The Week’s Most Fleeting, Cheating, and Trick-or-Treating Headlines

GAY BASH GAY BASHED
Blacks and gays come across as two Southern gentlemen slapping each other in the face with dueling gloves for all eternity.

Even after last week’s failed “tranny walkout,” LGBTBLTs are continuing to pressure Netflix to renounce and remove Dave Chappelle’s stand-up special because of the comedian’s “transphobic” jokes (not sure why it’s a “phobia” to say men aren’t women; sound more like a “fact”).

Even though the manwomen at Netflix have so far failed to get Chappelle’s special removed from the streaming service, high-profile gays like George “I miss the communal bathrooms in Tule Lake” Takei and poet Saeed Jones (author of “Ode to a Grecian Glory Hole”) are working hard to promote boycotts of Netflix because you have offended mah honor, sah (slap)!

Gays slap blacks!

At the same time, however, blacks have successfully torpedoed the Boston Pride Parade, one of the oldest gay-pride events in the country. What was supposed to be Boston Pride’s 50th anniversary has turned into Boston Pride’s epitaph. Not only has the parade been called off, but last week the entire Boston Pride organization disbanded—willingly, of its own accord—because black protesters “convinced” the leadership that Boston Pride was too white, too LGB but not enough T, too bourgeois, and too welcoming of gays who don’t think police should be defunded.

The tolerance parade was too tolerant so in the name of tolerance the tolerant leaders declared the parade intolerant in order to create more tolerance.

Figure that one out!

In the end, the Boston Pride leaders simply grew tired of BLM protesters blockading the parade route, as has happened every time over the past six years, so they surrendered. No more parade, ever.

Blacks slap gays!

It’s like watching the Three Stooges if Curly were a ghetto thug and Moe was transitioning to Monique.

IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, SURLY BROWNS
And on the topic of canceled parades, blacks followed up their victory over the Beantown buggerers by quashing some squash.

Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School in Seattle always took pride in its annual Halloween Pumpkin Parade. Children marching with pumpkins while parents take photos and think “What a magic moment” as the kids wonder when they’ll get to the part where they eat candy.

Alas, the parade has now been ended for good, because school admins decided that the event was racist. The exact quote from school officials: “The parade marginalizes students of color who do not celebrate the holiday.”

Admins claimed that “students of color,” “specifically African-American males,” “have requested to be isolated on campus while the event took place.”

The administrators seem to be saying that black boys are skeered o’ pumpkins. “We can’t let black males see pumpkins because they faint from shock.”

Yeah, that’s way more racist than a parade. And unfounded, too; the school offered no evidence that a single black male student skedaddled Stepin Fetchit-style upon viewing a jack-o’-lantern.

This is yet another example of the inversion of 1980s dynamics. During the period of the born-agains and televangelists, it was the evangelicals who protested Halloween events. And school administrators resisted, because Halloween is fun for kids, and always has been.

But now, woke leftists cancel Halloween events in the name of blacks who are likely not complaining in the first place.

Especially not when free candy is involved.

If this catches on, pumpkins might join the ranks of nooses and Confederate flags as things that warrant a hate-crime charge if displayed publicly.

Poor Linus…formerly mocked for his misplaced faith, now prosecuted as a genocidal KKK insurrectionist.

SOROS, YOU MAGNIFICENT (MILE) BASTARD
Certain things in life defy rational explanation. UFOs, paranormal sightings, and of course Dane Cook’s former popularity.

But the most fascinating unexplained mystery of the moment is the Great Shoplifting Epidemic. Why are once-glorious shopping districts now plagued by rampant robberies, to the extent that stores are choosing to shutter due to massive stock losses?

As an example, there’s Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Once known as “the crown jewel of American retail,” the Magnificent Mile is now the “Maaaaaan-ificent Mile,” beset by smash-and-grab shoplifting attacks and muggings of shoppers. What used to be a draw for tourists is now an ugly pastiche of vacant, boarded-up storefronts and for-sale signs. Anchor stores like Macy’s and Disney have fled, the latter realizing that “diversity” might be fine in movies, but when it comes to neighborhoods, “hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to the suburbs we go.”

Last week the Chicago PD, or what’s left of it after defunding, issued a warning to stay away from the Magnificent Mile due to the roving bands of extras from Death Wish.

When asked by CBS Chicago if the fleeing businesses are ever likely to return, Robb Karr of the Illinois Retail Merchant’s Association did his best impression of the falconer from The Simpsons.

According to CBS, with the fancy shoppes on the (formerly) Magnificent Mile emptied and shuttered, the thugs are now targeting 7-Elevens (Slim Jims: the consolation prize for looters who missed out on the good stuff).

Of course, the mystery remains: What’s causing this shoplifting epidemic? CBS is outta answers. Could it be Soros-funded DAs who refuse to prosecute property crimes, combined with politicians who defund cops?

Naw! That’s pure superstition. It’s likely alien pod-people or demon possession. Because the most convoluted explanation is usually the best one. That’s George Soros’ “Fock’em’s Razor.” And it’s Chicago canon.

THE BRUTHAS GIB
Nobody likes being in Chicago, but let’s hold our noses and stay for one more story. The city’s mayor, sentient Halloween prop Lori Lightfoot, has proposed a monthly “guaranteed universal basic income” program for the city’s poor. Under her scheme, the huddled masses yearning to thieve free will receive $500 a month, which, coupled with all those Slim Jims, ain’t too bad a deal.

Now, you’d think the Chicago City Council’s powerful Black Caucus would be jumping the broom for joy over the proposal.

But no. Funny enough, while the Council’s whites and Jews are totally on board, the Black Caucus is the primary force opposing the free-cash giveaway.

What gives? Did the Black Caucus members get hit on the head by a crate of Thomas Sowell books? Are they being blackmailed by Candace Owens for that one night of “indiscretion” in Burnham Park?

Nope. The council’s blacks are opposing the “universal basic income” scheme because it’s…universal. It’s income-based, not race-based. And the caucus members don’t want none of that free green going to no beaners.

Jason Ervin, chairman of the Black Caucus, told a local black newspaper that “until the city makes a deal on reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, there’s no way in hell we can support direct payments to anybody else.”

So git yo Salvadoran ass back to Salvadoria, Pedro. Illinois might’ve never been part of the Confederacy, it might’ve never been a slave state, but damned if Illinois taxpayers are gonna pay for the income of some lettuce picker before they pay for the descendants of people who were enslaved in states that are pretty damn far from Illinois.

And besides, what’s $500 a month anyway? Most of the Black Caucus members’ constituents make double that from stolen Slim Jims, Slurpees, and “take a penny” trays.

HBCU? More Like HBPEE-YEW!
Black Americans never seem to catch a break. They finally find a safe space from whitey, only to be persecuted by blighty.

Howard University is what’s known as an HBCU (Historically Black College and University…although considering the role of HBCUs in procuring victims for a certain celebrity rapist, it could also stand for Helping Bill Cosby Unload).

Intended as a haven for black scholars, Howard has, sadly, become a haven for something much worse: mold, mice, cockroaches, bedbugs, and other vermin.

It’s Howard U’s “Good Times Experience”—all the fun of living in a 1970s sitcom dilapidated housing project.

Dyn-o-mites!

To protest the unlivable conditions in student dorms, 150 Howard attendees have taken over the Blackburn Student Center, occupying the building as their new sleeping quarters.

Jeez, one wonders why these black students saw property appropriation as their best recourse. Where could they have possibly absorbed such a message?

But surely the school admins will admire this act of civil disobedience, right? Surely they’ll cheer the aggrieved youngsters for “taking up space” and “being heard,” because their lives matter!

Nope! The administration has shut off water, air, and Wi-Fi to the occupied building, and last week the university’s president released a statement ordering the young freedom fighters out…or else!

There may be areas where we agree to disagree. That’s the nature of a vibrant community. However, there is a distinct difference between peaceful protest and freedom of expression and the occupation of a University building that impedes operations and access to essential services and creates health and safety risks.

Oh, you don’t say! Too bad that message never reached BLM rioters last year.

“Agree to disagree”? To the current generation of young blacks, compromise equals genocide.

For anyone who had to endure BLM mayhem in 2020, the situation at Howard offers schadenfreude at its most justified.

I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics, but then I’m spoiled rotten having watched old black-and-white pearls such as From Here to Eternity, The Asphalt Jungle, and Our Man Godfrey. When Chariots of Fire came out some forty years ago I went bananas. My uncle had competed in both the ’32 and ’36 Olympics in the hurdles, and my father was on the relay team. Athletics back then were for pure amateurs only, and as in the case of the great Jim Thorpe, anyone caught having ever been paid even a dollar for competing in any sport in or out of the Olympics was obliged to give the medal back. Chariots of Fire captured the will, luminosity, and purity of the amateur athlete who competes honorably for glory and would rather die than cheat. Which brings me to the latest film my friend Michael Mailer has directed, and whose premiere I attended last week in the Bagel.

In brief, it’s Chariots of Fire on water. Heart of Champions was inspired by a true-life story that took place back in 1936. Nine working-class boys in America’s Northwest decided to challenge the upper-class crews that made up the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton crew teams, which were competing to represent Uncle Sam at the Berlin 1936 Olympics. To everyone’s amazement they ended up winning, going to Berlin, and winning again, beating Italy and Germany in the final. Apparently even the Führer was impressed when told of their background. There have been books (Boys in the Boat) and documentaries about it.

Michael’s movie has nothing to do with that event, and is set in 1999 at a fictional university battling against Harvard and other grand schools. The star is that wonderful actor Michael Shannon, who gives a great performance as a Vietnam-veteran coach who reads his boys better than any Freud ever could and then some. Michael unfolds the mystery of certain characters over the course of the movie. One can no longer do that in the era of social media as it takes a few minutes online to reveal pretty much anything one needs to know about anyone. Social media is antithetical to mystery, according to Michael, and by extension antithetical to art or the creation of art.

Here’s the director talking to me about the film: “The values espoused in the movie—sacrifice, team above self, sublimation of ego, and leadership—meant more then than they do now.” Michael also wanted to tell a story during a time when it was okay to get into a fistfight over a girl and not have it labeled a toxic-masculinity event. Here I take a parenthesis. Last week in London I had drinks with heroes at an undisclosed location. I am not being mysterious but following their rules. Perhaps a few readers will know what I mean. I am not being coy, just proud of having met with the best Britain can ever provide. Now back to the film.

Harvard is sort of the bad guy in the movie. Michael Mailer is a Harvard grad and has nothing but great affection for his alma mater. (I think the place stinks.) But if he hadn’t gone to Harvard, Michael would never have done the film. Crew at the stinky place is not a sport but a religion. Everyone who wasn’t as ugly or as nerdy as Mark Zuckerberg went out for freshman crew. No matter how short, weak, or fat, how athletic or clumsy, freshmen went out to row for their lives. Michael did not. He boxed, becoming captain of the boxing team and going on to the finals of the Golden Gloves where he lost in a split decision after a nonstop, violent toe-to-toe match. Oh yes, and another thing: Crew requires getting up at 5 a.m. and rowing. Michael lusted after girls and went after them, and unlike Zuckerberg he landed them galore. He also drank Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong in Harvard Square, was a very good student, and even had time to see his father, Norman, when the great novelist deigned to come around the quad and criticize. (You drop your left before the right cross, and Ptolemy was not only once a pharaoh but also an astronomer.)

So, once the movie presented itself, Michael Mailer was offered the chance to direct and he jumped at it. I won’t spoil it for you, but Harvard loses at the end, at least I think it does as I was seated next to Arki Busson at the premiere and he had just cracked a joke about a very pretty girl who was rather clingy in the film. A party chez moi followed, and as luck would have it we overdid things. But it was a Thursday evening and I didn’t have to fly to London until Monday, so I let it rip. I was inspired by the movie. American revisionists seem to think people should forfeit their history, customs, heroes, and freedoms to a self-appointed elite. I say screw you, you’re not worth a bucket of warm spit, and like the communist in disguise that you are, you will end up in the rubbish heap of history. There, take it from Taki, go see the movie and punch the next person who cancels you rather hard in the mouth.

“No worst, there is none,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, about human states of mind. If he were alive today, he might write, “No most absurd, there is none,” about our current contortions of language.

In a publication aimed at dermatologists, the Dermatology Times, we read in an article devoted to the treatment of the skin in transgender patients the following:

Patients of reproductive potential who are not…abstinent with penis-containing partners, 2 forms of contraception are required.

In other words, women who would like to be men but still have their ovaries and wombs can become pregnant by sexual intercourse with fertile men, the latter now being known as “penis-containing” persons. (The venerable but increasingly lunatic medical journal The Lancet recently decided to call women “bodies with vaginas.” How long can it be before we no longer address meetings or assemblies as Ladies and Gentlemen but as Penis-containers and Vagina-bearers, or perhaps P and V for short?)

At the same time as we are enjoined to think of biological sex as unimportant to the point of nonexistence, and to believe that men who can have babies by penis-containers are men in precisely the same sense that Tarzan was a man, we are also told to distinguish human beings solely by one or other of their genitive features. This makes the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four seem straightforward or even lucid by comparison.

The article in the Dermatology Times points to a practical problem for dermatologists in their treatment of women-to-men transsexuals. These women are given masculinizing hormones that, among other side effects, result in the development of acne in up to a third of them.

Acne is a distressing condition and when it is severe enough can provoke suicidal thoughts. Moreover, one of the best treatments for acne is isotretinoin, a well-known side effect of which is suicidal thoughts sometimes resulting in suicide, even in those not previously suicidal. As if this were not enough, the rate of depression and suicide among such gender-diverse individuals assigned female at birth is already high—according to the article itself. What is the poor dermatologist to do? The answer is simple: prescribe isotretinoin and shift the responsibility onto a psychiatrist. If the dermatologist refers the patient to a psychiatrist but the patient nevertheless commits suicide under his treatment, it is then the psychiatrist’s fault, not the dermatologist’s.

Did the writer of the article use the term penis-containing partner spontaneously, or was it the end result of a serious deliberation, either on his part or that of the editor, as to what term would cause the least trouble with the intimidatory lobby that has, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, come up like thunder ’crost the bay, though in this case not from China? (In fact, how they must be laughing in China at this further evidence of Western decadence.)

It is possible that I am mistaken, of course, and that thorough research would prove me wrong, but I do not think that anyone would have used the expression penis-containing partner ten, maybe not even five, years ago. It seems that civilizations go bankrupt like people, first slowly, then quickly.

There are several wider cultural trends discernible in the current agitation over transsexualism, or whatever name one wishes to give it. (“Words are wise men’s counters,” said Hobbes, “they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.” It is only fair to add that, with inflation, money could soon become the money of fools.)

The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable. In such a culture, death itself becomes unacceptable, an insult to our desired omnipotence; it is not any particular kind of death that we reject or fight against, often with success, but death itself.

The second trend is to magical thinking, despite the supposed rationality of our age and its vaunted defeat of superstition. We believe that we can change reality by means of mere verbal incantations. If we alter our language enough, reality itself will change. Some element of this belief can be found in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, though he was probably more in tune with the future trend than creator of it. Thus, if we go on saying long enough that women who take male hormones are men, and outlaw the opposite proposition, such women will become men.

The third trend is the worship of power. The object of deliberate language change is not to improve the state of the world, or even anyone’s state of mind, but the exertion and consolidation of power for its own sake. One glaring example of this was Ataturk’s language reform in Turkey: In a matter of a few years, an entire people was cut off from all of its past and history and had therefore no option but to cleave to the new dispensation, which even Erdogan has not been able to change in many respects, notwithstanding a little Busby Berkeley-style choreography and costume-dressing.

The fourth trend is centralization of the marginal; that is to say, a marginal phenomenon such as transsexualism comes to occupy the center of intellectual attention. To employ a different metaphor, the tail wags the dog.

The fifth trend is to the increasing spinelessness or cowardice of much of the intelligentsia, who in this case have proved themselves astonishingly easy to intimidate, a pack of intellectual Neville Chamberlains (but Chamberlain had more excuse, for he had lived through the horror of the First World War, which he did not want to repeat). Nothing has proved too absurd for this intelligentsia to swallow; indeed, the swallowing of absurdity is easier for the intelligentsia than others, for rationalization is their métier. There is no point in being an intellectual if you think only what everyone else thinks.

The most important question is, What next?—for there will be a next, because transgressive reform is what gives meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. My money is on incest, against which there is no rational argument these days, given the availability of birth control and abortion and the moral authority of mutual consent.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris, Mirabeau Press.

Back in the days when skin tone was not a criterion for worthy art, I used to attend the opera quite regularly, especially when Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini works were on offer. I mention skin tone because a black American so-called academic, Philip Ewell, claims that Western classical music is rooted in racism. Phil also thinks that Ludwig van Beethoven is kinda useless, and that our reverence for classical music is just an expression of white supremacy. So what else is new?

I’ll tell you in a jiffy: According to the obviously oxygen-deprived brain of Philip Ewell, old Ludwig has had his reputation propped up by “whiteness and maleness” for 200 years. What the moronic Phil doesn’t realize, however, is that poor old Beethoven has had many black academics rooting for him for many a year, namely because they believe Ludwig had black blood in his veins. Mind you, Beethoven had no more black blood flowing in him than I do, but was often painted in dark colors, probably in order to reflect his moods, which were at times black because of his lack of hearing. Beethoven’s ancestry was Flemish, and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that one of his ancestors had an affair with a Moorish servant, as the black academics seem to hint. Worse, these same academics insist that his music reflects African rhythms. This really takes the cake. “The Moonlight Sonata” has an African beat? (The good news is, as long as “they” think Ludwig was black, his statues are safe, like George Floyd’s in New York’s Union Square, where the career criminal’s has just been unveiled.)

Well, it’s a free country, at least if one’s black, Asian, or Hispanic. Whites have to be very careful what we say and do, but our English cousins are way ahead of us. Over in Blighty, the increasingly common view in musicology is that in the 19th century musical works were the product of an imperial society and that the classical-music canon must be decolonized. A first step of decolonization is to stop teaching music by Beethoven and Wagner.

Well, what can I say, except that in the theater of the absurd that we’re living in at the moment, once Wagner and Beethoven are out, current living conditions for the socially, sexually, and racially underprivileged will improve. This is what is taught nowadays in certain British schools, so God help us. Not only are the lunatics running the asylum, they are also making the rules for the rest of us. George Orwell must be turning over in his grave in frustration. “Why didn’t I think of this?” he must be saying to himself. And it gets worse. Orchestras in Britain are letting musicians go because of their skin color. The English Touring Opera has dropped fourteen white musicians in order to “increase the diversity of the company.” Aged between 40 and 60, they’ve been told their contracts will not be renewed because of “diversity guidance” from Arts Council England. The Arts Council runs culture in Britain and finances plays, orchestras, and other artistic endeavors. It hands out millions to all sorts of talentless projects and is staffed, you guessed it, by all sorts of lefty bearded men and women and even some normal-looking people. And yes, Boris and the Conservatives are in power with a great majority, but the Arts Council and the BBC are British institutions no one dares lay a hand on to bring about change.

Has wokeness doomed the arts forever? I would say definitely yes, and soon I am afraid we will reach the point where only black people will appear on stage and screen. Whites will only play very bad people, for example Charles Manson, and I also think the Nazis are safe and will be portrayed by white actors. Not to be undone, publishers are also falling in line. Back in 2018 Penguin Random House sent stern notices to all and sundry that they would need to fall in line with diversity targets, diversity being defined by sex, color, and whether one was able-bodied or not. I wonder what Penguin would decide if a young and healthy Hemingway were to submit A Farewell to Arms today? Or Scott Fitzgerald dropped a manuscript of Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby in their offices? There are no transsexuals in any of those books, and blacks and homosexuals are also absent. And both Papa and Scott were known to drink too much and like women. With art being judged nowadays by the biography of the artist, both writers would get a rejection slip and a letter encouraging them to seek help.

But back to music and opera and what a genius like Philip Ewell could do with, say, Don Giovanni or better yet La Bohème. The Don’s role could easily be that of a black because, like Wilt Chamberlin who claimed to have seduced 20,000 women, the Don’s servant Leporello assures us he seduced 1,003 in Spain, 640 in France, and only 91 in Turkey. Rodolfo and Mimi in Bohème are starving black artists in a Harlem garret. Mimi dies of an infected needle against Covid administered by a careless white doctor. Go get ’em, Phil.

Terrific investigative reporter Sam Quinones, author of the 2015 book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, is about to release a new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, out next week. It’s jam-packed with amazing facts and, like all of Quinones’ work, reads like a thriller.

You may think you know this story. Trust me, you don’t. I normally don’t write book reviews, but Quinones’ book is well worth your time. However, I reserve the right to slap him around a bit on his idea of “hope.”

Here are some quotes from the book to give you a sense of why you won’t be able to put it down:

“[Z]ach, a star high school running back, died … from a fentanyl-laced bogus Percocet sold to him by a dealer he found on Snapchat. The dealer delivered the pill at 3 a.m. The family’s Ring camera captured Zach sneaking from the house. … His father found him dead on the front lawn at dawn.” …

“Why would addicts seek out fentanyl, knowing it would likely kill them? The answer: That’s the nature of addiction; it reprograms our brains so that their mission is not to ensure our survival but to pursue the drug. In the world of opiate-addicted brains, an overdose is not a warning; it’s an advertisement.” …

“I spoke with two recovering meth addicts who said they had to relearn how to speak. ‘It took me a year and a half to recover from the brain damage it had done to me,’ one of them said. ‘I couldn’t hardly form sentences. I couldn’t laugh, smile. I couldn’t think.'” …

“In Columbus, Ohio, [a drug counselor] remembers a meth addict who was hospitalized with frostbitten, gangrenous hands, yet who left the hospital in midwinter to find more dope.” …

Quinones is satisfyingly venomous toward the Sackler family (the pushers of OxyContin). But I wish he’d expend a little of that bile on the Mexican pushers.

As he painstakingly documents, these new drugs, fentanyl and P2P meth, are produced almost entirely in Mexico, then distributed to every corner of the U.S. through a ready-made network of immigrants — legal, illegal and anchor babies. But Quinones seems unable to mention that Mexico is drowning our country in these poisons — without reminding us that legal pain pills paved the way! (I thought we were supposed to sneer at “gateway drugs” like marijuana, as a scare tactic out of “Reefer Madness.”)

E.g.:

— “‘Doctors and Big Pharma prepared the battlefield,’ [a DEA agent] said, ‘creating a market for the cartels, who then jumped at the opportunity to own the supply and feed the demand.'”

— “Their legal, doctor-prescribed pills led to trafficker-supplied heroin, then to illicit fentanyl; now it was meth made from sulfuric acid, lye and whatever else.”

— “Unprecedented supplies of [P2P meth] were again unleashed coast to coast. Only this time they came not from doctors and drug companies, but from traffickers, virtually all from northwest Mexico.”

— “Meth thus made it to all corners of America, in something resembling how thoroughly prescription pain pills blanketed the country two decades before.”

— “Many of [the drug addicts] were the children of the opioid epidemic generation. Their parents were hooked first on Percocet, OxyContin, then heroin.”

OK, got it. The Sacklers are scum. Can we talk about the Mexicans now?

Not only Quinones, but nearly everyone sentimentalizes drug users, arguing for widespread availability of antidotes, rehab, counseling. It’s never the users’ fault; they are only victims — of a sports injury, Big Pharma, the pill-mill doctors, the criminal justice system, the paucity of rehab clinics.

Millions of people have taken narcotics after surgeries without getting addicted, but OK, fine. Let’s assume every single meth/heroin/fentanyl addict was prescribed OxyContin after a high school football injury.

The thing is, now they’re addicts, making them predators on society, destroyers of America’s towns and neighborhoods. They cause unbearable pain for their families, bankrupt them, betray them, steal from them.

You know who else is completely blameless for becoming a predator on society? The family dog who gets bitten by a diseased raccoon and contracts rabies. Except rabies is preferable to drug addiction because, after causing mayhem for a few weeks, the dog dies. A better analogy is that the dog becomes Cujo.

Quinones’ response is: GIVE THE DOG NARCAN TO BRING IT BACK TO LIFE, so it can go back to being … a rabies-infested dog, preying on the family and neighbors. And also spend a kazillion dollars on clinics, programs, free food and shelter for all the rabies-infected dogs. Let them maintain their rabies in comfort — because it’s not the dog’s fault! It was the Sacklers, or the pill-mill doctors or one tiny, little mistake they made.

I’m not saying, Screw them, let them die, and the sooner the better. But I am saying that everything in life is a trade-off, and of the 10 possible steps to save a human from drug addiction, only the first has any chance of success.

Step 1: Prevent Americans from getting addicted to drugs in the first place. Prosecute the Sacklers to the ends of the Earth — but also build a wall, deploy DEA agents at every entry point and execute drug dealers, with alacrity and enthusiasm.

Steps 2-10: Expend infinite amounts of time, money, resources, charity, good will, government money, private money (which is mostly government money) to try to save those already addicted, with a success rate of about 10%, where success is defined as: The addict recovers well enough to become a drug rehab counselor.

Quinones says walls won’t work. I don’t know. They work pretty well everywhere else, and a wall is sure better than what we have now, which is nothing. By contrast, lavishing gobs of resources on the rehab industrial-complex has been tried over and over again — and failed over and over again.

Can we just block the drugs at the border, please? Rehab is not an answer.

Whatever the solutions, anyone who wants a gripping account of the scourge that killed 93,331 Americans in 2020 alone has to read this book, out Nov. 2.

Dune is an extraordinarily impressive (if not utterly enjoyable) adaptation of the first half of the epic 1965 science-fiction novel that George Lucas borrowed heavily from for his boys’ version in Star Wars.

The book by Frank Herbert, a GOP speechwriter who sensed early various late-’60s currents such as drugs and ecology, is a spectacular pastiche set 21,000 years in the future under a galactic empire where, because intelligent aliens don’t exist and technology is advanced but stagnant, human politics is all-consuming. The governmental system resembles that of Renaissance Europe, with aristocrats struggling to maintain their planetary autonomy despite the growing power of absolute monarchy.

Both sides are advised by the Bene Gesserit, a Jesuit-like order of cynical sorceresses, who have been pursuing a vast eugenics project to breed a superhuman who can see into the future.

They may have found him in 15-year-old Paul Atreides (played by the annoyingly spelled Timothée Chalamet), son of Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), a culturally Spanish aristocrat modeled on Machiavelli’s optimistic portrayal of the House of Borgia in The Prince, and his loving concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the most adept graduate of the Bene Gesserit convent school.

The emperor, for murky reasons of his own, gives House Atreides the desert planet of Dune as a fief. On Dune, the profitable mining of the psychoactive performance-enhancing drug “spice” is being hindered by the guerrilla rebellion of the indigenous Fremen (i.e., free men). They are modeled on Lawrence of Arabia’s Bedouin revolt in the desert, the 19th-century Muslim Caucasus resistance to Czarist imperialism, and the Sioux struggles with intrusive gold-miners that led to the battle of Little Big Horn.

The Bene Gesserit have planted a prophecy among the Fremen that Paul will be their Mahdi (messiah) and lead them on an interstellar jihad, which eventually turns out in the sequels to be a bloody catastrophe for the whole galaxy.

Herbert deserves credit for his prescience in worrying about jihad in the early 1960s when everybody else assumed that secular Nasserite Arab nationalism was the future of the Middle East.

As with Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, it took several years for the public to grok Dune, but it finally became a huge hit among hippies. It’s considerably higher in literary quality than the verbose and self-indulgent Stranger, although Herbert couldn’t quite maintain his Dune career peak in his sequels.

Herbert became a star speaker at early Earth Day events, although I must confess that the novel’s environmentalist themes were too subtle for me to follow. A simpler (but ironic) conservationist plot device would have been if the bad guys, the German-Russian House Harkonnen, had been trying to exterminate Dune’s colossal metal-eating sandworms to stop their spice-harvesting juggernauts from being swallowed whole.

Dune is close to being a sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but it stays (narrowly) on the sci-fi side of the line because Herbert insisted on making up technical reasons for why, say, the nobles’ troops fight with swords and their leaders try to assassinate each other with poisoned jabs rather than just take off and nuke the entire site from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure).

Of course, the real reason for all the arms control in Dune is that edged weapons are cool. As Churchill complained after the Great War, “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”

Dune is magnificent.

With Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve had established himself as a worthy successor to the Ridley Scott–James Cameron generation of sci-fi filmmakers, and now he has outdone himself with Dune. The scale and artistry of his inhumanly vast visual compositions would make Leni Riefenstahl jealous, and the inventiveness and detailing of his sets and costumes are memorable.

The typical sci-fi movie’s vision of the look of the future is whatever is coming into fashion at the time it was filmed. Hence, if you want to know which styles were au courant in a particular year in the past, just watch a sci-fi movie released the year after. Granted, I’m not terribly up to date on the latest haircuts and the like, but many of Dune’s creations, such as Lady Jessica’s veil-of-chains ensemble for occasions of state, seem deeply strange.

The 1984 adaptation of Dune flopped in part because of the poor special effects and producer Dino De Laurentiis’ insistence on squeezing the complex story into a single feature. (Curiously, the movie industry underestimated the public’s love of sequels back then.)

But some blame rested with the director, the estimable auteur David Lynch, whose personal predilection for the All-American Grotesque didn’t quite mesh with the book. In contrast, Villeneuve subordinates his personality to the source material (without slavishly trying to reproduce it word for word), and achieves a mood of ominousness rather than Lynch’s creepiness.

The new Dune’s casting is reasonably true to the book. The slight Chalamet’s boy-band emo looks are exactly what Herbert described for his protagonist. Similarly, Isaac is the American actor born to play a Mediterranean aristocrat, and the lesser-known Ferguson is a find as his northern European consort.

Still, much as I admire Villeneuve for his skill, ambition, seriousness, and lack of ego, he doesn’t quite spark joy. He’s been the anti-Tarantino in failing to get much charisma out of his stars (for instance, Ryan Gosling was a blank in 2049), other than the always fun Benicio del Toro as the Anton Chigurh-style hit man in Sicario, Villeneuve’s tribute to the Coen brothers’ Mexican-border classic No Country for Old Men.

That’s a problem because the Dune series is Herbert’s Nixonite warning against charismatic JFK-like leaders, but Villeneuve doesn’t elicit much star power from Chalamet.

Not surprisingly, Villeneuve employs two No Country stars in Dune. Josh Brolin plays the House of Atreides’ loyal retainer Gurney Halleck. But Villeneuve cuts out that military man/folk musician’s songs and most of his recitations from various hybrid holy books of the future (the Fremen, for instance, are “Zensunni”). While Herbert’s early-1960s brainstorm of merging John Wayne with Bob Dylan was…interesting, it’s probably for the best to streamline the character.

But that makes it hard to keep Halleck straight from Dune’s other macho soldier, Duncan Idaho (whose name sounds like it would work well for a fattening potato-based fast-food chain). Duncan is played winningly by Jason Momoa of Aquaman, who provides most of the cheeky relief from the weighty gloom.

Spaniard Javier Bardem (best known as Anton Chigurh) is amusing as Fremen chieftain Stilgar, doing a grumpy riff on Mexican Anthony Quinn’s wonderful Auda Abu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia.

Of course, inviting comparisons to David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece (Dune was filmed in the same Wadi Rum sandstone valley in Jordan as Lawrence) is trouble. Lawrence’s dialogue is vastly superior, and its four stars (Quinn, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Alec Guinness) outshine anybody in Dune’s company. Moreover, the contrast between the shimmering orientalist magic of Maurice Jarre’s score and Hans Zimmer’s groaning accompaniment doesn’t favor Villeneuve’s movie.

Still, how many recent movies bring Lawrence of Arabia to mind?

Warning: The film, which is officially Dune: Part One, peters out at some random point in the middle of the novel, so don’t sit through the credits waiting for the real ending, which hasn’t been filmed.

The second half has not been publicly greenlit, which probably reflects studio uncertainty about whether theatrical releases are financially viable at all anymore. This one cost $165 million to make.

Dune is currently playing on the big screen in theaters (if you like the giant IMAX format, there would be no movie more worth an IMAX splurge than Dune) and at home on HBO Max. The advantages of streaming include closed captions for hearing the dialogue over Zimmer’s thudding score and the ability to stop the film to discuss what’s going on in the perplexing plot.

Dune’s forays into diversity casting are mostly non-obnoxious, although having a not terribly good black actress play the planetary ecologist Liet Kynes (a name that calls to mind John Maynard Keynes) flops compared with Lynch’s use of Max von Sydow.

In tune with the times, the evil Baron Harkonnen’s predatory homosexuality is downplayed relative to its prominence in the book.

But, in general, I didn’t notice Villeneuve much updating Herbert’s themes to kneel to the Great Awokening. Culturally and ideologically, Villeneuve’s Dune is Herbert’s Dune, a remnant of the transition from the Space Age early ’60s to the granola late ’60s.

That raises a broader point often overlooked: No matter how many silly speeches actresses give at awards ceremonies, most of today’s major directors, such as Villeneuve, the Coens, Nolan, Tarantino, Chazelle, Scorsese, Eastwood, Gibson, Linklater, Judge, Mangold, and both Andersons haven’t yet succumbed to Wokeness.

I’m growing increasingly annoyed at the “demographics is destiny” trope. Not because it’s incorrect (it isn’t), but because more and more it’s being used as a crutch.

“Death’s coming to us all.” That’s a 100% true statement. But if you invoke it as a reason to smoke ten packs a day, or pop fentanyl like candy, or grow morbidly obese, you’re using an accurate assertion to excuse your own sloth.

At the moment, rightists are chain-smokers and leftists are health nuts. Credit where it’s due: Lefties are pulling off some impressive shit. While rightists are sitting home watching a black comedian tell a (possibly plagiarized) joke about trannies and acting like they themselves just won a victory, leftists are carrying out some Skorzeny-level aktionen.

Like the Texas Holocaust hustle. That was pretty awesome.

In September, Governor Abbott signed HB3979, a bill intended to fight antiwhite race theories (and other leftist propaganda) in public schools.

Under the law, no school or teacher may require a course or lesson plan that promotes the superiority of any race or sex, the inborn malevolence of members of any particular race or sex, discrimination against any particular race or sex, or the notion that members of any particular race or sex carry collective guilt for the actions of people centuries ago. The bill prohibits the infliction of psychological distress on students because of their race or sex, and it restrains teachers from claiming that the concepts of hard work and achievement are tools of oppression created by members of one race to subdue members of another.

Absolutely proper prohibitions. But to the teachers’ unions and their allies, this was an act of war. The law proscribes exactly the kind of brainwashing that’s the raison d’être of the education establishment. Yet there’s a wrinkle…teachers want to promote those hate-filled ideas, but they can’t admit it. They can’t say, “Yes, we want to make white students hate themselves and nonwhite students hate their classmates.” They have to say, “Oh my, we’d never teach such things! To suggest otherwise is Fox News propaganda!”

Teachers can’t say, “We oppose the bill because we want to teach the things it forbids.” Maybe they could be that honest in Oregon or NYC, but not in Texas.

A conundrum: How do you oppose a law when you can’t publicly admit why?

Now, if these were rightists, they’d give up. “This too hard! Me so tired. Oh look—funnyman told joke! I win! I win!”

But leftists—and by that I mean leftist “intellectuals,” not the BLM and Antifa subhumans—have a vision that they’re fanatical about. And fanatics rise to challenges. Several Texas educators isolated the one part of Abbott’s bill that could potentially be exploited—Section 1(h-2)(2):

Teachers who choose to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs shall, to the best of their ability, strive to explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.

Remember Christina Jeffrey? The NEA does. January 1995: The new GOP House had barely been sworn in, and Newt Gingrich appointed an old Kennesaw State University colleague named Christina Jeffrey as House historian. Within one day of the appointment, Democrat opposition research discovered that back in 1986, as a volunteer Dept. of Education course evaluator, Jeffrey had recommended against federal funding for Holocaust educational materials from an outfit called Facing History and Ourselves, because the materials lacked “balance and objectivity.” “The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view and it’s not presented.”

Jeffrey was trying to say that the course didn’t give students the full historical context of the Holocaust (as David Stein I worked with Facing History in the early 2000s, and I can vouch that their courses suck). But it was a clumsily written critique that any rational person should’ve known would be ill-received.

Gingrich was hit hard in the press—the first major body blow of his tumultuous tenure as speaker—and he was forced to fire Jeffrey and apologize. It was an embarrassment that took the wind out of the new speaker’s sails.

Using the Jeffrey assassination as a template, an aktion was launched to repeat that success and torpedo HB3979 using 1(h-2)(2).

The Carroll Independent School District (8,400 students) is in Southlake, Texas (Dallas/Fort Worth area). Two weeks ago, a bunch of Carroll teachers and admins held a meeting to discuss HB3979. The teachers overemoted about the horrors of the new law, how it’s “terrifying,” how it’s going to “hurt the children.” The meeting was chaired by Gina Peddy, district executive director of curriculum and instruction.

Supposedly, one of the attendees “secretly” recorded the meeting (although the audio is crystal clear).

At one point, Peddy told the teachers that because of HB3979, they’ll have to teach “both sides” of the Holocaust: “Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”

The teachers, of course, gasped and wept and screamed. “The ‘other side’ of the Holocaust? What has Abbott done to the CHILDRENNNNN?”

Within a day, the audio recording “that a winged Mercury did bear” magically found its way to NBC, which turned the meeting into a national story. And now the left, the Democrats, and the media have their talking point: “Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP are forcing schools to teach the other side of the Holocaust!” Every major press outlet trumpeted the story. The ADL declared war on HB3979, and Democrats statewide (with plenty of out-of-state dough) are now battling the law in honor of the 6 million!

The activists successfully shifted the narrative from a debate over the things the bill prohibits (which teachers can’t admit they advocate) to a phony debate over the Holocaust.

NBC’s Lev Golinkin (oy!) predicted that HB3979 will literally usher in the Fourth Reich.

Sieg guile.

Of course, the “other side of the Holocaust” talking point is nonsensical. The law specifically states that the “diverse and contending perspectives” section applies only to “currently controversial” issues. When New York Times vato Johnny Diaz (ese) covered the story, he excised “currently” from the bill’s wording. Dude literally altered the text. I emailed him repeatedly to ask why he did that, but apparently he was on an extended siesta (órale) and couldn’t reply.

The media’s also been rather cagey about Gina Peddy, the admin who made the “both sides” comment. Turns out she’s the district’s “diversity and inclusion” commissar, responsible for “cultural competence,” “hiring indicators that measure personal commitment to equity and inclusion,” “diverse instructional materials,” “books where all students feel they’re represented,” “culturally responsive teaching,” and a host of other woke programs.

Peddy ain’t no ig’nant hick who’d ever seriously suggest that her teachers need to teach “both sides” of the Holocaust. She knows better, and she knew what she was doing when she uttered the infamous “opposing perspectives” line.

This was a superb aktion. Not only did it shift the focus from the indefensible things HB3979 prohibits, it also triggered the “groyper” right to forget the whole point of HB3979. Once the media started wailing about how there’s no “other side” to the Holocaust, a bunch of far-rightists took the bait and said, “Yes, there is!” I know because I heard from them.

“Those leftists is claimin’ there’s no ‘other side’ to the Hollycost, Dave. Set ’em straight! Give ’em the facts!”

Yes, by all means, bite the hook. Make a debate that’s not about the Holocaust about the Holocaust.

Whatever my disputes with the mainstream Holocaust narrative, the Holocaust absolutely happened and American K-through-12 kids have no need to study the ventilation shafts of a building in Poland in 1943. We’re graduating kids who can’t read or do basic math. The whole purpose of opposing CRT is to not impose ideological fetishes on kids.

Thanks to the Carroll partisans, journalists who claim that CRT doesn’t exist and that parents who oppose it are Astroturf are now promoting videos of actual Astroturf parents in Texas attacking school boards for “teaching both sides of the Holocaust”—something that’s absolutely not happening. The “dramatic” footage of “heroic” Texas parents is being used to supplant footage of genuinely heroic parents in other states fighting against CRT.

That’s why the Carroll District aktion was so damn good. Maybe it won’t kill HB3979, but that’s not the point.

To best explain the point, let’s do some Godfather II cosplay. I’ll be Hyman Roth, you be Michael. And you tell me about how you saw an interesting thing happen today. Some blue rebels in red Texas carried out a successful act of sabotage, even though they were outnumbered and outgunned. The rebels pulled the pin on one little audio clip and radically altered an entire debate, putting the state leadership on the defensive.

And I’ll reply, “So what does that tell you?”

And you respond, “That they can win.”

You can gauge the health of left and right by comparing how blues act in red states vs. how reds act in blue states. As the blue Texans were pulling off their successful op, here in L.A., the recall campaign against Soros DA George Gascon died, its deadline passed, no money, no signatures, no volunteers, no publicity in the conservative press.

Blues in red states act like the future is theirs. They act like they’ll eventually prevail, if not today, then soon.

That means they will.

Reds in blue states have given up, surrendered. They either stay home and cheer when they occasionally see something in popular media that “owns the libs,” or they pull up stakes and flee to Nebraskee or Tixiss or Montanee.

As if the rot they’re fleeing won’t follow, as if a retreating army can ever stop looking over its shoulder. As if “red” South Dakota’s Governor “boys in the girls’ room” Noem, or Arkansas’ Governor “hey, if you don’t like trannies make a movie and change the culture!” Hutchinson, or Oklahoma’s Governor “I let a cannibal murderer out of prison because he’s black and I don’t want to look racist” Stitt are the last of their kind instead of what you can expect more of in the decades to come.

Blues in red states fight. Reds in blue states retreat. And an advancing force always catches up to a retreating object. Soon enough, a lot of you will stop talking about a border wall and start advocating a “Montana wall.”

“Just leave us this much America! Please!”

It doesn’t have to be that way, but it likely will. There’s no reason the right can’t win. Immigration, crime, CRT…average working-class whites (and many Hispanics) clearly want to see leadership from the right on those issues.

But the will on the part of the leaders, activists, and donors has to be there.

And currently, the left has the stronger will.

That’s not on demography; that’s on you.

I’ll pick up this theme next week.

“Let Poland be Poland!”

That was the call of American conservatives, four decades ago, when the Solidarity movement of labor leader Lech Walesa arose in the port city of Gdansk to demand their freedom of the Communist system imposed upon Poland by the Soviet Union after World War II.

A decade later, Poland broke free of the Soviet Bloc and Warsaw Pact, and later joined the European Union and NATO.

The question that has arisen today also has to do with issues of Polish identity and independence.

Specifically, can Poland be Poland — and still remain in the EU?

In recent years, the ruling Law and Justice Party has revised its governmental structures. The judiciary has been subordinated, brought under greater central supervision and control, and a disciplinary chamber has been established and empowered to remove judges.

Such action, says the EU Commission in Brussels, violates basic EU law, which applies to all member states and trumps national law.

Brussels wants the chamber abolished.

Moreover, on issues such as homosexuality, abortion and the media, the Polish government has taken stands more consistent with its Catholic traditions than with the social agenda of a secularized Europe.

The same holds true for the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Poland and Hungary are ostracized as “illiberal democracies.”

At a rally of tens of thousands in Budapest Saturday, Orban told supporters that Washington, the EU in Brussels, and billionaire George Soros are using their money, media and networks to bring to power the Hungarian leftist opposition in next April’s parliamentary elections.

“But what matters,” said a defiant Orban, “is not what they in Brussels, in Washington and in the media, which is directed from abroad, want. It will be Hungarians deciding about their own fate.

“Our strength is in our unity … We believe in the same values: family, nation and a strong and independent Hungary.”

Let Hungary be Hungary.

In this social-cultural-moral clash inside the EU, outsider Vladimir Putin comes down on the side of the traditionalists and nationalists in countries where Christianity retains a hold against secularism.

This weekend, Moscow released excerpts of Putin’s blistering attack on a woke West at last week’s gathering of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi:

“We’re surprised to see things happening in countries that see themselves as flagships of progress,” said Putin. “The struggle for equality and against discrimination turns into aggressive dogmatism verging on absurdity.

“Opposing racism is a necessary and noble thing, but the new ‘culture of abolition’ turns into ‘reverse discrimination’ … Here in Russia the absolute majority of our citizens don’t care what color a person’s skin is.

“People who dare to say that men and women still exist as a biological fact are almost ostracized … not to mention the simply monstrous fact that children today are taught from a young age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa.

“Let’s call a spade a spade: This simply verges on crimes against humanity under the banner of progress.”

In the clash between Poland and the EU, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged that a solution be found acceptable to both, rather than engaging in a long and bitter battle that leaves one side victorious and the other estranged.

Yet, today, Poland is being threatened with economic sanctions, including a possible withholding of annual EU stipends and money set aside for EU nations to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Responding to these threats, Prime Minster Mateusz Morawiecki is accusing the EU of “blackmailing” Poland and holding a “gun to our head.”

“If you want to make Europe into a nation-less superstate,” says Morawiecki, “first gain the consent of all European countries and societies for this.”

Membership in the EU is popular in Poland, and the government has not threatened a walkout, a “Polexit,” like the “Brexit” that British Tories voted for in 2016 and carried out.

Still, Brussels fears that successful Polish defiance of its demands could lead other EU nations to make demands, and the grand project of creating a European superstate, a One Europe whose member nations are accorded limited rights similar to those of the 50 states of the American Union, could collapse and fall apart.

National governments receive from membership in the EU not only the benefits of open markets, free trade and travel from one nation to another, but also, for nations like Poland and others in eastern and southern Europe, annual transfer of wealth from the EU.

The chokehold the EU has on its members is money. Brussels can cut off the funds transferred annually to Poland, as well as funds voted to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, together a goodly slice of Poland’s GDP.

The questions raised by the rebellious Poles are fundamental: Which takes precedence, when they come into conflict, Poland’s constitution and Poland’s laws, or the laws of the European Union?

Conflict appears inevitable, and the Poles will ultimately have to decide whether their country and constitution transcend EU law, or the reverse is now true.

The Week’s Most Arched, Starched, and Parched Headlines

THE GREAT NETFLIX PRANCE-OUT
When BLM sacked L.A. last year, the “peaceful protesters” focused on the wealthy Westside. It made sense; upscale territory filled with treasure.

Sadly for the transgenders who held a protest outside Netflix headquarters last week (because the streaming giant had allowed a black man to tell a joke), their staging area wasn’t exactly in the best part of town. Netflix HQ is in a part of Hollywood crawling with schizos, junkies, and criminals who look for any excuse to demand “reparations” from frightened passersby.

The denizens of those streets aren’t likely to call a man in a wig “ma’am.” Indeed, they’re rather likely to be irked by the request.

“Gimme your money, man!”

“That’s MA’AM! Call me MA’AM!”

(gunshot)

That might be the reason the vaunted “Great Tranny Walkout” fizzled. Initially, organizers predicted an army of shamblin’ shemales. “More than 1,000 Netflix employees are set to walk out of their jobs,” the media declared.

But being transgender is all about overstatement.

“I look sexy in this wig!”

“I look feminine in this dress!”

“I don’t look freakish…not even remotely.”

“1,000 Netflix employees will join us in a crappy part of town to march for the silencing of a black comedian.”

News outlets were cagey about the turnout. The New York Times would only commit to “dozens,” while other organs opted for “the exact turnout is unclear.”

Yes, unclear if one is cognitively unable to conduct a headcount of thirty people. Otherwise, there was no unclarity.

But tranny activism has never been about numbers; indeed, the joy has always come from getting the majority to bend to the tiniest possible minority.

So to hell with numbers! The walkout was a great success!

And the marchers looked fabulous in those wigs and dresses.

“PREVENT” ONCE AGAIN FAILS TO
Remember the tale of Danyal Hussein, the Iraqi-Kurdish immigrant in Britain who’d been identified by Scotland Yard as a Muslim extremist with a propensity for murderousness? And how, rather than doing the—what’s the word?—intelligent thing and sending his Muhammadan ass back to Iraq, the government enrolled him in what’s known as the “Prevent Programme”?

“Prevent” is an “interactive learning experience” designed to “cure” Muslim lunatics of their lunaticary. Through the use of hand puppets and flash cards, Prevent can take the most hardened jihadist and turn him into the kind of lovable Muzzie you can take home to mum.

In theory.

In reality, Prevent is a laundromat for leopards, and damned if those spots never wash off.

After graduating from Prevent, Hussein brutally murdered two British girls.

And now, Prevent has “triumphed” again. The Somali immigrant who savagely assassinated Conservative MP David Amess last week was also a Prevent graduate.

When asked if this latest failure will lead to England deporting suspected terrorists instead of trying to “cure” them, a government spokesman replied, “Bloody ’ell no, ’cuz we’s morons we is we is.”

Maybe there’s a compromise here: Just ask Muslim immigrants if they believe that there are only two genders and only women can get pregnant.

Any who answer “yes” will, by British law, have to be deported as “hate criminals.”

Muslim problem solved!

ALL HALLOWS’ PEEVE
You’re a woke “diversity” activist, and Halloween’s just a week away. But you look around and, to your dismay, your previous years of bullying and threatening have worked a little too well. White folks have become so petrified of wearing “racist” costumes, they’re not giving you any new material for outrage. No blackface, no taco costumes, sombreros, Indian headdresses, kimonos, ponchos, serapes, grass skirts, rastacaps, or, as NPR oddly phrased it, “sinister Arab mustaches” (aren’t they known for beards?). In many communities, costume parties have been banned, lest a random whitey wear a getup that might be called racist by a jobless millennial blogger employing his degree in “The Genocidal History of Wacky Hats.”

You’ve banished costumes, yet you feel strangely empty inside. How can you possibly have fun this Halloween if there are no white people to harass?

And then it hits you: You might’ve hectored whites into submission over Halloween costumes, but you can still attack them over Halloween words!

“Spook” is simply the Dutch word for ghost, as should be obvious by the double-o’s (after all, this is a “language” in which the word for tree is “boom.” How can you possibly take such a tongue seriously?).

So “spook” is just a harmless little word from a language nobody speaks. But to diversity inquisitors, it’s the most racist, KKK, rootin’-tootin’ strange-fruitin’ word in the world.

Last week the National Theater of Scotland was pressured into abandoning the use of “spooky” in its Halloween-themed productions, because “during the Second World War US military officers used ‘spook’ as a derogatory term to describe black pilots.”

And that affects Scotland…how?

A National Theatre spokesdumbass told the Sunday Mail that “NTS is committed to fighting racism so need to be extra careful in the language it uses. It’s always been a really white organisation but it’s trying to change that and become more diverse. There might not be many people who know that ‘spooky’ can also be used as racist but, even if it’s one person who’s offended, it’s one person too many.”

The Scottish are infamous for being stingy, but when it comes to kowtowing to those who refuse to understand word meanings, they’re anything but niggardly.

INVISIBLE VICTIM, IMAGINARY ATTACKER
The University of Maine’s “Campus Eyes” website is a tool through which students can report acts of racism, sexism, and other activities that on today’s campuses are seen as greater offenses than murder.

Last month, someone used Campus Eyes to anonymously report a homophobic hate crime on the school’s main mall:

A tall white guy with short brown hair grabbed my friend from behind and choked her and called her a dyke for wearing a pride shirt. My friend was alone at the time when the crime happened.

Students rallied for justice. Administrators assured the panicked pupils that cops were on the case.

And the community held its breath waiting for “tall Nazi with short brown hair” to be caught.

There was only one small problem: No student ever came forward claiming the assault happened. There was no victim.

Okay, two small problems: The report claimed that the assault occurred at 5:48 p.m. at the University Mall…an area packed with people at that time of day. And nobody saw nuthin’.

Make that three small problems: The mall is blanketed by security cameras, and police reviewed every second of footage. No assault.

No victim, no perp, no witnesses, no video.

As Maine is the Stephen King State (official motto: Mediocritas, Quantitas, Repetitio), the most viable spooky answer is, an invisible Nazi attacked an invisible lesbian.

At least that’s what the university thinks. Last week police closed the case on account of zero evidence that anything occurred. But the school wasn’t having it. A “diversity and inclusion” administrator told the campus newspaper that not only is the imaginary crime real, but all of us are to blame for it: “The reality is, acts like this happen because we as a community allow them to.”

Yes, we are far too lenient with invisible men.

Administrators warned LGBT students not to walk alone across the mall.

A case of overreaction? Or a legitimate response to the dreadful epidemic of invisible-on-invisible crime?

ROYAL DOLT’UNS
They call themselves the “tie-dye bankers.” Jay Lipman and Johny Mair founded the $1.3 billion “hippie” investment firm Ethic, which specializes in “socially conscious,” “green” investing to “save the planet.”

Their publicity photo depicts them in old sneakers, skinny jeans, tie-dyed shirts, scraggly beards, and scruffy hair, embracing each other while smiling for the camera.

As subjective as matters of intelligence can be, sometimes there truly is a pronounced dividing line between smart and “stone stupid.” And that photo is that line. It’s a Rorschach test. If you see two calculating con artists, you’re smart. If you see two benevolent hippies, you’re Rain Man.

Indeed, “green” Ethic has millions of dollars tied up in fossil fuels, fracking, big pharma, and companies like EOG Resources (formerly Enron) and Halliburton.

This is public knowledge. So what kind of low-IQ/high-bank-account cretins could possibly be gullible enough to fall for Ethic’s con?

Meet Rain Man and Woman: Harry and Meghan! Yes, the royal twits have partnered with Ethic to advance their environmentalist agenda, because apparently neither of them can read. Or cogitate.

That they can breathe is a medical miracle.

Meghan, the bimbo actress who hit the jackpot only to declare that jackpots are racist, has dismissed concerns that she and her whipped prince are investing against their own stated objectives, telling the press that her family never had “the luxury to invest” when she was young. That Markle attended a $16,000-a-year private high school doesn’t get in the way of her poverty lament. Indeed, she recently moaned to desiccated cadaver Nancy Pelosi that as a child, her family could “only afford” to eat at Sizzler every night.

Eating out every night? Bob Geldof raised money for the wrong kids. Young Meg was the true face of famine.

And now the spoiled brat who thinks eating at restaurants equals starvation, attending fancy private schools equals poverty, and marrying a royal equals oppression has bullied her wealthy moronic husband into investing in a firm where fracking, drilling, and pharma equals “green.”

As two faux hippies bang their solid-gold Indian drums and have a good laugh about how there’s one born every minute…sometimes into money.

NEW YORK—“The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money,” screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other captions of an antiwhite, anti-cop, anti-male, and anti-Conservative platform. (“Bid the binary goodbye,” is another pearl.) Not that anyone takes the Bagel Times seriously any longer since it decided that whites are very bad people, and that it will cover only Blacks (capitals for them, lowercase for us). Still, I found it amusing that London is responsible for the shame of the Pandora Papers, when most of the miscreants involved are third-world dictators and Eastern oligarchs.

Never mind. A newspaper that consistently shades the facts to suit its agenda—even book reviews are assigned to well-known haters of the subject reviewed—is not to be taken seriously, and it’s not, but as I’m traveling and feeling good, I will for the second week running defend the very rich. For starters, it’s only the very rich who are clobbered when investing in Silicon Valley start-ups that go belly-up. Those below a certain net worth are not allowed by law to invest. Mark one for the common man and woman. When a start-up implodes, as most of them do, the very rich take it with their chin up, while the media laugh like hyenas. But the working stiffs are safe by having been excluded from the start.

I am too bored to read the Pandora or Panama disclosures; suffice it to say when a nation like the Central African Republic’s leader and his sons, the notorious Teodoro Obiang clan, lord it over one of the world’s poorest nations but own yachts, private jets, and tens of houses in Paris and Beverly Hills, something’s very wrong. The same applies to President Kenyatta, whose name appears in many a list but is seen as a good guy by the West. Whereas I find nothing wrong when those who worked and took chances to make their money legally minimize their taxes and obscure their assets. Let the hacks make up stories about “global anger” over the rich-poor divide. Globally, the poor are too busy trying to make a living to be angry at the divide.

If the envious ones really wished to stop the rich hiding their money, they should go after the source. Places like Dubai, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, and good old Panama, among other playgrounds less known to the poor little Greek boy. What I would like to know, however, is what is wrong with trying to shield one’s children and grandchildren from unscrupulous extortionist politicians who live off the taxes paid by the rich? I understand emotional resentment by those with less toward those with much, but it’s the latter who keep things really going, and that’s the awful truth, like it or not. Here in the Bagel, the New York Post revealed that 65% of Bagelites pay no taxes at all, the billions dished out each year by the state to the less fortunate coming from the less than one percent of the very rich. No one seems to be complaining about this the last time I read about Pandora and Panama.

So, is there a global anger over the rich-poor divide, and are the very rich the bane or the salvation of humanity? I’d say neither, except in the mind of envious busybodies who remain fixated on equality as the highest ideal. Mind you, offshore trusts, tax loopholes, and shell companies rig the system for the bad-rich guys; but what about the good-rich guys, why should they be labeled with the crooks? Why can’t they legally shield their wealth from illegal seizure by politicians and public officials?

Over here in the Bagel most of the blame for Panama and Pandora is aimed at the Brits. “The global game of deceit played for decades by the wealthy and their functionaries in the city has eroded the rule of law and stripped away citizens’ trust in the system.” Bad Brits. You should copy your American cousins, who steal openly then settle out of court, or earn billions after causing the deaths of 500,000 innocents. Stupid Brits! Again, never mind. There is a visceral hatred of the wealthy here in America led by the media and the Twitter mob, but I remember once upon a time when people actually looked upon those who were richer as a target to reach, not to disparage. Hollywood has taken care of that; when was the last time you saw a film that showed a rich person as a good one? Most people today believe that the rich have an unfair advantage over the rest, and yes they do, they have more money, but that’s like saying that someone with more brains should be punished for it.

In order to lighten up a bit, here’s a female reviewer in the Bagel Times and her reaction to a book about Peter Thiel, a German-born entrepreneur who is a self-made billionaire but a Trump fan and a so-called political kingmaker: “As I read it, I grew colder and colder, until I found myself curled up under a blanket on a sunny day, icy and anxious. I tried to tell myself Thiel is just another rapacious solipsist, in it for the money.” Are we being serious? Is this a book review or a revenge opus written by someone wearing resentment-colored glasses? Someone better send her a fur coat, and soon.

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