YouTube removed a video of Knut Wittkowski

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

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has told CNN.

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

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

Twitter removed two tweets by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

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

The lockdown has been a big mistake, obviously

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governor Cuomo of New York State has said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall miss the office if it dies

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

Yes. 

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

Who knows?

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

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

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

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

I wrote about 1990s Romanian office life here.

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

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

Hidden in the plaster in a wall in the Constanta Casino

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

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


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


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

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

Quotations

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

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

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

— Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) May 13, 2020

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

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

What fools we have been

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

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

Vitamin D

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

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

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

The biggest problem Europe faces goes unmentioned

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday

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

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

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

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

Lockdowns have been proven to be a terrible mistake

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

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

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

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

— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) May 10, 2020

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

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

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

Chinese censor EU letter sucking up to China

China Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese communist party, published a letter by all 27 EU ambassadors calling for greater cooperation with Beijing, in what appeared to be a European response to Donald Trump's attacks on China in connection with the coronavirus pandemic. China responded by insisting the letter was rewritten to delete references to the coronavirus originating in China and spreading worldwide from there, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung. The EU meekly complied. 

Gone are the days when the European powers gave orders to the Chinese Emperor.

My idea as a young boy, at the time of the first British referendum, that it was better to be part of a European superpower than be a satellite of America is risible, though that is what still attracts many to the EU. 

Europe can never be any sort of power and even if it acquires an army will never use it in defence of common European interests. In fact its existence is a hindrance to European interests. Europe's relative economic decline is connected to the existence of the EU, though it has many other causes, first among them being the lack of European babies. (I am guilty here.)


The EU will trundle along for a very long time, siphoning off Europe's energy, while the relative decline of Europe continues. The result a materialistic, post-Christian, feminist Nirvana with lots of drugs and an increasingly powerful Muslim minority.


As my friend Bunny said, those who do not believe in their religion are destined to be conquered by people who believe in theirs. But that's another story.

Hume's birthday

Today is the philosopher David Hume’s 309th birthday. He was the first well-known European freethinker or atheist to die without making a conversion, according to Paul Johnson, admittedly not a professional historian. Hume's defiantly godless death shocked intellectuals throughout Europe, in the way that belief in the Deity now shocks most of them.


I wonder if Paul Johnson forgot Marlowe, but Marlowe, who was killed in a brawl in 1593, was a blasphemer rather than an atheist, like King William II. Marlowe said God was dog spelt backwards. That sort of thing. 

Until the 1960s Hume and Lock were on the Index of Prohibited Books that Catholics were not permitted to read. Now Catholics read and write the most extraordinary things.


This is from Boswell's Life of Johnson, (Samuel not Paul, of course) which might be my favourite book. 

‘…I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes. 'Well,' said I, 'Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.' 'No, no,' said he. 'But I shall have

An English princess in Kiev

On this day on 1107 the Russian Primary Chronicle records the death of the first wife of Vladimir Monomakh (‘He who fights alone’).

The chronicle does not name her, but this was Gytha, the eldest daughter of King Harold II (Godwineson) of England. She may have died whilst on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

In 1068 or 1069  many of King Harold II's family had fled to the court of their kinsman Count Baldwin in Flanders. Two of Harold’s sons, Edmund and Godwine, accompanied by their sister Gytha, travelled on to King Swein II Estrithson, the King of Denmark, Harold II's cousin. Sweyn II was born in England shortly after his uncle King Canute conquered England and she became a Danish colony.

Godwine and Edmund may have asked Sweyn for help in reinstating them in England, but after his failed expedition of 1069 Sweyn was once bitten twice shy.

The Kievan Rus was originally a Viking settlement and links between Kiev and Sweden were close. They were part of the same cultural space, one that Normandy and since 1066 England had left. Gytha’s marriage was arranged by Sweyn to one of the many nephews of the Grand Prince of Kiev. Presumably the couple conversed in Danish. 

She did not live to see her husband Vladimir become Grand Prince of Kiev (1113-1125). 

Vladimir arranged for Gytha’s eldest son Mstislav to succeed him. Mstislav in Western Europe was known as ‘Araldus [Harold] king of the Russians’.

Vladimir and Mstislavare regarded as two of the great rulers of Russia. From the time of Ivan the Terrible, the Tsars were crowned with the supposed ‘crown’ of Vladimir Monomakh. Was Vladimir half English? Yes, but it would be better to describe him as wholly Danish.

Advice for lockdown

“... when something is detestable, and yet inevitable, what one must do is not merely to endure it - a hard task whatever one may do - but find a way of loving it. Everything is a matter of points of view, and misfortune is often only the sign of a false interpretation of life.”
Henry de Montherlant

The recent past is the most forgotten historical period, in China and everywhere

“Ironically, North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s had far higher living standards than China and North Koreans would frequently congratulate themselves on not having fallen into the chaos and backwardness of their giant neighbour. It was only in the early nineties, with the end of Russian and Chinese subsidies, that the North Korean economy collapsed.” 

James Palmer, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China (2012)

I met James Palmer when I was in Peking. He's a very interesting man who tells me that the Chinese have the same attitude to the West as Eastern Europeans have. They certainly do not think of China as the centre of the world as they did under the emperors. Talking to him I formed the impression that they do not have the creativity of the West.

James is firmly on the left. He told me over a very good dinner that everything Niall Fergusson wrote about China in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest is wrong. I was reading it when we met. He is now working for Foreign Policy and accused the WHO back in February of acting as the Chinese government's PR agency.

The curious passing of Neil Ferguson

Professor Neil Ferguson is a highly intelligent and very dangerous fool. His predictions of 500,000 dead from Coronavirus, based on modelling so badly written that he could not share them with anyone, pushed England into lockdown. He  confidently forecast global deaths of four million from swine flu. The worldwide total turned out to be 18,500. In 2005 he said that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. Between 2003 and 2009, just 282 people died worldwide from the disease. I think he has done more harm than anyone for decades but I do not see why his breaking the rules on social distancing  should require him to resign. Either his advice is valuable or it is not. My country seems to have gone mad.

Joe Biden seems to be finished

Conrad Black thinks Joe Biden is 'cooked' and it is very hard to disagree. Apparently, "cooked" means "ruined" or "finished".

Lord Black is in top form in his latest article about the forthcoming US election.

'The real test of these matters is how the people vote, and the country saw Joe Biden come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and descend to 11 percent in that state’s Democratic primary. Generally, no candidate in either party is nominated who loses badly in New Hampshire.


'It did not require a resurrected Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that Biden’s sudden emergence from punch-drunk Palooka on the ropes to the anointed nominee in two weeks was not entirely spontaneous. In a formidable display of professionalism, the Democratic Party elders carried him to the finish line on March 3, knocking Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren out of the race and obtaining endorsements of Biden from three of them.

He thinks the investigation into the FBI side of what he calls 'the fraudulent Trump-Russian collusion outrage' will include decisions by President Obama when Vice-president Biden was in the room. Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine and China will be used against his father. I wonder if Hunter Biden's activities in Romania will also hit the front pages. 

And then there is the accusation that the old man raped Tara Reade all those years ago.

Lisa Bloom

@LisaBloom

Trial lawyer fighting for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse

I believe you, Tara Reade.
You have people who remember you told them about this decades ago.
We know he is "handsy."
You're not asking for $.
You've obviously struggled mightily with this.
I still have to fight Trump, so I will still support Joe.
But I believe you. And I'm sorry https://t.co/eMUBrkkVFE

— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) May 1, 2020

Lisa Bloom, 'trial lawyer fighting for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse', will vote for a man she thinks is a rapist but many, including Lord Black and Tucker Carlson, think Joe won't stand in the end - or, as Americans say, run. 

I don't think he can be replaced unless he wants to be replaced and so I think he will be the candidate and will lose. 

Mario Cuomo's boy might have had a good chance but I think Donald Trump would probably beat him too. I think it's a zeitgeist thing. This is not the moment for the exhausted globalist left.

'Trust deficit: The roots of Russia’s standoff with the West'

“After the collapse of one pillar of the former bipolar world order, it became fashionable in the West to think that the world order could become unipolar, with the U.S. at the helm. In the 1990s, Russia descended into its worst crisis since 1917. It not only ceased to be a superpower, it suffered political, economic, and social collapse as well. It was not even clear that Russia would survive physically. So, perhaps believing that Russian interests and views didn’t matter anymore, Clinton made the decision to enlarge NATO to the east. But just because Russia couldn’t do anything about it at the time doesn’t mean that we accepted it. We never did. Since then the process of NATO expansion has been unstoppable, and so has the subsequent chain of events.”

“It’s not that we view NATO as an existential threat right now. But Russia cannot accept that a country next door would be a member of a military alliance that is hostile to Russia. We are not opposed to Ukraine being democratic. It’s fine with us if a neighbor has a different political and social system. But not a member of an adversarial bloc. Security is the central issue.”

So says from Alexei Gromyko, who "as director of the official Institute of Europe, often serves in an advisory role to today’s Russian leaders" interviewed in a very interesting article by Fred Weir on the way Russians (those in power at least) view the West. Alexei Gromyko is the grandson of Andrei Gromyko, the seemingly eternal Soviet Foreign Minister  from 1957 to 1985. He was wittily called 'the Abominable No-man', a sobriquet dating from his time as Stalin's ambassador to the UN.