Flies are like sheep: They seem to follow their leader, without it being clear which of them is their leader. This was my conclusion from watching flies approaching the flypaper I hung in my bedroom recently.

Our house in the country is invaded by insects every year, a different species, or at most two species, taking it in turns, as if by rota. One year it was the turn of Cydalima perspectalis, the box tree moth, which covered the walls as graffiti artists cover concrete. This moth is a species that was introduced, like electric cars, into Europe from China, spread very rapidly, and wiped out Buxus shrubs more thoroughly even than electric cars are wiping out the European car industry.

There are several methods to control this moth, whose population tends to explode when conditions are right. There are chemical insecticides, moth sex hormones that confuse the adult moth worse than contemporary children’s books confuse children about their sexual identity, nematode worms that parasitize the moth, and bacteria that excrete a toxin specially toxic to caterpillars of the species. But as in politics, no victory over the moth is final, and like discredited ideas, it is bound to return in a few years’ time.

This year it has been the flies (again) and the stink bugs. The latter is the brown marmorated stink bug, the scientific name being Halyomorpha halys. This is another import from China, though I hesitate to allege any malicious intent on the part of the CCP. This slow-moving insect aggregates in houses by the hundreds or thousands to escape the winter cold. It flies blindly into things with a characteristic little smacking noise, and its flight emits a buzzing that irritates sensitive persons such as I. Worst, of course, is the smell it emits when frightened, annoyed, or inadvertently squashed. The unpleasant odor it emits can linger; it consists mainly of two aldehydes called trans-2-octenal and trans-2-decenal. These chemicals have been tested for their bactericidal properties, particularly on antibiotic-resistant Staphylococci (a menace in hospitals), so one day Halyomorpha halys may prove to have been a blessing to humanity. For the moment, though, it is a pest, which we control by the advised method, the vacuum cleaner. There are fewer of these insects now, but, like financial scandals, they continue to emerge.

As to the flies, I now understand why for many centuries, indeed for two millennia, people believed in the theory of spontaneous generation, that is to say the theory that life emerges spontaneously from nonliving matter (as, presumably, it must once have done).

However many times I thought that I had cleared the room of flies, they always returned, but I could never find the place from which they emerged. One minute they weren’t there, and the next they were. This was the kind of experience that led the great naturalist Aristotle to conclude that life was spontaneously generated, a belief that Louis Pasteur was concerned to refute more than 2,000 years later. It is salutary to remember that the endurance of a belief is not an infallible guide as to its truth.

I used an old-fashioned method of ridding the room of flies: flypapers. Gone are the days when flypapers containing arsenic were soaked by disgruntled spouses who disposed of their husbands or wives by feeding them the resultant tasteless, odorless solution. Nowadays, they, the flypapers, consist of rosin, the sticky residue of pine resin after evaporation of the resin’s water content, applied to tape. Flies are attracted to rosin, but once they land on it they are trapped physically.

The packaging told me that the flypapers contained no insecticide, and the website of the company that made them claimed that it was “ecoresponsible” and took into account all the environmental, social, economic, and ethical effects of its activities. Naturally, I am not in favor of companies behaving immorally, for example by unmercifully exploiting people or by carelessly polluting the area round their own factories, but I wish we could sometimes have a rest from the epidemic of high-mindedness that afflicts our times and which, by reaction, introduces wicked thoughts into our minds.

Actually, the new flypapers are rather cruel, to flies if not to spouses. They don’t kill the flies directly, but only by exhaustion and inanition. The flies are stuck on the paper until they expire, which as I have observed can take more than 24 hours, even more than 48. I touch their wings or their legs and see them move. I feel a certain pity for them.

I do not want to make myself out to be some kind of benevolent biophilic mystic, a sadhu. While I think that a fly considered individually and close-up is a creature of beauty, in any numbers, they are (to me, at least) repellent. But even when there are many dead flies trapped on the flypaper, I cannot help but think of William Blake’s poem when I focus on one of them:

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art thou not
A man like me?

This, of course, gives rise to an intimation of our mortality and tenuous hold on the thread of life:

For I dance
And drink and sing:
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

Or as the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear puts it, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Can, or do, flies suffer? Certainly they struggle to free themselves from the flypapers, as if they valued their freedom and their lives, but such behavior could be, and presumably is, purely mechanical, that of mere automata. Curiously, though, when first I hang the flypaper in the room, the flies are wary of it. They approach it and then fly away, and approach it again, and fly away again. They seem to be attracted and wary at the same time. But once one of them is trapped, seemingly by chance, by flying too near the rosin or landing on it, a floodgate is opened, and the pioneer is soon followed by many more.

I suppose you could call the first fly an influencer.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).

If you wanted proof that men are now marginalized, look no further than a question tabled for discussion at next year’s annual U.K. conference of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Would the fellowship consider the creation of a video which is aimed at encouraging Men into AA? This would complement the suite of videos already available for Women, Armed Forces, People of Colour, Bluelight Services and LGBTQIA+.”

When a friend emailed me that, I had to do a double take. How we encourage more men into AA should be a bit like asking how we encourage more men to take an interest in porn, or cars.

Are men now so unmanly they’ve given up on drinking themselves to death, or are a lot of men, while perfectly hard-drinking, now unable to go to AA because AA is so feminine, so woke, and so LGBT-hoo-ha-plus they can’t face it? Or, even worse, are they getting thrown out for upsetting women? Because I certainly have recent experience of witnessing that happening.

It’s interesting that they are capping up the word “Men,” a daring move in itself. I don’t even know if many men with a capital M exist anymore. I think there are a few, but they have to be very careful, as we know, not to go around triggering women by being too Men-like by insinuating they might fancy women or by making a comment to a woman such as “Good morning” or “I like your handbag, my wife has one the same,” as in the case of a recent harassment case in the British fire brigade.

This is not to mention any of the big male music stars in the States right now who are fighting off properly lurid allegations. These A-listers are accused of all sorts of dramatic alleged crimes, whereas in Britain men are now so tame the sexual harassment cases require forensic reading to work out what they might have done to even vaguely upset a woman.

In Britain, it’s gotten to the stage whereby any one-night stand between two randoms, never mind one random and one D-list celebrity, is liable to one day become a front-page harassment case causing shock and awe on social media.

So first off, I’m amazed AA GB has the gall to speak about Men using a capital M, even though it describes women with a capital W and People of Colour all capped up, because that is what you would expect. Women deserve a big W and People of Colour deserve a big P and a big C. Obviously. But do men deserve a big M? I can’t see why, given the alleged horrors they are routinely accused of.

Men, one would assume, ought to be lowercase in order not to upset any female victims (that should probably be Victims) who happen to be reading the question, and who might faint or need a personal injury lawyer if they see the word “Men” written out blatantly proud of itself, just like that, with no regard for all the wonderful brave Survivors out there who can tell a story or two about what Men have done to them. And so on.

But anyway, here we are with this question tabled for discussion at the next AA conference, where there will also be plentiful discussion, I’m assured by my friends in the fellowship, about such things as safeguarding and making everyone feel included and equal, and all that.

Of course, the tabler of the question might be being sarcastic, to make a point. But I’m assured by someone who ought to know that the question is serious and is being taken seriously by the conference organizers.

Men are now so marginalized in our society that it no longer goes without saying that men might be in the majority, numbers-wise, in a self-help group for drunks and dropouts.

Men are now so underrepresented everywhere that they have to be encouraged to come forward to talk about guzzling booze and being a fuck-up.

They now need special measures to make them feel welcome in a grimy old back room of a church serving stewed coffee and stale biscuits where they can go to share about spending all their money on gambling, prostitutes, and whiskey, and the fact their wife has left them.

And I suspect that they need reassurance they are still welcome in these grimy old rooms for good reason.

I first noticed AA was rather full of women of a certain kind about ten years ago when I moved from London to Surrey and came across a genteel sort of AA meeting where the ladies who lunch were more than well represented.

You had to mind your p’s and q’s at those meetings—a memo went out asking people not to use bad language—and it was not long before I noticed that they really didn’t like men. They especially disliked rough, working-class men, and those who had been criminals, which was unfortunate because AA traditionally helped quite a lot of those, and indeed it goes into prisons to encourage inmates to go to meetings when they are released.

I wrote a lot of articles about the AA ladies who lunch banning one convicted felon they took a particular dislike to, even though I witnessed him doing not much in meetings he was excluded from, along with much hysteria about what a man of his type might do if left unchallenged. It was all very Minority Report, crossed with that armchair social media sleuth spirit that pervades our society now whereby a load of busybodies with nothing better to do decide to investigate, try, and convict someone they don’t like the look of—usually a man—instead of calling the police to report their barking mad suspicions.

I felt at the time, as I do now, that the feminization of recovery was not going to be a good thing for low-bottom drunks for whom AA meetings are arguably the last-chance saloon. The men who need help most, it seems to me, might not be welcome there for much longer if many more ladies come to talk about having one too many glasses of sparkling wine and, usually, their daddy issues.

This situation is very unfair, because these ladies don’t really need AA. A book club would do as well. They need somewhere to have a chin-wag and a good old gossip, is all.

They can probably survive if they don’t go to AA meetings because they’re not drinking themselves to death anytime soon.

The low-bottom male drunks (together with a more desperate class of female drunk who is not picky about whom she sits next to) really are going to drink themselves to death without intervention.

And added to that, they’re probably at some risk of harming someone, not least a woman, if they don’t stay sober.

So the stakes are much higher if you throw those men out, than if you risk losing a few female wine guzzlers who want to talk about how their father never really loved them, or how their mother annoys them, or how their kids aren’t doing so well at school, or how their husband keeps leaving the loo seat up, and so on.

Let them walk out if they don’t like sitting next to a convicted felon, I say, because they’re not the ones who really need this. And they’re not the ones who are going to harm society if they don’t get with the program.

But this isn’t the view of the AA top brass, and whenever I write to complain about the issue of banning male former criminals they always emphasize their commitment to safeguarding women, even at the expense of being unfair to desperately unwell men.

Naturally they take this view. Every area of our society has become more and more feminized, from schools to the jobs market to sports, with the impact on men and boys well-documented.

But what happens when women even invade the spaces where desperate men go once they’ve hit bottom, ironically to get help with the very issues this new feminine society of ours is demanding they stop having?

When even AA meetings become places where men can’t swear, where they can’t speak openly about crime or drug use, or about the very behavior they want to address by getting sober, lest they upset women by describing it, then we are at risk of depriving men of the one last place they can vocalize what’s eating them and where they can attempt to become the better version of themselves that our intolerant society demands.

I’ve seen men criticized in AA rooms for rude and risqué jokes. I’ve seen them admonished for triggering women by talking openly about their anger issues.

At one meeting in South London, I heard a guy share, figuratively speaking, about feeling like he wanted to kill his brother’s wife because she had ruined him, but he quickly concluded that he would not harm her, of course, because he was now on the straight and narrow, and he said he was glad to be sober so he didn’t hurt people anymore.

This used to be a fairly standard sort of AA share. But a young girl with a punk hairdo shared after him that she now felt triggered by listening to a man voicing violent intent toward women. And she asked the secretary to do something about it.

Thankfully on that occasion the secretary decided to ignore the woman’s complaint. But this is not the trend.

The trend goes relentlessly all the way down the same route it always goes: Men get hounded for being men. Men get hounded for even vocalizing what it sometimes means to be a man, and to try to be a better man.

And so there are more and more examples coming to light of men being banned from AA groups in Britain.

This AA conference can ask the question about male representation all it wants, and it can approve the production of a special video aimed at encouraging men to go to meetings. Or even Men.

But what will the video show, exactly? Perhaps a man sitting mute and compliant, neutered as a dog in his seat, listening patiently and nodding sympathetically while the women share about their daddy issues and how much they hate men, before standing up and saying, “My name’s Steve and I’m an alcoholic, and I’m also a man, for which I unreservedly apologize.”

It was nice to see Crystal Mangum, victim of the nonexistent gang rape by Duke lacrosse players in 2006, admit last week that it was all a fake-out. Many of you were happy, though bored, and moved on. But cruel people like me aren’t ready to move on.

The Duke lacrosse case was the ne plus ultra of the media’s anti-white hate. Lacrosse is the oldest team sport in America (apart from scalping and human sacrifice) now played by mostly white, preppie, upper-middle-class kids. So when Mangum claimed she’d been gang-raped, beaten, kicked and strangled by members of the Duke lacrosse team after being hired as a stripper, the media thought it was Christmas Day.

In lieu of reporting, news reports were bristling with references to “frat boys,” “entitled,” someone’s “daddy,” “white male privilege,” “the patriarchy” and — of course — “slave masters.” (“The tangled American opera of race, sex and privilege” — in the deathless prose of New York Times reporter Duff Wilson.)

Mangum’s credibility was not exactly bulletproof. A year earlier, she’d been hospitalized for psychiatric problems; she was on antidepressants, in addition to having a serious drinking problem; and she once pleaded guilty after trying to run over a police officer with a taxicab she’d just stolen. This also wasn’t the first time she’d claimed to have been gang-raped by three men. Even her father said the previous allegation was false.

Moreover, her claims about the lacrosse players were really a kaleidoscope of stories. First, she insisted she hadn’t been raped at all, and then she said she’d been raped, but the number of rapists kept changing (20, five, four, three or two, before she finally settled on three), as did the number of orifices that had been raped.

None of the doctors and nurses who examined Mangum found any physical evidence that she’d been raped, much less violently gang-raped in a small bathroom. Even when given an absurd and unconstitutional photo “lineup” of only team members (no wrong answers!), her description of the rapists was so at variance with the actual players that some speculate she was trying to hit the eject button on the whole case. But District Attorney Mike Nifong wouldn’t let her.

After a year of Nifong torturing the “suspects” (with the enthusiastic participation of Duke University) — putting them in handcuffs for the cameras, lying about their cooperation, hiding the DNA evidence clearing them — then-North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took over the case, dismissed all charges, and took the highly unusual step of declaring the players, “innocent.” DA Nifong was removed, disbarred and jailed.

Why would any prosecutor so maniacally pursue trumped up charges, in open defiance of the evidence? It seems that Nifong was up for reelection and was trying to impress his black constituents. As Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson put it in their excellent book on the case, “Until Proven Innocent”: “Black leaders and voters made it clear that his only chance of winning the primary was … by indicting lacrosse players for a rape that he must have known they did not commit.”

I note at this juncture that there is no jurisdiction in the country where a prosecutor could impress white constituents by railroading innocent black men.

In a surprise development, The New York Times reported the case honestly at first, with Joe Drape talking to both sides, the prosecution AND the defense. Unfortunately, any actual reporting inevitably cast doubt on the state’s case. So Drape was promptly yanked off the story, and it was handed to writers who could be counted on to talk only to Nifong.

Times sportswriter Selena Roberts wrote an entire column premised on Nifong’s easily disproved claim that the athletes had refused to cooperate. In her first column on the case on March 31, 2006, Roberts wrote: “Players have been forced to give up their DNA, but to the dismay of investigators, none have come forward to reveal an eyewitness account.”

In fact, the accused immediately gave statements to the police of their own free will — without counsel present — and eagerly provided their DNA, blood and saliva samples, knowing it would prove them innocent (which it did … to no effect).

The Times had to issue a correction to Roberts’ claim.

But Roberts burbled on, comparing the lacrosse team to “drug dealers and gang members engaged in an anti-snitch campaign,” accusing them of being “roped off from the norms of decent behavior,” and abiding by “the Vegas rule of ‘what goes on here, stays here.'”

Appalled by the players’ supposed lack of cooperation, Roberts turned, naturally, to a women’s study professor, Katie Gentile at John Jay College. Based on her extensive research, Gentile explained to Times readers that, for male athletes, “your self-esteem is more valuable to you than someone else’s life.”

Someone else’s life?

The only lives that were nearly destroyed here were those of the accused lacrosse players. Give me any reason why — it doesn’t even have to be true, just a reason — other than that they were white men.

This is my last week in the Bagel and things are looking up. For some of us, that is; for others it’s despair time. No use beating around the bush: Israel has won big-time, Iran has lost big, and the Palestinians are back to ground zero, with nothing to look forward to except more deaths, more land grabs by Israeli settlers, and more crushing and brutal retaliation by Israel at the slightest indication of civil disobedience. A two-state solution is now a mirage of a Thousand and One Nights.

Let’s take it one at a time: Tehran gambled and lost. Its proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah have been downgraded to zero, while its ally Syria is now a country about to disappear as the ancient nation it once was. It will most likely break up into three parts, the Kurds hopefully holding their own against the powerful Turks who control the northern part.

Israel now owns Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. It has totally downgraded any Syrian weapons the rebel groups that overthrew Assad might have inherited and used against the state of Israel. The only danger to Israel now is the vacuum created by the Assad fall, one that Netanyahu will play to the hilt. Over 350 air attacks on Syrian sites by the Israelis have taken place since the departure of Assad.

Iran is now the next Israeli enemy to probably go down the so-called Swanee. As a friendly to Israel, Trump is not getting involved. Turkey is poised to see its influence expand, and Tehran is Netanyahu’s next natural target. The Gulf monarchies will turn a blind eye if Israel decides to turn Syria into another Gaza, making Alawite and Christian minorities in Syria an endangered species. Wealthy Gulf monarchies stand to gain a lot as Sunni power is on the rise, while Shiite strength is at an all-time low. Israel is now all-conquering. If Israel had the man power, it would take over Syria, but it does not. The Golan Heights will suffice.

Who would have thought that while the genocide—there is no other word to describe the 50,000 deaths of innocent Palestinian women, children, and old people (not including 17,000 or so Hamas fighters)—was going on that Iran would be turned into a pathetic third-rate mini-power overnight by Israeli bombs? Tehran’s missiles and offensive capabilities no longer exist, and the mullahs could be next. This is the $64,000 question. Where and when will it stop?

Since I began my journalistic career in the Middle East, mainly reporting from Jordan and Israel, I have fervently believed that one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies, which continues well into the 21st century, is that of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, I cannot put all the blame on Israeli hard-liners. In the late ’90s Prime Minister and General Rabin had offered Palestinian leader Arafat—this you won’t believe, but it is 100 percent true—a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96 percent of the West Bank, and 4 percent of Israel, to make up for the 4 percent that the settlers had occupied beyond the borders in the ’67 war. And guess what? Arafat turned it down, confirming what ex–Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban had said long ago, that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Just think where the Palestinians would be today—they are the smartest and most secular of Arabs—if Rabin had not been assassinated by an Israeli right-wing settler, and if Arafat had not been so mind-bogglingly obtuse. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve the great tragedy of Palestine, and the Palestinian leader walked away. Twenty-five years later the Palestinian cause is lost. Netanyahu is a brutal Zionist who sees the Palestinians not unlike the way Hitler viewed the Jews. Anyone who doesn’t agree with him is an anti-Semite, and his Jewish followers in America have made that clear: You’re either on Israel’s side or you’re Hitler. I should know. Ever since my youth, and because of my pro-Palestinian stance, I’ve been slandered as an anti-Semite. I have always refused to explain or complain about this lie, in fact my standard answer to the vile accusation is that some of my richest friends are Jews. So you can imagine what the haters do with that response. Ironically, my closest friend is half-Jewish and he’s poor. This week a pro-Palestine demonstration by students in the Bagel was headlined as a “Festival of Jew Hatred.” It was nothing of the sort, but Bagel Jews have been known to cry wolf at times.

The coming Trump administration will now try to bring Saudi Arabia around to adopting Bibi as a close ally and friend. Words uttered by Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi ruler, about the kingdom never ceasing its tireless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state should be taken at face value—the last time a Saudi told the truth was when Faisal as king admitted parts of his kingdom were sandy. I say good luck to those that believe the Saudis will stand tall for the Palestinians. The Saudi-Gulf-Israel alliance is only a matter of time. What is not a matter of time is the permanence of land theft, the mass expulsions, the imprisonments, and the occupation of Palestine by brutal Jewish settlers.

Having said all that, the only thing left to do is wish all Takimag readers the happiest of Christmases, and a very long and happy life. And thank you for reading us.

A fascinating test case of the rule of law in America is whether or not law schools are obeying the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision in the summer of 2023 finding affirmative action in undergraduate admissions to be a violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws.”

That ruling against Harvard College didn’t exactly necessarily apply to law school admissions, but come on…you law school deans are supposed to be able to figure out its implications.

The American Bar Association has now published the data on first law classes enrolled after the Supreme Court’s decision, so we can see who is naughty and who is nice.

I will focus on the 19 law schools with median LSAT scores of 170 (Vanderbilt, UCLA, Berkeley, Duke, and Boston U.) to 175 (Yale). These account for a little over 14 percent of all law students, and a higher percentage of those who will graduate, more of those who will pass the bar exam, and an especially huge percentage of those who will get hired by Big Law firms to work on corporate deals at starting salaries around $225,000. You often hear about the top 14 law schools that you must attend to be hired to work on major corporate contracts, but nobody seems able to agree on precisely who they are. So a top 19 list works well.

There are plenty of fine law schools for other types of lawyers, such as criminal justice. For example, Kamala Harris was admitted to San Francisco’s Hastings Law School (now called UC San Francisco for racial reckoning reasons) under an affirmative action program, which launched her as a prosecutor on her fabulous political career. But if you want to clerk for a federal judge (as about a quarter of Yale and U. of Chicago grads do) or get paid lavishly to grind away on mergers & acquisitions, you probably ought to attend a law school with a median score of 170 or higher. (By the way, LSAT scoring appears to have gotten slightly easier in recent years, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t score that stratospherically.)

In 2023, the 19 law schools with median LSATs of 170 to 175 enrolled 437 black first-year students out of a total of 5,597 students, or 7.8 percent.

Unfortunately, only about 35 blacks in the whole country scored 170 or higher in 2022–2023. (I’m estimating that figure using Excel’s Normdist function with 10,040 black LSAT takers with a mean of 143.64 and a standard deviation of 9.78.)

That would mean there is an average of about two black students per year with the cognitive horsepower to fit into the middle of the class for each of the 19 top law schools.

But in 2023 the two top-scoring law schools, Yale and Harvard, alone had 66 blacks in their first-year classes. So, they likely absorbed a very large fraction of the three dozen or so blacks scoring in the 170s.

Thus, it’s likely that some of the next 17 law schools didn’t enroll a single black student with the school’s median LSAT score or better. But you aren’t supposed to mention that. Penn law professor Amy Wax is being suspended and fined half a year’s pay for pointing out that Penn’s black students seldom perform in the top half.

So for every one black performing well enough on the LSAT to fit in nicely at a top 19 law school, there were 95 whites, Asians, and other unprivileged miscellaneous.

And, nationally, there were about 81 Hispanics scoring 170–180. Plus perhaps a half-dozen high scorers from other privileged ethnicities such as American Indians, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and “Canadian Indigenous.”

In contrast, there were about 2,037 whites, 633 Asians, 344 no responses, and 337 multiracials (mostly white and Asian) acing the LSAT. That adds up to 3,351 racially disprivileged test-takers scoring 170–180 compared with about 120 to 125 Underrepresented Minorities.

Being a really good lawyer is hard. Writing contracts is like coding a computer, just using a programming language from the 15th century with a lot of Norman French terms like escheatment.

And yet in 2023, blacks made up 7.8 percent of the first-years at the top 19 law schools rather than the 1 percent or so they’d make up at the top half-dozen law schools without DEI racial preferences.

Barack Obama makes an interesting test case of the size of the racial gap. He probably turned his life around at age 26 by scoring either at the 94th or, most likely, 98th percentile on the LSAT. Within a few weeks of his showing up at Harvard Law School and demonstrating that he could hang with the outstanding white students in classroom discussions, he was already being talked about as America’s First Black President.

And yet 800 whites per year score at the 98th percentile on the LSAT.

So what happened in 2024 in response to the Supreme Court declaring affirmative action a violation of the civil rights of Asians and whites?

The New York Times focused on Harvard:

Black Student Enrollment at Harvard Law Drops by More Than Half

After a Supreme Court decision ended race-based admissions, some law schools saw a decline in Black and Hispanic students entering this fall. Harvard appeared to have the steepest drop.

…Harvard Law enrolled 19 first-year Black students, or 3.4 percent of the class, the lowest number since the 1960s, according to the data from the American Bar Association. Last year, the law school’s first-year class had 43 Black students….

But Harvard Law School was anomalous. Yale, the most prestigious law school, boosted its black share from 11.4 percent in 2023 to 12.2 percent. Stanford spit in the Supreme Court’s eye, soaring from 6.9 percent black before the Supreme Court had its say to 12.4 afterward.

Overall, the top 19’s black share dropped from 7.8 percent last year to 7.1 percent this year, with Harvard’s decline of 24 black students accounting for more than three-fourths of those schools’ decline from 437 to 406 blacks.

Hispanic share in the top 19 was down slightly from 11.5 percent in 2023 to 11.0 percent in 2024.

But so was the white share, down from 51.7 percent to 50.7 percent among elite law schools.

Asians soared from 13.4 percent to 20.2 percent, but some of that increase is due to the ABA unhelpfully choosing this year, when the public might be especially interested in how closely law schools are obeying the, you know, law, to change its methodology to now require foreign students to pick a race. The NYT reported:

The A.B.A. changed its reporting categories this year to include students who were not U.S. residents in the racial and ethnic breakdown of the class. Last year, they were a separate category.

Similarly, most undergraduate colleges excuse foreigners from having to pick an American race to check.

The change complicates year-to-year comparisons, and could help explain why some schools, like New York University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, had big increases in Asian students.

Overall, it looks like very little changed despite the Supreme Court’s ruling:

What Harvard Law did seems similar to MIT cutting their black share of undergrads from a ridiculous 15 percent in 2023 to a compromise 5 percent in 2024: MIT is obviously still using a lot of affirmative action to make its freshman class 5 percent rather than 1 percent black, but it at least shows some respect for the Constitution.

In contrast, Yale and Stanford law schools are flat-out insulting the Supreme Court.

But what nobody seems to wonder about other than college presidents and law school deans, not even Supreme Court justices, is the Asian-black IQ gap if we switch to a meritocracy.

Unlike in math test scores, whites long held a small lead over Asians in average LSAT score. But in this decade, Asians have pulled slightly ahead of whites on the LSAT.

There are now 18 times as many Asians as blacks scoring 170 or better on the LSAT, whereas in 2012 there were only 13 times as many.

Is America ready for blacks to only get their rightful 1 percent of the spots in superelite institutions, while Asians come to dominate?

I don’t want to come off as lacking empathy, even though I do indeed lack empathy.

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is reassuring. Not because he deserved to die. Certainly he didn’t. And not because it’s cool to make a political statement by murdering someone. It isn’t. But there are so many random, meaningless killings in urban America these days, it’s nice to know that occasionally there are still murders with meaning.

I’m not saying the meaning was good. I’m just saying, at least it was intentional. The newspapers are filled daily with stories of a brilliant neurosurgeon or a pregnant mom or a WWII vet randomly shot in the head because Daquan saw a white and was like, “Man, fuck that cracka walkin’ around all breathin’ an’ shit” or Ignacio the Guatemalan thought it would be muy interesante to fire a gun into a crowd because he’s a dreamer or Crackwanda the homeless woman pushed a dad in front of a subway car because the octopus-woodpecker demon that lives in her socks said, “Do it and you’ll win a Grammy.”

What was Obama’s favorite term? “Senseless violence.”

Yep, so much so that when violence makes sense, it’s refreshing.

It’s a principle leftists rarely grasp, when black advocates decry the negative image of blacks as criminally inclined, when those advocates say, “Why you scared of blacks? Italian mafiosi killed people too, but you don’t cross the street when you see a wop,” what they don’t get is that, sure, Mafia killings were bad, but they were rarely random. Random violence is what people find disconcerting. Right or wrong, there’s comfort in the belief that the victims “brought it on themselves.” When violence “makes sense,” that doesn’t make it good, but it does make it less distressing.

Rick Moranis walking through Manhattan gets punched in the face by DeQuandrius who was just looking to punch a white guy, any white guy, that sends a visceral shiver down the spine because it could’ve been you or me. If, on the other hand, Moranis had been decked by a comedy fan screaming, “Bob and Doug McKenzie were never funny,” we’d take solace. It was targeted; we’re safe.

“Sense-full” violence has a long history of being celebrated in movies. Antiheroes. Tony Soprano, hit men with a heart, edgy Deadpool-type superheroes. As long as the violence makes sense, as long as it’s not random, audiences are okay with it. The Abominable Dr. Phibes is widely considered to be Vincent Price’s best film. If you’re a horror fan, you’ll know it. If not, here’s the story: A theologian’s wife dies on the operating table, so the grieving husband kills the entire surgical team, one by one, in sadistic, painful ways based on the biblical plagues of Egypt (boils, hail, locusts, death of the firstborn).

The murderous widower is the hero of the film. At no point does the screenplay suggest that the doctors and nurses were incompetent. They tried to save the wife’s life. And the entire movie is us, the audience, enjoying seeing health-care professionals killed.

To be clear, it’s a really well-made film. But it only works because the murderer has a mission. You could not get a similar movie from LaQuixnious Jackshun randomly raping and murdering a white chick in a crime of opportunity.

Just give the killer a motive and you can excuse the most grotesque violence.

The killing of Thompson reminds me of the case of Judge Joan Lefkow. The wise Hebraic justice had ruled against neo-Nazi Matthew Hale in, of all things, a trademark/copyright dispute. Matthew Hale ran the openly murderous Church of the Creator, a white supremacy org that spawned several mass shooters. But what took him down was a trademark dispute.

That alone makes the story funny, and I haven’t even gotten to the really funny part yet.

Oh, and look up Cranston v. Hitler. In 1939 Hitler initiated a copyright lawsuit against future U.S. senator Alan Cranston. Yes, Hitler himself went to court over a copyright issue. Which is so fucking hilarious, the image of Hitler walking into a courtroom with a briefcase to enforce “mein kopyright,” and in fact Hitler won, which is the button on the gag. But in Matthew Hale’s case, he lost. And when he lost, being a good Nazi handed a defeat by a female Jew judge, he—what else?—began plotting the judge’s assassination.

Which bought him forty years in the federal pen.

Mere months after sieg-Hale was sentenced, Judge Lefkow’s family was massacred.

You didn’t have to be Columbo to put zwei und zwei together. Violent neo-Nazi loses trademark lawsuit via a Jewish judge. Violent neo-Nazi threatens Jewish judge. Violent neo-Nazi plots to kill Jewish judge. Violent neo-Nazi is sentenced to forty years for plotting to kill Jewish judge. Jewish judge’s family is executed.

Open-and-shut, right? Following the murder of Judge Lefkow’s family, every media org ran lengthy stories about how the culprits had to be neo-Nazis acting on Hale’s orders. Journalists expressed zero doubt. Because doubt would be silly, what with it being so open-and-shut and all.

But sonofabitch, you know what? As obvious as it was that the neo-Nazi who was imprisoned for planning the judge’s killing was the one behind the killing of the judge’s family, it wasn’t him. While everyone was obsessed with “Nazi vs. Jewish judge,” lurking in the shadows was Bartilomiej Ciszewski, a disfigured Polack who lived in the U.S. under the name Bart Allen Ross. Ciszewski had sued his health-care provider, claiming that their subpar treatment caused his disfigurement. And indeed, the bastard was one ugly fuck. Mouth cancer led to the removal of Ciszewski’s lower jaw and tongue. And I gotta confess…maybe I’ve been at this job too long because I’m not even sure which is the best nickname for the freak, “Yecch Walesa” or “Lick Walesa” (because his tongue was removed).

I need a vacation; I can’t even distinguish good puns from bad anymore.

But anyway, Judge Lefkow had ruled against him in his lawsuit. A minor lawsuit. Not Hitler vs. Cranston; a Polish nobody got cancer, sued his health-care provider, and lost.

I have no doubt that the moment Judge Lefkow banged her gavel to end Ciszewski’s case, she forgot about him.

But he didn’t forget about her. As she made headlines battling neo-Nazis, this small man, this jawless nonentity, brooded. Plotted. And he murdered her husband and mother. As detectives closed in on Ciszewski via DNA and firearm evidence, Mr. Kill-basa committed suicide, after sending a TV news station a letter confessing to, and defending, his actions.

Damnedest thing, isn’t it? The neo-Nazi was the obvious suspect, but the real killer was a forgotten loser who felt he’d been wronged in a health-care case no one cared about. Matthew Hale had followers; Ciszewski had nobody. Just his own pain and loneliness.

Thompson’s assassination is a reminder that while we fear random violence, as we should, we always have to keep in mind that nonrandom violence exists, and it’s not romantic or cool or something to cheer in a movie, and you never know what everyday, workaday thing you’ll do today or tomorrow that might trigger an unstable individual to engage in targeted violence.

I’d go so far as to argue that the plague of random violence unleashed by Soros DAs and open borders over the past decade, the Daquans and Ignacios who kill for no reason, has caused us to drop our guard against pinpointed violence. The less-than-negative reactions to Thompson’s murder suggest that some of us find “meaningful” violence fun.

It’s a terrible reaction, but one born of a people plagued by Daquans who’ll slaughter a white couple on a date because why not?

Be aware of random crime on a city street. Also, be aware that you might be somebody’s nonrandom target. I’m saying this as a guy whose words in 1993 attracted the attentions of a serial killer. I didn’t intend my words to do that, but as I age, I increasingly take the “butterfly effect” into consideration.

There’s something anticlimactic about random crime. LaMeniss fires a gun in anger and nails a 3-year-old kid in the head, and at trial he’s like, “I’ze sorry yo’ honor, I wish I hadn’t dun it.” And he’s likely telling the truth. LaMeniss scares us because there’s no logic to his actions. But we also need to be scared by the guys who do have logic, albeit their own insulated, detached logic.

I’ll end with this: When my dysfunctional relationship ex of five years, model-actress (now celebrated “mommy blogger” with major corporate sponsors) Rosie Maxhimer (née Tisch) outed me in 2013, when she, after five years of being financially supported by me and outdoing me in the “right-wing extremism” department, figuratively ended my life, she took a chance. You do something that life-altering to someone, you’re rolling the dice. Women have been socked on the jaw for far less (I’m not advocating that, just stating an unfortunate fact). But Rosie believed me to be a man incapable of physical violence. And indeed, in 56 years I’ve never physically harmed man nor beast. But at the same time, she didn’t foresee that my mother would become terminal with Alzheimer’s and I’d need money and I wouldn’t have money thanks to Rosie bankrupting me, and you never know how that kind of stress, that kind of sadness, that kind of desperation, might change a man. Or unlock something deep, dark, and previously unseen.

Rosie got lucky. Even with my alcoholism, even with my grief, I don’t have violence in me. She gambled and won. But to quote Miller’s Crossing, “Nobody knows anybody—not that well.” She took a very serious risk.

And then, a hospital killed my mom. And a different hospital would end up killing my dad. And no, it had nothing to do with insurance; it was dancing nurses malpracticing. But we have to view these things in context. People are imperfect, systems are imperfect. In 1992 my friend/actress/bimbo Stephanie Togrul (the petite blonde enthusiastically clapping for me in the audience during my Montel Williams Show appearance), a nurse in the cardiac ward at Cedars Sinai (the hospital that would kill my dad three decades later), would regale me with stories of how many times she almost accidentally overdosed patients.

She’s now a 4’11” champion bodybuilder.

Jesus, I’ve known some oddballs in my life.

The point is, keep perspective. People are flawed. We all are. Movies make vengeance seem cool. But you know what’s really cool? Sanity and impulse control. Also, give hugs not drugs.

At the same time, always be aware that something you do could, theoretically, send an unstable person on a path of vengeance.

It’s just the world we live in.

The majority of murder victims are dispatched by people they knew. Odds are that if you’re murdered you’ll be murdered by somebody you once felt comfortable yelling at, dismissing, or ridiculing.

Hell of a thing, huh?

And never forget it.

If you saw a large group of men running toward you, dressed in tight Lycra bearing the words “QUEER RUNNING CLUB,” what would you do? Personally, I’d start running too—right in the opposite direction. And, if I happened to be Jewish, I might try running all the faster.

For obvious reasons, gays don’t like Gaash—particularly not Omer Gaash, a homosexual Israeli photographer who recently offered his valuable services to the Queer Running Club (QRC) of London, whose members spend their days jogging between the bushes in the city’s parks, very possibly horizontally. Although Gaash’s only desire for the QRC was “for you lovelies to have wonderful photos” within which to record their public group-based activities for all posterity, it soon turned out there was a problem.

Relay-Race Relations
As he had initially offered them his services for free, it is possible the QRC did not immediately realize Gaash was Jewish. This rapidly proved “problematic,” however, as, for some bizarre reason, besides dashing about everywhere bow-legged in high heels with their arms flapping around like girls and going “OOH!” the QRC are also intensely interested in the current unfolding military and geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Therefore, a representative contacted Gaash with the following “friendly” message, once they discovered he was from the Land of Zion: “QRC has been, and continues to be, firmly pro-Palestine. I just wanted to make sure that aligns with you.”

But possibly implied support for the gay-killers and Jew-slaughterers of Hamas didn’t wholly “align” with Gaash’s own personal values, so he messaged the QRC right back refusing to confirm or deny his utterly irrelevant opinions vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip. The QRC then barred him from taking any live-action snaps of them at all, saying they were “not in a position to separate our politics from our running.”

Why not? Because of a doctrine known as “intersectionality,” the idea oppressed minority groups should all stick together, no matter how severe their own personal differences may be, thereby to defeat the true overarching shared Ultimate Evil of cishetero male white Western imperialism.

The QRC website claims their club is “political by its very nature” as “When queer people support one another it’s a political act of radical care against systemic oppressions that have historically held our community back,” even though Jogging Whilst Gay has never yet been considered a criminal offense under U.K. law.

The group’s basic idea seems to be that, under classic leftist intersectionality doctrine, the homophobes of Hamas are oppressed by the Islamophobes of Israel, who must therefore be oppressed in turn by the Jewphobes of the Queer Running Club who, in their own turn, would doubtless be subsequently oppressed themselves by the homophobes of Hamas, should they ever go for a quick shared sprint together through the remains of central Rafah, the very definition of a circular firing squad.

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My…Enemy Too?
The Queer Running Club has now been reported to authorities by the U.K. Lawyers for Israel group, accused of acts of illegal anti-Hebrewsexual discrimination. Yet some may see a dark intersectional irony in some Jews like Omer Gaash’s current plight. The thing about intersectionality is that by taking someone else’s side in an utterly unrelated cause, by definition you then have to take sides against someone else in it all too. Therefore, you force other people to take sides against you at the same time, as certain unfortunate Jews themselves are now also finding.

The official origins of intersectionality lie with a black U.S. lawyer named Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term in 1989 just to be able to better moan about being black and a woman simultaneously, but in practice you could say certain Jews had already been employing a variant of the same basic ideology for decades.

As David Cole has previously explained on this very website, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Jews concluded white people as a whole were their natural enemy—even white people from the countries who had fought against the Nazis, and in whose lands many such Jews now dwelled, having been welcomed into them as refugees by…anti-Nazi white people.

To lessen the potential threat of becoming victims of purges and pogroms at the hands of any future white Hitlers ever again, certain deeply misguided Jewish-led organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) therefore agitated for mass non-white immigration into white America and Europe.

Such groups’ assumption was that imported chocolate-skinned golems would also be likely to suffer racism at the hands of the ever-genocidal palefaces and thereby become the Israelites’ automatic allies, increasing the Jews’ political leverage against the wicked whites—different oppressed ethnic groups joining together against a shared oppressor, a classic definition of intersectionality.

Big mistake.

Roches Always Survive
Within a British context, the clearest example was surely Barbara Roche, Immigration Minister within Tony Blair’s left-wing New Labour Junta from 1997 onward. The descendent of East End Jews, but not a good one like Alf Garnett, Roche was allegedly part of a deliberate (and deliberately unadvertised) New Labour plot to “rub the right’s noses in diversity” by legislating to create a massively multicultural society where none had existed before.

In 2003 she openly boasted that “My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics. I understand the otherness of ethnic groups. The Americans are ahead of us on things like multiple identity.” So are schizophrenics.

If she really knew her history of Jewish immigration into Britain, Roche could ask her fellow wandering tribeslady Bat Ye’or why she and her family had to flee to the (former) safety of London from the recently “decolonized” Egypt back in 1957. Clue: It had something to do with pogrom-loving Muslims, one of whom quite literally whipped the Ye’ors Londonwards out of the airport…

“I love the diversity of London. I just feel comfortable,” Cock-Roche said in 2011, her hard work infesting the place with black-scarab Arabs done. I wonder how “comfortable” she’d feel today being carted into one of the city’s Islamist-infested NHamaS hospitals that I wrote about on this site last week, needing urgent treatment for a large machete wound inflicted by a passing highly diverse Somali pirate shouting, “Death to the Zionist scum!” Oh, but don’t be silly; Roche is an ex–Cabinet Minister. She’ll be able to pay to go private.

The Unwisdom of Solomon
This isn’t to say that all Jews collectively were responsible for the present-day “browning” of Europe and America—most of the New Labour Cabinet were not Jewish Labour at all, but pure white British—yet certain isolated malign Jewish individuals and bodies, like Barbara Roche, the ADL, and George Soros, do bear some guilt for the crime. Sadly, the collective punishment is currently being borne by the ordinary innocent Jews of the West, not the guilty minority.

You’ll have seen the recent scenes of imported intersectional Moroccan Muslims going on a mass “Jew-Hunt” through the streets of Amsterdam against visiting Israeli soccer fans, for example. Matches involving Israeli teams in Europe represent an obvious easy target for such anti-Jewish mobs, so much so that a game between Israel and Belgium was recently moved from Brussels to Hungary, where it was safer.

And why was it safer for Jews to be in Hungary? Because there are almost no Muslims there, because the nation’s current unacceptably white-skinned leader, Viktor Orban, sensibly refuses to listen to the Soroses of this world and let all the Sinbads in.

Guess which current European leader the ironically Hungarian-born Soros most hates, and does his level best to undermine, therefore? That’s right: Viktor Orban. Why? Because if Hungary remains white, it supposedly may one day become Nazi just like Germany once was, meaning it will be no safe space for the Jews—despite the fact it’s one of the few remaining actual safe spaces for Jews left in all of Europe, because there are no Muslims there. But, in the name of shared intersectional safety in numbers, fools of this particular deluded Jewish mindset argue it might be a good idea to let all the Muslims into Hungary anyway.

What Jew Do That For?
Meanwhile, I can’t help but notice that, despite Donald Trump being so pro-Jew he may as well build a Wailing Wall on the border with Mexico, 79 percent of self-defeating American Jews voted for Kamala Camel-Lover in November, even though the Democrats are now increasingly the party of indigestible foreign-harvested coffee dregs like Ilhan Omar who want to throw open the borders to the entire Jew-hating, Muslim diaspora.

So, to protect themselves from the evil white Republican Nazis like Trump, who are demonstrably not Nazis at all, and who tend to mainly support and accept Jews as well-integrated “honorary whites” who look and act much like they do, the overwhelming majority of the American Bagel-Ballot have suicidally decided to vote instead for the Islam-importing party of rabid Hamas-worshippers, and those who actively wish to exterminate them.

That same plan has worked out absolutely flawlessly for the Jews in today’s newly pogrom-ridden Amsterdam, hasn’t it? When it comes to their growing persecution by Muslims here in today’s West, I tend to take the side of the Jews—it would be nice if more of them tried doing the same themselves sometime, that’s all.

For “intersectionality,” just read “insanity.”

Oh God, oh God, is there no limit to idiocy? From Yahoo News, presumably meaning news for or from yahoos:

“Tom Homan, the man tapped by Mr. Trump to lead his border closures, recently told Fox News the president-elect ‘will use [the] full might of the United States Special Operations to take ’em out,’” meaning fentanyl traffickers in Mexico. The colloquial “take ’em out,” I suppose, is to provide a glow of casual virility. To be sent, saith Yahoo, are the Special Forces, Green Berets. Good troops, but hopeless for the intended purpose, which is itself hopeless.

Sending troops to Mexico may be the damnedest fool idea I’ve ever heard, and I have lived in Washington. Those proposing it seem to know nothing of Mexico, nothing of the military, and nothing of the cartels. They appear to think that the narcos will come forth and do chivalric battle mano a mano with the Special Forces. The idea is so stupid that even Lindsey Graham might notice. Though I doubt it.

The Special Forces cannot stop the flow of fentanyl from Mexico to America. Mexico cannot do this. The United States cannot do it. The reason is that vast numbers of Americans, unhappy and borderline desperate, want fentanyl to alleviate existence. Mexicans, a happier people, do not use fentanyl, though they have access. As long as there is so much demand from people willing to pay high prices, someone will supply the market. If Mexico disappeared tomorrow in a flash of blue light, a month later the flow would continue by other means. Have you ever seen a nighttime radar map of the hundreds of boats off the shore of Miami?

Allow me a few thoughts on this folly:

First, Sheinbaum won’t permit it. (For the enlightenment of 90 percent of Americans, Claudia Sheinbaum is president of Mexico.) She has said that the introduction of American troops would be a breach of Mexican sovereignty and she is having none of it. She is smart enough to know that getting U.S. troops in is much easier than getting them out. Thus the introduction of American soldiers would require a direct military invasion. Here we go again.

Second, narcos do not wear shirts saying “I’m a narco” in Day-Glo letters. They look exactly like everybody else. How do the Special Forces—do tell me, oh do—find narcos in Guadalajara, a city of 6 million and home to many narcos of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? Do they say to passersby, “Hi, I’m Sergeant Ferguson and I need you to tell me you are a narco so I can shoot you.” This Homan guy seems about one generation removed from trilobites.

Third, narco drug labs do not carry neon signs saying “Narco Drug Lab.” Washington may not have thought of this. Labs look exactly like surrounding buildings. Since cartels have lots of money, and labs are cheap, if one is shut down, another will pop up, perhaps in a remote city. Think Whac-a-Mole. What fun.

Fourth, Mexico is a huge country of 130 million. The cartels are all over the place, and mobile when they need to be. Special Forces are few. Do the numbers. In both cities and countryside, narcos can simply fade into the surrounding population. What now?

Fifth, outside of the cities, narcos tend to hole up in the mountains, such as the Sierra Madre. Have the fern-bar Napoleons of Washington been to these parts? I have, as for example around the Barranca del Cobre. The terrain is impossibly rough, heavily forested, usually on steep slopes. The locals, including narcos, know every inch of the winding, narrow, almost impassable trails. The Special Forces do not. The Spanish word for ambush is “emboscada.” Worth noting.

Sixth, the Mexican population would side with the narcos. For one thing, narcos tend to care well for their pueblos, drilling wells, building infrastructure and such, which buys loyalty. There are books on this, but mostly in Spanish. For another, Mexicans have had multiple bad experiences of invasion by America, which of course most Americans have never heard of. The resulting hostility is quiescent but intense. Handing out candy bars to children will not change this. Finally, wars in which civilians are indistinguishable from the bad guys inevitably lead to dead civilians, this being encouraged by the narcos. Every 6-year-old girl with her head blown off by panicked GIs will lead to fifty young men picking up rifles, and not with friendly intent.

Seventh, escalation would be almost inevitable. In the countryside, the SF would quickly find that it needs helicopters to chase the narcos and to avoid ambushes and IEDs. Helicopters require bases, which will be attacked, so Army forces from America will be needed to protect the bases, and so on. This song is well-known to oldsters from Vietnam and youngsters remembering Afghanistan. All of this, if actively pursued, is a sure road to a long, grinding, losing fight.

And of course the arms industry, sensing a cash spigot, would offer technological solutions, send money. More Reaper drones at millions per, with magic foliage-penetrating radar to allow the usual bombing of the wrong locals, amounting to recruiting for the narcos. Biometric identification systems to find narcos. That sort of thing. Once the money begins flowing, lobbyists will go into overdrive to keep the incursion alive.

Eighth, hostages. Well over a million Americans live in Mexico, mostly retirees but now a good many digital nomads trying to escape worsening conditions in the U.S. They—we—are easy targets. Gringos clump together in places like San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta, the north shore of Lake Chapala. They hang out in known bars and restaurants, easily bombed or subject to five gallons of gasoline through the entrance followed by a match. The narcos do these things, but so far not to Americans. This could—would—change.

The narcos are bad, bad boys. They are perfectly capable of kidnapping a gringa, killing her with a propane torch, and leaving her naked, horribly burned body in a shopping mall with a note: “Yanqui go home.” This is not Fred’s sick fantasy. These things happen.

How will the wussy-hawks in the Potomac booby-hatch respond to a million terrified expats streaking for the Texas border, abandoning houses, belongings, and comfortable lives crafted over years? Where will they then go?

Trump would then have to withdraw and lose face, not his preferred mode, or let the killing of Americans continue, maybe not what Congress would want, or escalate, as futile as it would be stupid.

Ninth, trade with Mexico, which is huge. Here I speculate, but an interesting question is whether, and with what effect, the narcos could interrupt commerce with the U.S. The narcos are not stupid. They successfully run a massive drug trade involving Asian, South American, and Middle Eastern suppliers and customers in North America and Europe. Good conservatives, they do this despite governmental regulation. Could they seriously crimp American factories by blowing up trucks and terrorizing labor, and killing American managers and their families? I don’t know. They will think of it.

That these questions, instantly occurring to anyone familiar with Washington’s interventionist wars, have eluded the kiddie hawks in the federal bubble, and certainly the Homan trilobite, augurs ill.

Do the larval Clausewitzes in Washington not understand any of the foregoing? The Special Forces are soldiers, not magicians. They can’t do what can’t be done. The whole idea reeks of Washington’s characteristic arrogance and ignorance, its lack of curiosity, its usual overestimation of its own powers, its underestimation of the adversary, and its incomprehension of the kind of conflict it is beginning—war after war, world without end, learning nothing.

The Week’s Most Snowing, Blowing, and Ho-Ho-Ho-ing Headlines

DEARTH PENALTY
Scandinavians have a problem when it comes to crime and punishment. As in, they don’t punish crime.

In Sweden, the state cannot prosecute anyone under the age of 15. Not execute but merely prosecute. This is the same state that imports Third World “gentle giants,” some of whom are six feet tall by the time they’re 14. And these 14-year-old dishonor students are committing murders throughout the nation, often as contract killers for criminal immigrant gangs, knowing that the law can’t touch them.

Recently one such 14-year-old “dreamer” stabbed a native Swede in the side of his rib cage, killing him.

R.I.P. Max von Side-ow.

A 13-year-old enricher raped a Swedish woman who tried to adopt him, then walked free because of his age.

Call that chick Regreta Garbo.

Remember, Scandinavia is where Anders Breivik murdered 77 people and the most time he could get behind bars was 21 years.

Norwegian intellectual: “21 years will be enough to show Breivik the error of his ways.”

Breivik at his parole hearing: “I’d happily kill 77 again if I could.”

Norwegian intellectual: “You see? Reform works. He’s not trying to outdo his record.”

Scandinavian “justice” deserves the Max von Side-eye.

Meanwhile, as African teens in Sweden kill wantonly, African teens in Africa are faring less well. Twenty-nine Nigerian children are facing the death penalty for taking part in anti-government protests. And an additional 29 are facing the death penalty for failing to convince your grandma that they’re wealthy princes who need a cashier’s check to claim their fortune.

In California, following the massive tough-on-crime surge in the November election, prosecutors are starting to seek the death penalty again. In Sacramento, the DA is pursuing the death penalty against cop-killer Adel Ramos. Ramos’ defense attorneys are asking the state to show mercy because of Ramos’ “childhood trauma at the hands of his father.”

The Sacramento Bee doesn’t detail the exact nature of the “trauma,” but word is it involves a leaf blower inserted in the worst possible place.

KAMBO MEAL
One of Norm Macdonald’s classic routines centered on the death of Steve Irwin. People were saying, “I can’t believe the crocodile hunter died,” and Norm was like, “Actually, I can totally believe a crocodile hunter died.”

In that vein, one wonders if the friends and family of bimbo actress Marcela Alcázar Rodríguez are saying, “I can’t believe Marcela died. All she did was travel to Mexico to ingest deadly poison.”

And again, in the spirit of Norm, yeah, it’s not a surprise.

Rodriguez traveled from L.A. to Durango to take the kambo frog toxin. The kambo frog secretes a deadly poison when frightened by natural predators, and a really deadly poison when frightened by a naked photo of Whoopi Goldberg. And supposedly, according to indigenous natives, if you ingest small amounts of this poison it’ll cure whatever ails you.

Say the people who spent 500 years carving the hearts out of children and the next 500 years dying of the common cold.

Yeah, these are the ones from whom you want to take health-care advice.

Rodriguez took the kambo poison in the “traditional” way—having it burned into her skin (ironically, that was Fauci’s initial plan for the Covid vax). And for some baffling reason the fatal toxin proved fatal.

Her body was flown back to L.A., where she’ll be buried at Forest Lawn with a tombstone reading “Actress, Artist, Imbecile.”

Funny enough, in 2015 another booby bimbo, Korean-American Playboy Playmate Yoonj Kim, was asked by her magazine to try the kambo poison as a dare. In the resulting video, which has been viewed 1.6 million times on YouTube, Kim “excretes” waste of her own after coming into contact with the toxin.

Titi, meet caca. And that’s a lake in which you most definitely don’t want to swim.

CRUDYARD KIPLING
Bangalore? More like Mangle-ore.

In 2006 the government of India officially renamed the city of Bangalore “Bengalūru.” The aim of the name change was to convince returning tourists that this was not the same fetid crime-infested sidewalk-poop-strewn sewer they’d previously visited.

“Honey, are you sure this isn’t Bangalore, where we were robbed last year?”

“No, silly, this is Bengalūru, totally different. Like comparing that nice Sean Combs with that horrible P. Diddy.”

Well, as Kipling said, you can’t change a leopard’s spots. But you can rearrange the spots with a really sharp machete. Recently a woman in Bangalore named Mahalakshmi was chopped up into fifty pieces and placed in her refrigerator (Mahalakshmi has no surname, like Cher or Madonna or, more appropriately in this case, Slash). The body was discovered after neighbors complained of a strong odor coming from the apartment. And it needs to be asked, how bad did that diced wog smell to be refrigerated and still permeate the entire building with a stank so strong it annoyed Indians who live in open sewers?

The story captivated the public (Benga-lurid).

Meanwhile, in Baghpat, a 6-year-old-girl was kidnapped by an assailant who took her to an abandoned house in the forest to rape her. However, a troop of monkeys heard the screams and stormed the house, attacking the rapist so badly he fled.

You know your country is crap when it takes monkeys to keep law and order.

In Kipling’s Jungle Book, Mowgli is kidnapped by the Bandar-log monkeys, who want to be more human. In a 2024 update, the Bandar-logs see the condition of India and realize that emulating the residents would be dysgenic.

Oh, pee-eee-yew,
Don’t wanna be like you-oo-oo,
Don’t wanna stink like you,
Or think like you, too-oo-ooo,
Can’t you see,
An ape like me-ee,
Throws less feces than untouchables like you.

Last week the NY Times’ “brilliant” “economist” Paul Krugman officially retired after a career full of never getting a single thing right. But in all his bad calls, arguably none were worse than that time he very publicly fell for an Indian Microsoft Security scam.

So with all of India’s problems, at least they can brag that they tricked Paul Krugman.

Which is like saying, “We’re a great nation because we pretended to throw the ball and our dog looked confused.”

RECEPSHUNNED
Based on court documents, this is a rough reconstruction of morbidly obese black man William Martin’s job interview with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

We’ll pick up the transcript after the part in which Martin heard the name of Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos and replied, “Damn, I be starvin’ for nachos too! Got any cheese wit’ that?”

Interviewer: “Now, this is a reception desk job. You sit at the desk, man the phones, and answer visitor questions.”

Martin: “Got it.”

Interviewer: “I see you’re proficient in Word, Excel, and Outlook.”

Martin: “Indeed.”

Interviewer: “What would you say are your strongest personal traits?”

Martin: “I’m good with people. Friendly, easygoing.”

Interviewer: “Wonderful. And your weakest?”

Martin: “Hmm…that’s a tough one…uh…well…maybe that I’m too f—ing fat to sit at any desk ever constructed by mankind.”

Yes, Martin is suing the library because they don’t have a desk large enough to encompass his Brobdingnagian frame. Even the giant atrium front desk at the Niarchos Library could not fit him. He’s demanding $4.6 million in compensation for the fact that he’s eaten ribs and pigs’ feet to the point where he’s the human meatball meme.

Apparently he only sought the job in the first place because he heard “liberry” and thought it might make a tasty pie.

Meanwhile in Kansas City a white firefighter was just awarded $850,000 because he was denied a position solely because of his race. So, a black guy who can’t sit behind a desk is given a desk job (and then he sues anyway), while a fully qualified white firefighter can’t get hired at all.

America practices a bizarre kind of racism.

DOLPHINISHED
How bad is the drug trafficking problem in Mexico? Even the dolphins are dying of fentanyl.

This is an especially serious matter for Mexicans, because, to them, the dolphin is a sacred animal, as it’s born equipped with its own leaf blower.

That said, prior to the invention of the gasoline combustion engine, attempts by Mexican gardeners to use dolphins as yard maintenance equipment were rarely successful.

And now, bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico are washing ashore awash in fentanyl. Which is odd because you’d expect bottlenose dolphins to be into coke. Worse still, the drugged-up fentanyl-flooded dolphins are visiting grocery stores trying to pass bad $20 bills while screaming, “I can’t breathe.”

Never forget George Flipper! Blackfish lives matter.

Although the bottlenose breed seems most heavily affected, other species that have been opioid-poisoned include the Irrawaddy dolphin, which is not to be confused with the “I’ze-a-daddy?” dolphin, which swims the ocean fleeing child support payments, the Risso’s dolphin (not to be confused with the Lizzo’s dolphin, which plays the flute while twerking), the melon-headed dolphin (often called “the Olbermann”), and the pygmy dolphin, usually referred to as “the Shapiro.”

As to how and why these dolphins are ingesting fentanyl, scientists are baffled. The question of how so much fentanyl got into the Gulf is very much open for debate, but almost certainly it has something to do with the fact that every year in Houston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, “black spring break” is held at the beach, resulting in a veritable army of drowned corpses that prove impossible to resist for the carnivorous aquatic mammals.

Black activist Beverly Bond once said, “Walk into your purpose.”

Or float into a porpoise.

When I saw video clips of the joyful toppling of statues of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the tearing from walls of his ubiquitous portrait, I wondered what it must be like to be a dictator and see images of yourself everywhere (not that I have any ambitions myself in that direction).

Do you come to imagine, for example, that they are a manifestation of genuine popular affection for yourself, or are you like the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, of the poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Somoza Unveils a Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium” (the fact that Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest, was a commie doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good poet).

The Somoza of the poem is perfectly clear-sighted. He knows that people didn’t erect the statue spontaneously, out of love for him, because he knows that he himself ordered it to be erected. Nor does he think that it will be a perpetual monument to himself because he knows also that the people will tear it down as soon as they can. No, he had it erected because he knew that the people would hate it, in other words that it would humiliate them, and a humiliated people is easy to cow into submission, at least until—to use a word of slightly different zoological connotation—the worm turns. (A note to pedants before they write in: I do not think that the verb to cow has any etymological link with the female herbivore known as the cow.)

It seems to me, however, that Cardenal may have simplified a little. Such is the complexity and potential dishonesty of the human mind that a dictator would be perfectly capable of imagining that a statue of himself is a manifestation of people’s affection for him and that there are people plotting to bring down both the statue and him because they hate him. This is not totally irrational or impossible. After all, as Americans know, even in a free democracy some people love the leader and some people hate him (usually more of the latter after he has been in power for some time).

Assad junior, it seems to me, is a living refutation of Solzhenitsyn’s famous remark that Macbeth was capable of killing only a handful of people because he was motivated by no ideology, and it requires an ideology to bring about hecatombs of the Nazis or Communists. Assad junior had a self-justification for his rule, no doubt, as every ruler and dictator has and must have, but he did not really possess a full-blown ideology in Solzhenitsyn’s sense. His trajectory is worth recalling.

The son of a monstrous dictator, he seems at first to have had no inclinations in that direction himself. Among other things, he didn’t seem to have the physical attributes of a dictator, but rather of someone pliant and weak, more herbivore than carnivore, more giraffe rather lion (though giraffes can kick a lion to death). And it spoke rather well of him that he should qualify as a doctor, apparently quite genuinely so, and wish to become an ophthalmologist, to which end he studied in London, where his conduct was not that of a spoilt brat but by all accounts rather modest—laudably so, in the circumstances.

If it had not been for the stupid fatal road accident that killed his older brother, an accident emblematic of the follies of gilded youth everywhere, Assad junior might have spent his life anonymously and usefully as an ophthalmic surgeon—though, like all hypotheticals, this cannot be proved. He was like Macbeth, a man who would have been content to remain a loyal servant of the king before he met the witches who first unleashed ambition in his mind (where there must have been the potential for it). But of course, an honorable and decent future was not to be, neither for Macbeth nor for Assad junior.

Replacing his brother as legatee of a terrible father, Assad junior was at first of mildly reformist disposition, certainly not a born and bred bloodthirsty kleptocrat. He had been called back to “serve” his country and now found himself at the head of a criminal organization whether he liked it or not, though probably, given the considerable perks of the job, he came soon enough to like it. And then came the challenge to his power, in a country in which defeated politicians do not retire to tend their roses and write their memoirs. Honorable and honored retirement was not really a possibility for him; he could not hope to spend the rest of his life in Estoril as the overthrown monarch of a Ruritanian kingdom might have been able to do. There would have been, in effect, no rest of his life, for he would have been safe nowhere.

Thus, he became a butcher, one of the worst; and as Macbeth found, once you start down the path of butchery, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to stop. You cannot, in mid-course, suddenly say that you now realize that it has all been a terrible mistake, that you are sorry and would like to start again, and that all you want is a second chance. You must kill all your enemies before they kill you.

Again, the human mind being what it is, a manufactory of rationalization, Assad junior could no doubt justify his actions to himself, especially as he was protected, and protected himself, from direct contact with their consequences for millions of people. Besides, he lived in a part of the world in which there were no simon-pure competitors for power, and he could easily have convinced himself that the alternatives to his rule were even worse—which is a first step to the conclusion in his own mind that he was really rather a good chap. Not après moi, le déluge, but après moi, le massacre, he probably thought, disregarding the fact that massacres had long been taking place and were continuing under his rule.

No doubt he felt his departure as a personal humiliation, but as to the scenes of joy at his overthrow, he probably thought that they would soon enough change to those of anguish. As Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, said on the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (which was to cost a fortune and be of no benefit to Britain), “Those who are ringing the bells will soon be wringing their hands.” Assad junior will not be wishing the Syrian people well, but rather all the misery in the world for having shown themselves so disgracefully ungrateful to him. It will serve them right!

Shakespeare would have understood.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).

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