The modern world is one of both convenience and inconvenience. For example, you can buy an air ticket in a trice (who remembers travel agents, airline offices, and laboriously filled tickets?), but you are enjoined to arrive ever earlier and wait ever longer at the airport.
One secret of contentment in the modern world, as I suppose in every other, is knowing how to employ the wasted time that is otherwise enforced upon you. I learned a long time ago to take a book with me wherever I went. It was very useful to have a book at isolated African land borders, for example, where I discovered that settling down to read contentedly would so exasperate the immigration officials who were hoping that prolonged delay would cause me to offer a bribe, that they would wave me through gratis. (It was also the only way that I could ever get through Moby-Dick.)
Recently I had an enforced waste of time at Istanbul Airport. Say what you like about Erdogan, but the Turks certainly know how to build an airport and other infrastructure (an art completely lost in our own country). Our airports by comparison with Istanbul are a shabby, incompetent mess.
Books and computers take the wasting out of waiting, but it is also instructive to look around at one’s fellow passengers. Opposite me, for example, was a mute man in a wheelchair of about 40, dressed in a tracksuit and a Muslim cap, who was terribly deformed and who writhed continually without any external stimulus. He looked around him with what appeared to be an uncomprehending, vacant stare.
His aging mother, in Muslim dress, sat beside him. She must have devoted most of her life to looking after him.
It so happened that in the same week, I spoke to a Dutch doctor about euthanasia and assisted suicide. The subject had been on my mind because I am soon to give a talk on that subject. He told me that a person who resembled the young man in the wheelchair had just been euthanized (at his own request) in his area. There was also a doctor in the area who had come out of retirement to do that sort of thing.
The mother of the handicapped man said something to him (of course, I could not understand what), and he replied with a luminous smile that lit up his entire face, an illumination that was lasting. Her face expressed tenderness.
How easy it is to conclude that the lives of others are not worth living—intrinsically not worth living! I thought of the horrible book by a lawyer, Karl Binding, and a psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, Authorisation of the Elimination of Life Unworthy of Life, published in 1920, not long after the end of one of the greatest mass slaughters in history. It was in the same year that, perhaps not surprisingly, Freud introduced his concept of the death instinct.
Our own Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill does not, of course, propose anything nearly so terrible. For myself, I can easily think of situations in which I would wish for easeful death. On the other hand, in my own case, it is difficult to see how the provisions of the proposed act could be conscientiously complied with, at least without a considerable expenditure of doctors’ and officialdom’s time.
Not since I was about 10, when our family doctor, Dr. S., performed home visits and looked down at me through his gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles in such a way that I dared not fail to improve, has any doctor known anything about me, apart from the results of my blood tests and X-rays. Who is my doctor? I cannot say. If I go to the doctors’ surgery, which is rarely, I feel fortunate if I am granted an appointment, and then usually to consult a doctor whom I have never seen before and will never see again. How are the provisions of the act to be carried out in such circumstances (which I assume to be far from unique)? In my case, the law will either be a dead letter or not properly complied with.
I turned from thoughts of death to those of life, from the unfortunate handicapped man to the Russian prostitute sitting beside him on the other side, to be exact. We were all bound for a country in the Gulf, and she was clutching her Russian passport.
How did I know that she was a prostitute, you might ask? She was very blonde, heavily made-up, and dressed in a white tracksuit with gold piping. Her trainers sparkled with paste diamonds. Her lips had been improved by silicon or some other filler, to give her what I have been told is now called the “trout pout.” Even Dr. Watson would not have mistaken her for a geologist or an oil executive.
In such a situation, I always remember the lines by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz taught me forty years ago by a taxi driver in Mexico City: O who is more to blame, though both do wrong: She who sins for pay, or he who pays for sin?
Her vulgar getup could not disguise the fact that she was no great beauty. At first I was repelled, but then felt sorrow for her. What abuse or exploitation must she have suffered at both ends of her trajectory? Her value as a commodity would soon decline; she would have to make whatever dirhams, dinars, or rials while the sun shone and then return to some dismal flat in Russia.
I was told by friends in the Gulf that on the return journey of the prostitutes to Russia and other such places, one could tell how successful returning prostitutes had been by the number of suitcases they checked in at the airport: as a rule of thumb, one suitcase for every ten clients. How this was known or calculated, I do not know. And every Friday, a hundred thousand Saudis crossed the border to take advantage of the looser rules relating to alcohol, and other things.
The world remains not without interest.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
Remember the old cliché of a pessimist seeing a glass half empty rather than half full? I’m a pessimist by nature, always imagining the downside of something, except when it comes to women. (In their case the downside reveals itself after a while, but the start is always brilliant.) I suppose my pessimism derives from childhood, when dreams never became reality due to a strict nanny and even stricter parents. Or so a shrink might say, although I’ve never been to one, and many of those who have been and whom I have met rarely made any sense.
This preamble on pessimism has to do with the Middle East—Gaza, to be precise. Although it deeply saddens me to write it, it seems to me that I have more chance to run off with Lily James than for peace to hold over that tortured piece of real estate. In fact, it is far more realistic for a lasting peace in Ukraine than a permanent end to the hostilities in Gaza. There are two main obstacles to peace: Hamas and Netanyahu. It is as simple as that.
Conducting summary executions the day after resuming control of Gaza proves that Hamas has learned nothing from this unspeakable tragedy. Sixty-eight thousand dead from Israeli arms, half of them innocent women and children, and all Hamas can think of is to add on to this morbid number. Persuading Hamas to disarm is a key to The Donald’s twenty-point peace plan, but Hamas is as likely to voluntarily disarm as Bibi is to become Catholic.
And let us not forget Netanyahu and his fellow gangsters like Smotrich and Katz. They are the very ones who helped finance Hamas before Oct. 23 in order to keep the Palestinian Authority weak and the West Bank divided. Hamas saved Netanyahu two years ago, and he’s not about to get rid of them, because they come in handy where domestic Israeli politics are concerned.
The horror deal between two very evil parties began in 1996. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist, Hamas and Netanyahu worked hand in hand in defeating the Oslo agreements, and then Bibi facilitated Qatar’s hundreds of millions of dollars in paper bills to Hamas, a fact that weakened the Palestinian Authority to no end. Netanyahu and Hamas still need each other, and I am afraid they will do their utmost to subvert any peace agreement. Gaza, needless to say, cannot be reconstructed overnight. There were 654 Israeli strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities alone. The area has been ground into rubble, making peace over such devastation almost impossible. Netanyahu knew what he was doing by waging total war. He was making peace untenable. Netanyahu’s plan now is to keep the Palestinian Authority from leading a united front with Gaza.
Israel’s creeping takeover of the West Bank has been decades in the making. Seven hundred and forty thousand so-called settlers are now entrenched on Palestinian lands. Last time I was there, during the Yom Kippur War, there were 10,000. Israel has been very smart in its land grab. It has made a two-state solution impossible by an impracticable contiguous Palestinian territory. Land grab aside, a Palestinian state cannot be created unilaterally without the agreement of Israel, and as long as Netanyahu rules, there will be no state of Palestine.
Gaza, of course, is the great tragedy, with displaced families having been bombed in their tents, their shoeless orphan children lying dead next to their parents’ graves. And it gets worse, as far as the prospects of peace are concerned. Close to 11,000 Palestinians are still locked up in Israeli prisons, a third of them without charges or a trial. At least 77 detainees have died in custody over the past two years. Since 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank through force of arms, more than one million Palestinians have been arrested. International condemnation that brought about change in South Africa has not been heard where Palestine is concerned. What I’d like to know is where the international outrage, let alone the diplomatic censure, has been. Is there one rule for rogue countries and another one for Israel?
Israel’s extremist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been accused of having deprived prisoners of food and inflicting physical torture. I am not in a position to know whether these charges are true or not, but I do know that they have not been investigated by human rights groups. The other thing I know is that the Trump people are busy sucking up to the Israelis and totally ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. The latter, I need to remind the world, are also people.
“But people will die!”
That’s what some shout whenever anyone proposes cutting government spending.
An audience member at a town hall shouted it when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said Medicaid shouldn’t cover illegal immigrants.
Ernst responded with an obvious truth: “We all are going to die.”
The audience groaned and booed. The Nation magazine said her “cruelty and sarcasm might cost her her job.”
Why? Ernst was right.
Politicians, spending other people’s money, ought to put limits on how much tax money to spend on medical care.
But they don’t want to.
“If there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to try,” said Barack Obama, pushing gun control.
“You can’t put a price on human life,” said Sen. Cory Booker.
But in the real world, we put a price on life all the time.
In my new video, Ken Feinberg explains how he does that.
Feinberg was appointed to decide how much money 9/11 victims should receive.
He was also chosen to decide how much to give victims of the BP oil spill, the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Katrina, the Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech shootings, and other tragedies.
Judges and juries put prices on lives every day, Feinberg tells me.
“You get hit by an automobile. There’s a price … Over a work life, what would she or he have made? Add some element of emotional distress, pain and suffering. There’s the value of the life.”
“That’s good?” I ask.
“What’s the alternative?” He responds.
One alternative is for victims to sue. Ambulance chasing lawyers tell you, “I can get you more!”
But people who sue often don’t get paid for years, and the legal system (plaintiff’s lawyer, defense lawyers, plus court costs) takes most of the money!
After 9/11, “There was a cold calculation made by Congress,” says Feinberg. “We don’t want lawsuits … Lawsuits are inefficient, costly, delay ridden, and most importantly … very uncertain … ‘Take the money from Feinberg and sign away your right to sue.'”
Some people complained about that.
“People felt that this fund was too assembly line. It was automatic calculations with a calculator. ‘Why won’t Mr. Feinberg give me a full and fair opportunity, one-on-one to chat about my dead wife?’ … I conducted myself, over 900 individual hearings … it was inefficient. You had to slow down the process to see them. It was tragic and horrific to listen to people. But it helped to assure success of the fund.”
I was surprised that Feinberg now says government shouldn’t do anything like the 9/11 fund again.
“No,” he says. “9/11 was unique … the only program in American history where the government paid the claimants. It was all taxpayer money … Don’t ever do it again.”
Why?
“Americans do not have government as a source of individual compensation to victims of life’s misfortune, even innocent victims … Where does it end? … Why would people mitigate against risk in day-to-day living if they knew that, whatever happens to me, if I’m climbing a mountain that I shouldn’t or driving a motorcycle that I shouldn’t, it’s all right because government’s there to provide a check. I think you’d bankrupt the country.”
He adds, “American people are very self-reliant. You buy life insurance, you have some protection, Social Security … We don’t look to government to be the guarantor of misfortune and compensation.”
Money for victims of the BP oil spill, the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Katrina, Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub shooting and other tragedies where Feinberg was hired to pay settlements came from the companies involved or from volunteers.
People donate because we want to help. That help then comes without strings. Victims get money fairly quickly because there are few delays from lawsuits.
That’s the best way to compensate people.
Politicians in Washington have the shortest memories.
Maybe that’s why they so seldom learn from their sometimes catastrophic mistakes.
It was less than 20 years ago that the U.S. economy was flattened by the mortgage and banking crisis. Anyone remember?
The experts said that the odds were tiny that the housing market could crash; that the federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never need a bailout; that mortgage-backed securities were as good as gold.
Then they crashed overnight spectacularly and devastatingly. Banks made riskier and riskier housing loans to subprime borrowers — and the government covered the bets with essentially 100% loan guarantees. The book “The Big Short” famously tells the story of strippers in Las Vegas playing the market and flipping houses by taking out three or four mortgages.
One reason depositors and investors were paying no attention to the big banks’ high-risk lending strategy is that everything was guaranteed.
By you and me.
Americans are still rightly infuriated by the taxpayer bailouts in the trillions of dollars. The media has swept it all under the rug as an example of the excesses of greed and get-rich-quick capitalism. These factors played a role in the meltdown, for sure, but their partner in crime was the government itself, which insured all the financial Hail Mary passes.
One contributing factor to this moral hazard is deposit insurance. Right now, accounts are insured up to $250,000, so most Americans don’t have to worry about the soundness of the bank where they store their hard-earned savings. We don’t want 1929-style bank runs, for sure. So this safety net, there for shock-absorbing systemic risks, makes sense for mom-and-pop savers and investors.
But now there is a proposal to raise that taxpayer-insured limit to — drum roll, please — $10 million.
Huh? How many Americans have $10 million to deposit in the bank? Well, let’s see: There’s Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, to name a few in the billionaire class. I’m the last person on earth to join Bernie Sanders in tearing down “the rich” when they earn it.
Supporters in both parties claim this will allow smaller community banks to more easily raise capital for lending and compete with the “Big Five” banks. That’s a good goal.
But we really should call this latest proposal “the Billionaire Insurance Act.”
A recent study from the Cato Institute found that fewer than 1% of deposit accounts exceed $250,000, the level at which Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation coverage currently ends. So to increase that amount to $10 million will mean taxpayer-supported insurance for the deposits of not the top 1% but the top 0.01% of Americans.
But who will be watching over the banks? It’s one thing to have the proverbial fox watching the henhouse, but with these kinds of limits, NO ONE is watching except the federal regulators who were asleep at the switch in 2006, ’07 and ’08. Think of how much larger the taxpayer losses would have been if this policy were in place 20 years ago.
There is another reason why lifting the deposit insurance limits is foolhardy. We don’t want to encourage investors to seek safe harbor in risk-free investments. The millionaires and the billionaires are the people we DO want to take risks with their fortunes. We want them to discover and seed-invest in the next Microsoft or Google or Walmart.
Risk-taking is a virtue — it’s what built this country.
But we want investors to make the big bets with their own money, not yours and mine.
Much is made of America’s “social peace,” though you’d be hard-pressed to find any if you left the Whole Foods parking lot. The latest reminder came when Washington announced that, thanks to a government shutdown, November’s food stamp payments might not arrive. Cue the shrieking: 42 million souls, or at least their Twitter proxies, declared civilization itself imperiled because the Treasury might skip a month of swiping the national debit card.
This is what passes for drama in 2025: the EBT apocalypse. “You’re talking about millions and millions of vulnerable families!” wailed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, as if Armageddon could be measured in missing snack credits. Somewhere between “bread riots” and “trending hashtags,” the republic discovered that its definition of peace now depends on whether the barcode beeps at Walmart.
Let’s be clear about the terminology, since few in government can be. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, supplemental being a word once understood to mean “extra,” not “existential.” EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) is simply the mechanism that dispenses the goodies. In short, SNAP is the trough, EBT the spigot. But over time, the spigot has become the shrine.
We are told this costs $100 billion a year, the price of national anesthesia. A hundred billion to purchase silence from those whom the modern state, having atomized the family and debased work, now pays to stay docile. Kipling, who had seen the imperial version of this bargain in India, called it Dane-geld. The term itself goes back to the ninth-century protection racket run by Viking entrepreneurs, when English and French towns, rather than fight, paid the Northmen to sail away, only to watch them return, invoice in hand. Eventually, the wiser burgs stopped paying and started fortifying. “When you pay the Dane-geld,” Kipling warned, “you never get rid of the Dane.” Years later in England, he recalled how the Raj sometimes bought peace on its frontiers by subsidizing the very tribes that raided it, a lesson in futility he turned into verse. You pay off the raiders to keep the peace, only to find they return for more, and this time the tribute arrives by direct deposit.
Naturally, the Democrats could reopen the government tomorrow. But they won’t, because the spectacle of “hungry families” is too useful. A good riot in the service of the administrative state is worth any number of hungry children. After all, nothing says compassion like holding the poor hostage for a budget increase.
The right, alas, isn’t much better. Libertarian purists chirp that charity is for suckers and that Atlas should shrug while the rabble starves. A generation after Ayn Rand preached the gospel of self-reliant übermenschen, Bill Gates was busy turning monopoly software into a monopoly morality, an economy where billionaires offshore the factories that made America great, then donate a tax-deductible sliver of the proceeds to “sustainable development.” Gates gives away the rope with which his class will hang us, and calls it virtue.
The result? A middle class that can’t afford groceries, an underclass that won’t buy them, and an overclass that doesn’t notice because Whole Foods delivers. America has perfected the economic trinity of late empire: socialism for the poor, capitalism for the rich, and existential dread for everyone in between.
The EBT serfs of the underclass aren’t doing their cause any favors. Social media now hosts a veritable Louvre of looting: TikToks planning “free” Thanksgiving dinners (funded by theft), Instagram sermons on how taxpayers “work for us,” and the inevitable Walmart brawl when reality crashes the entitlement fantasia. They no longer raid monasteries like the Norsemen; they pillage the self-checkout aisle and livestream the decline in real time.
According to the National Academies Press, 23.3 percent of black Americans receive food assistance, compared to just 2.7 percent of whites. A tenfold gap that progressives treat as proof of tenfold racism. (Suggest a cultural explanation and the diversity commissars will haul you off for reeducation.)
We must recognize that we can’t negotiate preferences for peace anyway; there’s nobody across the table to deliver the goods. Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago: These aren’t cities run by Mafia dons who can be bought off with a suitcase of cash in exchange for ending drive-bys or curbing the drug trade. If only it were that simple. One can almost picture Mayor Brandon Johnson being handed the tribute like some urban capo dei capi at City Hall. A cash-filled suitcase might actually work better than the billions Washington keeps pouring into civic collapse.
Thus the Danegeld grows bureaucratic appendages. What began as food stamps soon required a priesthood of diversity czars and equity consultants to justify the tribute. Every payment demands a rationale, every rationale a new office, and soon redistribution becomes a career path.
Affirmative action, once sold as a temporary expedient, became the managerial class’ favorite self-licking ice cream cone, a policy that feeds on its own failure. The Great Society promised to buy peace in the cities with preferences, quotas, and cash. Half a century later, the peace is gone, the preferences are permanent, and the cash—about $100 billion in SNAP alone—a standing tribute in the new Danegeld economy.
The bureaucracy built to enforce “equity” has become its own caste system: diversity commissars, community “liaisons,” grievance brokers, and NGOs devoted to the fine art of redistributing guilt. Tom Wolfe saw it coming in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, his portrait of government mediators paid to absorb rage and hand out cash. The flak remains, but the catchers now run the place.
This is the genius of America’s ruling class: They’ve turned welfare into a form of hostage negotiation. Every month brings another deadline, another threat of chaos unless the tribute is paid. And everyone gets a cut—the bureaucrats, the “advocates,” the consultants, the grocery conglomerates, and the compliant voting blocs who keep the racket humming. It isn’t socialism; it’s extortion with branding.
Meanwhile, the real economy, the one that once made the country hum, has been dismantled. Industry is gone, replaced by delivery apps, diversity seminars, and fentanyl. The old slogan used to be “Give a man a fish.” Now it’s “Give a man an EBT card and hope he doesn’t film himself pistol-whipping the cashier when it declines.”
This is not sustainable, and everyone knows it. The moral rot of the system is that it reduces citizenship to consumption and governance to appeasement. The Danes, at least, had the decency to row home after taking their tribute. America’s raiders stay, breed, and vote, and the state keeps paying them not to riot.
What would a sane society do? Not Ayn Rand’s sociopathy, nor Gatesian benevolence—something duller, harder, and infinitely more adult: restore the dignity of work, rebuild the institutions of order, and stop mistaking bribery for justice. The SNAP card was meant to feed the poor; it has ended up feeding the illusion that the poor can be paid to behave.
But the government will keep paying, because it fears what happens when it doesn’t. And the raiders will keep raiding, because they’ve learned that peace is just another line item on the federal budget. The Vikings took gold and sailed away. The EBT class takes chips, soda, and democracy itself—and stays for dessert.
As with all great farces, it ends in tragedy.
Just in time for Halloween, the leader of Maidstone Borough Council in England has written to the U.K. Home Secretary demanding she take time out from her busy schedule to do something really important instead—pardon seven local women wrongly hanged as witches in July 1652.
The witches’ belated exoneration is supposedly necessary as an act of contemporary public penance from the hideous white patriarchy who have run the West for centuries now, still keeping women and other minorities down even today: an argument rather undermined by the fact that Great Britain’s current Home Secretary is a brown Muslim female named Shabana Mahmood.
Claire Kehily, a Green Party councillor who helped lead the campaign (another clear sign of the ongoing oppression of women the length and breadth of the kingdom), argues that such a centuries-late absolution would not be a complete waste of everyone’s time, but something that “sends a strong message that injustice [against women] will be called out and fought against,” no matter how long ago it occurred. Unless, of course, said “injustice” is still occurring today, and being perpetrated by the left’s current favored client class of transgenderists.
Wart’s the Point?
These very same witch-loving “feminists” in far-left parties like the Greens are also the ones habitually championing the supposed “right” of cross-dressing males to enter female spaces. Interestingly, cross-dressing was once considered a possible diagnostic sign of witchcraft, as with Joan of Arc (now misleadingly reclaimed as a transgender sorceress named Joe), showing that these ideologues really are of the Devil’s party without knowing it, just like Milton.
It’s always very easy to offer up meaningless, consequence-free apologies for the misdeeds of distant ancestors you disown from your own nation’s past, but offering up apologies for the misdeeds of people you support from your own political present is rather more difficult—hence a sudden “feminist”-powered rash of performative calls for pardons to be issued to deceased witches unjustly persecuted back during the Middle Ages.
This has happened in Catalonia and Connecticut, as well as in Massachusetts, where a female victim of the Salem witch panic was formally exonerated in 2022, surely a development of great comfort to her blackened skeleton.
Diabolical Fools
The global center of all this needless estrogen-soaked virtue signaling is Scotland, home of Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters, where more witches were executed per capita than anywhere else in Europe.
Today things are far different in fair Caledonia, where the magical pendulum has now swung so far the other way that the nation was formally run by a wicked witch between 2014 and 2023 in the repulsive guise of Nicola Sturgeon, hard-left First Minister of Scotland for the Scottish National Party.
On International Women’s Day 2022, the wizened dwarfish crone courted her core identitarian coven vote by issuing a formal apology upon behalf of the entire Scottish government for this “egregious historic injustice” to all those long-buried Scottish witches who no longer had any ears to hear it. As Sturgeon’s speech explained, these wronged individuals “were not witches, they were people, and they were overwhelmingly women.”
This is perfectly true: 85 percent of hanged or burned Scottish witches were indeed female. Which, coincidentally enough, is today probably the approximate ratio of women to men inside the average Scottish women’s prison, schoolgirls’ locker room, or female public toilet, thanks to absurdly lenient domestic Gender Recognition legislation allowing mad male warlocks wearing black tattered dresses and pointy hats to waltz inside them more or less at will.
The main champion of pushing through such infernal laws? Nicola “First Feminist” Sturgeon, a true Hellish Nell if ever there was one.
The Kilt of Guilt
Sturgeon issued her 2022 apology in direct response to a prolonged campaign to do something futile from a group called Witches of Scotland. The two founders aren’t even real witches themselves, but something far worse: a human rights lawyer and a left-wing writer and educator.
The duo’s main efforts seem mainly limited to writing a misandrist-sounding new book, How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy, and commissioning someone to design a special pro-witch brand of tartan, with incredibly profound and moving symbolic colors on it: “Black and gray represent the dark times and the ashes of those who were persecuted.” The tartan’s slogan is “When you wear it, you wear remembrance.” They’re getting confused with poppies, I think.
The tartan was crowdfunded, with £140,000 raised from ordinary Scots, all of whom chose option No. 4 online when confronted with a direct choice about what the best good cause to donate their precious groats toward might have been:
(1) Babies with cancer
(2) Legless war veterans
(3) Blind homeless people
(4) Knitting a big fat conscience kilt
Just for comparison, the cost of a single intensive care ward ventilator unit for a U.K. hospital is £20,000. They could have bought five of those and still had £40,000 left over to blow on magic stripe-y skirt things. So why didn’t they? Because ventilators won’t help smash the patriarchy, that’s why.
To Bear a Grudge
In June 2020, Claire Mitchell, the main human rights lawyerette driving the Witches of Scotland campaign, was declared “Lawyer of the Month” by scottishlegal.com, proudly explaining how she entered the world of lawyering in the first place driven purely by the prospect of “helping people right wrongs that have been committed against them.” Serious wrongs like a single mother who couldn’t afford to pay her Scottish Council Tax being raped by big hairy trannies in a prison toilet? No, trivial “wrongs” like not being able to see any statues with visible genitalia that look exactly like your own do.
Skipping (it’s what girls do) through Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh one day while thinking about kittens and licking a big pink lollipop, Mitchell happened to realize that, of all the statues erected there, not a single one possessed a vagina; all were male. Even the park’s sole animal sculpture, of a creature called Wojtek the Bear, “who had done great things in the Second World War,” was a he-bear, not a she-bear.
Surely persons who menstruate deserved their own memorial, if a sodding bear with a dick did. But which persons who menstruate in particular? How about witches? They’d do.
They were all female (apart from the 15 percent who weren’t, who could just fuck off), they were the victims of a universally male judiciary (as were all the male criminals who were condemned to hang by the exact same “sexist” male judges too), and there were thousands of them who had been slaughtered down the years, thus enabling this all to be portrayed as a program of misogynistic femicide on a colossal scale, whether it was or was not.
The Witch of Bendor
Mitchell’s fellow “quarrelsome dame” in this quest is writer and educator Zoe Venditozzi, who says, “Anybody that argues there wasn’t a misogynistic, anti-women agenda [to old-time witch hunts] is mental and clearly a man.”
“Only someone in possession of a penis” would look at the 85 percent female figure for executed witches in medieval-era Scotland and not spy misogyny, Venditozzi argued. But surely in Nicola Sturgeon-era Scotland, “someone in possession of a penis” can actually be a woman, can’t they? At least legally. Arcane human-rights-law-derived Gender Recognition spells say they can, anyhow, which is how we end up with bizarre conjurations like a grown adult male murderer inhabiting a Scottish women’s prison pretending to be a tiny female baby, complete with state-supplied costume and nappy. What I want to know is which other biologically male inmate was pretending to breastfeed him?
Obviously, women really are still being oppressed in contemporary Scotland, then. Venditozzi certainly thinks so. Thanks to the continued influence of the patriarchy, “We’re maybe not still setting women on fire, but we’re losing some of the gains we’ve made in the last half a century,” she added.
Is she bravely criticizing trans rights here, and by implication Nicola Sturgeon? Unlikely. Looking it up, I find Zoe has written a novel involving a trans piano teacher, and once helped edit an affirming guide for queer and trans teens called Coming Out: Stories From LGBT Young People for Dundee & Angus College.
Claire Mitchell, meanwhile, has specifically compared her campaign to get dead witches pardoned to a previous successful queer crusade to overturn the convictions of gay men prosecuted for bumming one another in Britain’s past, when such games of hide-the-broomstick were still very much illegal.
Rowling in Their Own Filth
I don’t think either professional complainer with ovaries has specifically gone on the record in regards to their explicit position on trans rights. But approaching Nicola Sturgeon for help in achieving an apology or pardon for dead sorceresses in 2022, when controversy over her own dark Gender Recognition goetia was at its absolute inescapable height, would probably be something any true self-respecting “gender-critical feminist” would have been unlikely to have done.
One prominent Scotswoman famously not on the gender shifters’ side is J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter novels only ever feature female spell-casters wielding artificial handheld wands, not full-blown fleshy pink ones. And for this she has been treated by Scotland’s rainbow-captured left like a traitor to her entire sex, when more properly she is the precise reverse.
Ironically, the latter-day Isobel Gowdie that is Rowling specifically claims to have been treated like a witch. In 2020, the very year the Witches of Scotland campaign was hatched by a crybaby barrister catching a brief glimpse of a small granite bear penis in a park, Rowling posted a now-famous image of herself wearing a defiant T-shirt reading “THIS WITCH DOESN’T BURN,” unlike her books in the hands of hissy-fit Scottish queertards.
Indeed, J.K. has actually been burned as a witch in print, in the trash hit 2022 novel Manhunt, which is by a trans “woman” about trans “women”—ones who hunt TERFs like Rowling, ultimately roasting her alive in her own castle (the author seems to think she lives in one, much as he probably reckons Tolkien lived in a hobbit hole and Jules Verne in a spaceship).
Stake-Holder Politics
If true feminists prefer to take up the cause of a literal wronged present-day female witch, meanwhile, rather than a mere figurative one like Rowling, they could always side with Angela Howard, an aspirant enchantress ejected from a magical initiation course by the U.K. Pagan Federation earlier this year for refusing to agree with their leadership that “trans women are women, trans men are men, and all nonbinary genders are valid.”
On what grounds? Reportedly, the cult’s ancient gods had told them so: “The gods and spirits we work with teach us that transformation, identity, and embodiment are part of the spiritual path.” With “theological” attitudes that pathetically left-wing, the U.K. Pagan Federation should really join up with the Church of England.
Howard was in the middle of completing an online course to become a druidic bard, she says (enlightenment occurs electronically nowadays), when access to the necessary magical modules was suddenly and cruelly withdrawn from her. To lefty druids today, “Getafix” is evidently just another word for a penis removal operation, one probably performed with a golden sickle.
This unwarranted expulsion, Angela said, represented “a kind of spiritual witch hunt.” The wannabe witch-pardoners of the left are in a way quite correct, then: Wicca women in the West really are still being burned alive at the stake, even today. But by them, not the so-called “patriarchy.”
What a bunch of stupid witches.
The Week’s Most Halloween Becomes Obscene, Spanish Monsters Queer Your Teen, and Ghosts of the Gazan Mujahideen Headlines
HARDON PARDON?
It’s Halloween later this week, and President Trump has been doing his best to scare the sweet bejaysus out of everybody sentient a few days early. Not content with pranking Gov. Gavin Newsom by having the Marines launch a live shell over Interstate 5 in California, causing debris to rain down on electorally disposable left-wing motorists below, he also decided to put the willies up the nation’s entire female population by teasing the possible pardon and early release of P. Diddy.
Currently serving a fifty-month term for violating the Mann Act (which, if you’re not legally literate, basically means violating a Womann), Diddy is reportedly going to be set free to knock on YOUR daughter’s door this Oct. 31, yelling, “Trick or treat?”—whichever answer she gives, the end result will be the same, his candle rammed inside her pumpkin.
Diddy Kong being unleashed from his cage just in time for Halloween is appropriate, as the jailhouse rapper is purportedly a long-term satanist, at least according to one of his old producers at Bad Boy Records, who claims to have witnessed Diddy performing dark “ritualistic” rituals (are there any other kind?) in honor of Lucifer during his time in the music studio. The end result, says the producer, who has since found Christ as an evangelical pastor, was that he himself ended up being possessed by a hell-demon and “making beats” for four days and four nights straight. Is he sure Diddy hadn’t just laced his drinks with Viagra?
At first, this whole yarn sounds most unlikely. Then you learn the producer’s name: Rod Long. Whatever could have caused Diddy to have hired the fellow and then introduced him to Cassie with a title like that?
DISABLED LOUVRE
If Diddy isn’t pardoned by Trump this week, he could easily manage to escape regardless, simply via bribing the authorities to appoint as his prison’s new governor Dominique Buffin, Director of Security at the Louvre in Paris, from which antique crown jewels worth 88m euros were just stolen. Critics have since been lining up to rubbish the museum’s piss-poor security measures, but France’s Culture Minister, Rachida Dati, denies anything was amiss at all, making the following strange claim during a parliamentary inquiry into the theft:
“Have the Louvre’s security precautions failed? No, they have not failed. That is a fact. The security measures worked.”
How can the security measures have “worked” if the jewels were stolen? Because Dominique Buffin was a diversity hire given her role on the sole grounds of her chromosomes rather than her actual relevant skills. Hence, the main point of the Louvre’s current security regime was not to provide any security at all, besides job security for yet another identitarian public-sector nonentity.
The main flaw under Buffoon’s nouvelle régime was that the security camera supposed to be monitoring the jewels was installed facing the wrong way, like British artillery during the Fall of Singapore. You’d think guards monitoring security-cam footage would have realized the difference between shots of golden crowns and diamond tiaras and pointless 24-hour close-ups of the outside door of the nearest disabled toilets, but evidently not.
Thieves gained access to the building by the simple means of donning hi-viz jackets and pretending to be workmen. Ironically, hi-viz jackets are now so absurdly ubiquitous in public spaces that they effectively make you invisible.
For the spooky season, American partygoers are predicted to adopt a “Halloween Heist” costume trend in tribute to the affair, involving comedy cartoon striped burglar outfits and big bags marked “SWAG,” draped over with a luminous construction worker vest. The sad thing is, if trick-or-treaters walked up to Dominique Buffin’s Louvre dressed exactly like that, she’d probably just let them in to steal the Mona Lisa.
HALALOWEEN HAUNTINGS
Over in the even more hag-ridden U.K., politicians prefer to facilitate shameless robbery direct from the state via a different means: funding mad PhD projects with stolen taxpayer money. Nadia Yahlom is an anti-Zionist Jewish PhD shyster, recently caught cutting down yellow ribbons in support of Israeli prisoners held hostage by Hamas. Subsequent inquiry revealed how she likes to spend her days: investigating jihadi ghosts in Gaza on the public dime.
Her Halloween-friendly PhD project is called “Ghosts of the Al-Ghaib: A Participatory Audio-Visual Exploration of Haunting in Palestine,” which Yahlom describes like this:
Working closely with those who have experienced haunting, supernatural sightings and/or spirit possession, I will be using film, sound, photography and other mixed media to explore how djinn (ghosts, spirits, witches, demons and other forces of the Al-Ghaib or “unseen” world) are experienced, embodied and described by different Palestinian communities…. It examines what form hauntings take in Palestine and how these apparitions are linked to political volatility, violence, (post)colonialism and intergenerational trauma.
The average bloodsucking PhD parasite gets £20,000 a year over 3.5 years, so about £70,000 from actual useful workers like nurses and prostitutes. Funding ultimately comes from the U.K.’s Department for Science, Technology and Innovation—even when it involves hunting ghosts and genies. (The same body also funds feminist witches and “queer tarot readers” to make special magical altars intended to “support the manifestation of new forms of protests, resistance and reimagining,” albeit not protests against needless government overspending on dogshit.)
To be fair, there are quite a lot of dead people in Gaza at the moment, so plenty of ghosts for Yahlom to choose from. Another Palestinian spook-hunter, Ahmad Nabil, explains what the region’s uncanny djinn look like: “You can’t see their facial features because cone-like hats are covering everything but a little bit of the eyes.” Are you sure they weren’t just women in burkas, Ahmad?
Others, meanwhile, looked like this: “They were floating and did not have any hands.” Had they been convicted of theft by the local Hamas Sharia Justice Department? The U.K.’s own Anti-Government Waste Department should do the exact same thing to Nadia Yahlom someday.
WANKENSTEIN’S MONSTERS
Following revelation of Yahlom’s pointless PhD, British media dug up other ludicrous examples of students who needed their hands chopped off. Particularly pathetic was the University of Manchester’s decision to facilitate an aspirant Professor Wankenstein to spend three months masturbating to cartoon images of underage boys in Japanese manga comic books, then make detailed notes upon the matter. As the candidate put it in his subsequent post-ejaculation write-up, trying to make it all sound like “science”:
After each masturbation session I would write down my thoughts and feelings—a kind of critical self-reflection—in a notebook, as well as details about which material I had used, where I had done it, at what time, and for how long.
That’s the kind of thing we were all hoping for from the Epstein Files, but sadly it was not to be.
Even worse was the study “The Europe That Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000,” which set out to answer “How the growing transnational circulation of gay male erotica and porn magazines in postwar Europe contributed to the development of a shared identity and sense of belonging among European gay men,” a question so very important the taxpayer handed over £841,830 for it. How many porn mags was the author buying, exactly? You can get it all free on the internet.
The full-blown professor responsible, a Spanish-sounding limp-wrist named Joao Florencio, doesn’t even live in the U.K., but Sweden, from where he is also commissioned by Whitehall to give seminal web seminars about persons called “ass-pigs,” open-all-hours homosexuals who enjoy what he describes as “relentless condomless penetrations, stretching of the rectal sphincter, and exchanges of all kinds of bodily fluids (sperm, urine, semen, etc).” Where’s the ectoplasm? And then, just to add insult to injury, he expects ordinary citizens to pay for all his consequent necessary antiretrovirals, anal bleaching, and rectal prolapse surgery, too.
Further analysis found evidence of useless PhD studies into everything from “single-player gay adult video games” to “queer pirates.” Here’s a fun game: Which single example from the list below is the sole one found not to be in receipt of shedloads of undeserved cash from the U.K. Department for Science, Technology and Innovation?
(a) Cruising the Cut: Lesbian Histories of Mobility and the Queer Futures of Boat-Dwelling on the U.K.’s Canals
(b) Queer Whores: Embodied Knowledge and Performance Practices in Sex Work (Including Stripping, Sploshing, Pole Dance, and Fetish Wrestling)
(c) Crafting Counter-Hegemony: Using Pieces of White Porcelain to Interrogate Constructed Ideologies of Whiteness and Empire
(d) Listening to the 85%: Exploring How Recording and Listening to Underwater Sounds Can Increase Environmental Awareness on the Isle of Man
(e) Buzzers for Bedwetters: Incontinence and the Urinary Body in Britain, 1870–1970
(f) Promising Potential Methods for Treating Eye-Cancer in Children: Avenues of Best
Prolonging Sight and Alleviating Infant Pain and Suffering
If you didn’t answer “(f)” immediately, you really haven’t been paying much attention, ass-pig.
THE LIE OF SAURON
Yet more monstrous nonacademic non-study leaked out from England’s University of Nottingham this week, where a new literature course called “Decolonizing Tolkien” is now being taught, arguing that the orcs and goblins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy are racist caricatures of black, brown, and Muslim people, on account of their dark skin, by comparison to the nice, clean, pale features of the heroic Nordic-type elves, hobbits, and wizards who slay them: What a LotR crap.
The dusky minions of the Dark Lord Sauron can’t have been Akbars in disguise; the books famously feature Two Towers, and the orcs don’t knock them down by hijacking and then crashing large passenger dragons into them even the once. To be fair, they are all born from mud, though.
The academic Tolkien shite in this respect is a black gentleman named Dr. Onyeka Nubia (the rough white equivalent would be Sir Arthur the Aryan, so perhaps this is an assumed name?), whose online profile tells us that “Dr. Onyeka’s research began in 1993–94 after finishing university and without the backing of other academics,” possibly because he had just made all his “research” up. A revisionist Afrocentric historian, Nubia argues Britain has always been full of melanated orcs like himself, it’s just that their presence there was so incredibly common that nobody at the time even thought it worth mentioning the fact in any contemporary historic records or documents.
Think about it: Do the Venerable Bede or Geoffrey of Monmouth specifically mention any spiders being present during the Battle of Hastings or the crowning of King Alfred? No? But there were still some spiders living in England at the time, though, weren’t there? It was exactly the same with Nigerians, says Nubia, and you can’t possibly prove otherwise.
Things could have been worse. If Professor Joao Florencio had been handed over another free £841,830 for exploring a racially loaded Lord of the Rings, he would have just bent over in front of P. Diddy and asked to become his new ass-pig.
SPANISH PRACTICES AT THE BUMMER CAMP
A mother shopping at budget European supermarket chain Lidl was shocked this week to find that a novelty neon glow-in-the-dark Halloween sign that was supposed to read “Trick or Treat” had been foolishly fashioned using an ambiguous font style appearing to make it read “Fuck or Treat” instead, which sounds like the title of yet another taxpayer-funded U.K. PhD project being pursued by a Spanish queer.
Actually, it was probably intended for use at a genuinely scary Spanish summer camp for children that has just been exposed as an alleged front for perverts. The camp was supposed to be all about introducing kids to the age-old traditions of Basque culture, but really aimed to initiate them into the even older cultural practices of Sodom and Gomorrah instead.
Since the camp was run by demented ass-pig queer ideologues who later boasted, “We want to faggotize your children (since we usually don’t have any children of our own),” parents did not initially realize the organizers’ suspected chosen method of exposing their offspring to Basque culture was to expose them to their own adult genitalia lightly covered over in cellophane, something passed off as an innocent “reenactment of Basque mythology.” Which bit? The Legend of Pedro the Big Gay Pedo? The Day Michael Jackson Visited Toledo?
Reportedly, once locked inside, hungry children were cut off from the outside world, leaving them no option but to suck the adults’ toes in return for snacks, or having to “pull their trousers down to receive food.” Which hole were they being fed through? Alternative sustenance was thankfully available: A big image of a woman with her legs spread was on display, with the caption “Enjoy your meal!” underneath.
Furthermore, kids were made to share showers with both adults and other children of all 94,763 possible admixtures of genders and sexes, while very camp commandants wandered around naked smoking weed, and mirrors were covered over to help teens develop “body positivity” (or possibly just to disguise that the adults were all sex vampires). When confronted with evidence of such eldritch evil, the incubi and succubi in charge merely called complaints “transphobic.” As in all the best horror movies, from Frankenstein to Pan’s Labyrinth, it turned out the worst monsters of all were really the humans all along.
Hopefully, long prison sentences will now await all involved—leaving the camp in need of a new leader. If P. Diddy really does get out of jail this week, it sounds right up his street.
Like most human beings, I have my moments of envy (some of us have more than mere moments, of course, and make of envy the ruling passion of their lives). When I see the vast salaries paid to chief executives, the thought, or perhaps I should say emotion, crosses my mind that it is wrong that they should earn so much more than I. Am I not as hardworking, as talented, as they, albeit in my own way? By what token, therefore, are they paid many multiples of what I earn? No increased effort of mine will close the gap significantly.
Even in my envious moments, I make distinctions. I don’t begrudge the vast incomes of those who founded and still direct large enterprises. My fleeting envy, which I control by taking thought, is directed against those who have never founded anything, but who have merely climbed up an existent commercial hierarchy until they are in a position to loot shareholders’ funds. Have they not a fiduciary duty to pay themselves the smallest amount for which they would be willing to do the same work? Would a man paid $50 million a year really refuse to do the same work for $49 million? The $1 million difference amounts to theft and should be returned to the shareholders or other workers in the company.
The lowest sum for which such executives would be willing to work no doubt depends on their comparison with others in similar positions to themselves. If Buggins earns $50 million, then Muggins will consider himself naturally entitled to the same compensation (as it is now often called, presumably compensation for a life of sacrifice of something that the compensated would rather have done instead).
Here the lizard brain, which is programmed to detect menace, malfeasance, and malevolence everywhere because the world is a fundamentally hostile place and such a brain is therefore essential to our survival, begins to think of conspiracy or at least of cartel, in this case of the chief executive class. Surely the chief executive class has somehow gotten together and worked out a means to pay itself as much as possible, or as much as it could get away with, rather as we suspect pharmaceutical companies decide their prices for similar products? And the chief executive class can get away with a lot because, as James Burnham pointed out more than eighty years ago, the owners of a large joint stock enterprise are, through dispersal of ownership, no longer in charge or control of it, as are, say, the owners of a small private company.
It is true that chief executives have large responsibilities, and that their bad decisions can ruin companies (though rarely themselves). But many other persons in their companies have highly responsible jobs, and it is impossible to determine the true proportion of total responsibility for the success or failure of a company that people have. If a chief executive earns 350 times more than the average employee of his company, is he really 350 times as responsible as the average employee?
A workman is worthy of his hire, but is the going price for his hire always just or fair? A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay is a common cry, but how are fairness and justice to be decided, by whom, by what criteria, and by what institutions, and how enforced? If one tries to decide these questions, one soon enters a philosophical labyrinth from which there is no exit. It soon becomes apparent that the imposition of supposedly rational scales of remuneration would be worse than any unfairness or injustice that results from the present system—if “system” is quite the word for it.
An effort to think in detail of what a supposedly just system would be, what it would entail, and what its practical effects would likely be helps very quickly to dampen the ardor of one’s envy. In other words, contrary to what complete irrationalists might believe, our emotions are, or at least can be, if we make the effort, affected and even controlled by taking thought.
All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative, which is no doubt true; but the natural habit of comparing one’s situation with that of other people is also to a degree controllable by taking thought. If I grow envious over the superior wealth of others, which I think unmerited by comparison with my own merits, can I not stop to think in absolute rather than in comparative terms? Except by comparison with someone else’s situation, is not my own situation perfectly satisfactory, or as perfectly satisfactory as any sublunary situation ever is? I am not poor, I am not oppressed, I am not even more than mildly unhealthy. I eat at my pleasure, I suffer no avoidable discomfort, and cutting my coat according to my cloth entails no great hardship, unless not being able to afford certain sumptuary items that I might buy if I were richer counts as great hardship, which I think it does not. After all, the number of people who have absolutely no financial constraints on the fulfillment of their every material wish is vanishingly small, and I am not even sure that such lack of constraint is in any case altogether conducive to greater contentment. The pleasure of possession is often increased by the sacrifice needed to achieve it.
All this is a complicated way of asserting a moral cliché, that one should count one’s blessings. But as with all principles regarding the conduct of human existence, there’s a caveat. There is something divine in discontent, too, for without it we should not strive very hard to achieve anything. In other words, we should count our blessings, but only in moderation.
Ideally, our discontent should not derive from envy; it should derive from the desire to achieve something intrinsically worth achieving, but which we have not yet achieved. However, counsels of perfection are useless, and envy—of power, wealth, attractiveness—is an ineradicable component of human nature. Like appetite, it can be controlled but not eliminated; like Shiva, it is both creator and destroyer.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).
Having given up on the notion that diversity is a strength under the crushing weight of the evidence, The New York Times is now pushing the idea that America has always been a diverse nation that loved diversity, and practically made diversity a founding principle, and they would even have added “diversity” to Mount Rushmore if only they could find someone, ideally a lesbian woman of color, with that surname.
For example, the preamble to the Constitution states that its purpose is “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” — obviously meaning their own descendants, as well as the descendants of Congolese, Bangladeshis and Cameroonians.
To prove that America was teeming with diversity from its very beginning, a Times op-ed by documentary producer Leighton Woodhouse describes the bitter enmity in Colonial Pennsylvania among the Quakers (from north-central England), the English Anglicans (from all over England) and the Scots-Irish (from Scottish Lowlands and Northern England).
Not only were the original Americans from an area of the world smaller than Kansas, but as DNA tests now prove, the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have nearly identical genes — as noted by Times science reporter Nicholas Wade in 2007. (And by the way, everybody hated the Quakers.)
But suppose we didn’t notice something fishy about Woodhouse trying to pass off blinding homogeneity as “diversity.”
Neighbors and families feud. Heard of the Hatfields and McCoys?
The last two Jews in Afghanistan hated one another’s guts. Their animosity subsided only when one died of old age. Therefore, by Woodhouse’s lights, there’s no such thing as “Jewish.” It’s a polyglot ethnicity, encompassing Papua New Guineans, Djibutians, Uighurs — anybody.
Similarly, the fact that Iranians in Los Angeles have been holding competing demonstrations almost weekly since both sides of the 1979 Iranian revolution relocated there means “Iranian” is an unidentifiable ink blot. Mexican drug cartels, Korean boy bands, the North Pole’s Eskimos — they’re all part of the beautiful mosaic that makes up an Iranian.
America’s wild diversity is reflected in its founding document. Every signatory to the Declaration of Independence was British or Dutch. So were the vast majority of American presidents, every single one of whom was at least part English. All but one declaration signer and two presidents have been Protestant.
So Woodhouse almost had us fooled with his We’ve Always Had Cannibals and Child Rapists op-ed.
While it’s totally believable that Times readers have no concept of American history from 1620 to 1970, it’s hard to believe they also have no idea what’s happening right now. Only someone who willfully stuck his head up his butt could fail to notice that recent immigrants aren’t exactly blending.
News you would not encounter during America’s first 350 years:
“Maryland Man [Kenyan immigrant] Arrested After Admitting to Killing, Eating Roommate” — U.S. News and World Report. (It was the “eating” that disqualified the suspect for cashless bail.)
“ICE arrests illegal immigrant accused of child rape in Framingham, Massachusetts” — WCVB Channel 5, Boston. (This story has become so common it’s on Page 27 of the paper, next to the horoscopes.)
“Undocumented migrant accused of molesting 5-year-old in her own home” — WPTV News, Florida. (Sorry, but this is what happens when you give 5-year-olds their own homes.)
“Trial [of Iraqi immigrant Faleh Hassan Almaleki] Begins in Arizona ‘Honor Killing’ Case” — Associated Press. (After being arrested, the suspect surrendered his firearm and his “World’s Greatest Dad” hoodie.)
“Texas dad Yaser Said found guilty of fatally shooting teen daughters in ‘honor killings'” — Associated Press. (Defendant said to the quintessential “Texas dad.”)
“Attempted ‘Honor Killing’ Trial: Ihsan Ali Learns His Fate” — COURT TV. (In addition to getting the silent treatment from his daughter.)
“Santeria Ritual Sacrificial Practices in Miami” — Florida International University. (Suspects said to be not particularly devout, more like Christmas and Easter santeros.)
“Animal cruelty investigation underway after bag with 3 mutilated birds found in Putnam County …” — ABC7, New York. (No word yet on how the suspects got to Putnam County from Springfield, Ohio.)
“A ring of beheaded chicken carcasses was found in a Southwest Miami-Dade intersection” — CBS Miami. (Fed up with chicken carcasses in public spaces, Hispanic neighbors are demanding more severed heads.)
“Animal sacrifices on the rise in Queens with chickens, pigs being tortured in ‘twisted’ rituals” — New York Post. (Bodies were transported to nearby veterinary clinic, then pronounced “delicious on arrival.”)
“ICE, federal partners arrest more than 1,400 illegal aliens in Massachusetts … including murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational criminal gangs” — DHS Press Release. (After the arrests, witnesses say several Harvard dorms were all but deserted.)
“ICE Arrests the Worst of the Worst Including Pedophiles, Child Abusers, and Sexual Predators” — DHS Press Release. (Meanwhile, local elementary schools brace for a shortage of “drag queen story hour” readers.)
“Bombshell DHS sweep in Minneapolis-St. Paul finds 50% of immigrants had committed immigration fraud, with credit card fraud and burglaries … chief among [their other] crimes” — New York Post. (Also, 12% of arrestees claimed to be married to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.)
“[Moldovan national] wanted on international warrant facing fraud charges, caught with 131 bogus credit cards in Indiana” — CBS Chicago. (Ironically, the suspect used his one phone call to contact customer support in Bangladesh.)
“Somali market owners charged with [$10 million] food stamp fraud” — Columbus Dispatch. (Police said their first clue that something wasn’t right was the words “Somali market owners.”)
“Five Men from Somalia Arrested on Charges of Forgery, Credit Card Fraud, Drugs in Ohio” — Hiiraan Online. (Somali market owner agrees to testify against them in exchange for a lighter sentence.)
Even the “good” Ellis Island immigrants brought us anarchism, communism, organized crime, bootlegging and worship of a foreign pope, among other nonindigenous American customs — i.e., not those of the foundational Dutch and British.
It took us 100 years to assimilate them, and they were Europeans, not drastically different from the people who founded and created our country. Now liberals want us to import entire nations of cannibals, child molesters, thieves and voodoo practitioners.
Perhaps those attributes could be scribbled in crayon on the Statue of Liberty poem by Emma Lazarus — one of those Ellis Island immigrants.
Lady Annabel Goldsmith left us last week at the age of 91. During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would have been reversed. She would have been Darcy, with Mark Birley and Sir James Goldsmith as Elizabeth Bennett. Both her husbands were wellborn but of inferior birth to her. I met her about sixty years ago, and she was as aristocratic as they come, and as down-to-earth as her puckish irreverence would take her. A quick smirk and a raised eyebrow would turn into something prurient and funny.
Her two great loves were the two men she married and her six children. Her bad luck was that both men were terrific womanizers. Good women—and she was among the best—are known to forgive womanizers because womanizers tend to adore, understand, and worship their wives. I happen to be speaking from experience.
I had the sad duty to write about the death of her firstborn, Rupert, off the African coast back in 1986 in The Spectator. She wrote me a thank-you note that was heartrending in its beauty and elegance. Rupert was the best-looking young man in England, and he and I became close buddies after I threatened him with a baseball bat. “Never come within fifty yards while I’m with a girl,” I warned him. He wrote and sent me books when I was staying with the Queen 41 years ago. I had the same problem with Zac many years later. Another great looker-I could not find the bat so I offered money.
Annabel’s temperament was almost oriental in its outward impassivity. Civility and basic respect for others were a must with her, but she was subtly provocative and had a wicked sense of humor. Wonderfully mischievous, she enjoyed revving it up when the Austro-Australian Princess Michael would complain about me at Annabel’s annual summer party. Annabel would listen to the Austrian, then seek me out, come very close, and whisper: “The Kents simply adore you.”
Her summer party, by the way, was the last of its kind. Annabel’s bash in her large and magnificent garden in Richmond mixed a few brainy types, journalists of the better kind, her young brood and their friends, a couple of dukes, playboys and politicians, and a rogue or two. Annabel had Lady Thatcher and Sir Dennis as regulars, and she made sure no lefty type embarrassed them. Not that there were many lefties around her house. She made a special effort for Lady Thatcher’s dinner neighbors; they had to be intelligent above all. The food and drink were as good as they get, and in all the years I attended I cannot remember a single one that was rained out.
Asked by her son Robin what exactly Marie-Christine of Kent had against Taki, her reply was curt and to the point: “Does the ham like the knife?” She did better with Claus von Bulow, who was an old friend of hers before he was accused of trying to murder his rich wife in America. Claus was found not guilty on appeal. Old jokes by John Aspinall and Jimmy Goldsmith about Claus had surfaced, and the know-nothing press was writing terrible things about him. Claus’ godfather was not Goering, and he was certainly not a necrophile. “Aspers” had spread that particular tale because some had found Claus rather boring, so he “decided to give him some exotic glamour.” Oh well.
Gossip writers, especially left-wing ones, are notoriously petty and know very little, and took some of the outrageous jokes seriously. Poor Claus had been run out of New York because of his conduct during the trial—he had moved his mistress into his wife’s Fifth Avenue apartment, shocking the Yanks. Once back in London, not every door was wide-open to him. But Annabel’s certainly was. He was an old friend. I was there when she gave a coming-home party for him. It was a hot sunny day, we were all in our summer whites, and Claus was beaming as Annabel had her arm entwined with his, taking him around and introducing him. What he didn’t see was her other arm-index finger, to be exact—pointing to a large yellow pee spot on Claus’ trousers, in case anyone had missed it. It was a scene out of a Marx Brothers movie.
Annabel tended to befriend men and women who had many redeeming vices. So-called bad boys and naughty girls were never snubbed by her, but harsh, aggressive women spouting stupidities were not her cup of tea. Today’s so-called society hostesses suffer from an unquenchable craving for publicity. Annabel was the exact opposite.
Her grandest love and passion were her children, a rare trait among women of her class, but perhaps, like Rick in Casablanca, I’ve been misinformed. Robin, Jane, Zac, Jemima, and Ben will now face life without her. They will find it tough, but time will help.
What remains for me are those whispered memories of our youth and good times. She stood out in this heedless society of ours.
Goodbye, dear Annabel, and as we Greeks say, may the earth that covers you be soft.
