him was a statue to PC Keith Palmer, who was killed by a terrorist, Khalid Masood, three years ago.

The papers all report untruthfully that he urinated on the statue. They know it's untrue because the photo makes it clear that he did not.


The media makes much of this incident but the media said little about BLM men urinating on, not beside, the Cenotaph and Churchill's statue. 

The BLM protesters who attacked the police last weekend were treated with tenderness by the press in contrast. The BBC headline said

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.

BBC listeners know that they are to understand that anti-racism protesters are good and, on the other hand, anti-BLM protesters are racist and wicked.

Now we have reported the story of the wonderful BLM demonstrator who rescued a white rival protester. And indeed he is to be congratulated, because he may well have saved the man's life.


But he saved him from dying by picking him up from the ground where he might have been walked on, beaten or kicked to death, so he says. And he did so, he said, to prevent the death tarnishing the BLM side.

What was the man doing on the ground? I don't know but my guess is he was knocked to the ground by thugs. The media do not want you to see that. 

Will the West collapse like the Soviet Union?

The Soviet Union ceased to exist because it couldn't offer its people rising living standards and because, outside Russia, it could not command their loyalty because it was a multinational federation.




But the most important reason why it failed was because its elite stopped believing in it. They saw that it was built on lies.




Some people, especially Russians, think the West is an illusion built on lies. It is not. But what if its elites come to think it is? What if this is what is happening now?




I hope it's not as bad as that but, if it is, the elites must be replaced by people who believe in their tradition. This should in fact happen anyway




Maybe, just maybe, the current statue destroying revolutionary fervour will give way to counter revolution.

From "Watermelons" by James Delingpole .

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%.