In 1515, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull stipulating that all published material translated from Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Chaldaic into Latin, or from Latin into the vernacular, should be moderated by sensitivity readers. Without such precautions, the document …
Australia’s zombie election
Australia’s election may have kicked off a little over a week ago, but aside from the TV pundits giddy at the prospect of filling airtime with banal updates of the location of the Prime Minister’s plane, it’s hard to find …
Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory
When, the summer before last, the results of the first Covid wave began to be tallied in the media, there were different ways of measuring the devastation. One way of looking at the pandemic was to focus on how many …
Why we fear dead bodies
It is almost exactly two years ago that we were first asked to stand on our doorsteps to clap for NHS staff. As the weeks went on, the target of our applause was widened: to healthcare workers and emergency services, …
Will China rebuild Ukraine?
The readout from the Politburo meeting published by the Xinhua news agency on 28 March 2022 was the shortest in decades: just 100 characters or so. Apart from a statement of condolence for the tragic China Eastern plane crash a …
Why Hong Kong can’t escape Covid
“Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till …
The tragedy of Matt Hancock
The first lockdown deepened during a luridly warm spring. Strange things began to happen in England. Mr Motivator MBE returned to television, and a TikTok about pubs made young men cry. The middle-classes baked until the flour ran out; the …
How the truckers split indigenous Canada
Canadians aren’t known for the depth of their political feeling. If anything, our easy-going passivity is often a point of pride and distinction against our overzealous neighbours to the south. Yet if the recent Freedom Convoy revealed anything, it was …
Covid has created a capitalist nightmare
Over the past two years, as the pandemic claimed the lives of millions of people and upturned the lives of everyone else, a silent revolution was taking place. Western capitalism suddenly found itself usurped; replaced by an even more oligarchic …
We deserve better than these weaklings
Vladimir Putin is many things. To Boris Johnson, he is “irrational”. To Joe Biden, he is “a killer”. To Barack Obama, he is the “bored kid at the back of the classroom”.
I suspect that Putin is all of these …
New Zealand’s lockdown fairytale is over
New Zealand is finally facing its moment of truth. Long committed to Zero Covid, the nation has been held up as a pandemic success story: proof that the virus could be held at bay by “empathetic” leadership and prudent government …
The Covid regime has fooled us all
In the late stages of the American Covid regime, “The Science” has become dramatically less important to the ruling class. Notably missing from a new debate about masking policy, in which President Biden has cast doubt on the recent decision …
Why Canada’s truckers will lose
The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Will Australia survive Covid?
It wasn’t so long ago that Australia was lauded globally as a rare success story in the fight against Covid. Its federal and state governments were eager to take credit for this, and Australians were eager to give it to …
Is it worth vaccinating children?
Like a number of the weird little pressure groups that sprung up over the pandemic, the modus operandi of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team, or HART, is relatively straightforward: cobble together a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials, …