When the Asian Flu hit in 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower didn’t declare a state of emergency, lock down the economy or close schools. But the era’s scientists did deliver a vaccine in four months flat. In the Wall Street Journal, Niall Ferguson suggests that a society with a stronger fabric of family life, community and church, and much simpler government, was better equipped to withstand a pandemic.
The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”
