The high-profile arrest, in Dubai, of a spectacularly murderous drug lord based in the Netherlands, prompts a BBC article which touches on a disturbing possibility: Liberal drug laws (which UD, as an old hippie, tends to go for) attract the cartels. “… 59% of [the Dutch believe] the Netherlands [is] now a narco-state.”

[A] report commissioned by the mayor or Amsterdam in August described the capital as a “Valhalla for drugs criminals .” … The Netherlands has in a sense created the perfect environment for the drugs trade to flourish. With its extensive transport network, its lenient drug laws and penalties, and its proximity to a number of lucrative markets, it is an obvious hub for the global narcotics flow.

Just wondering what my beloved Nabokov would say this morning.

UD‘s county – Montgomery – barely holds on to its top twenty richest counties in the country ranking.

Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
Baby you don’t know shit
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
The way you use your mom
You’re the sub she’s dom

Otherwise you’ll bomb

Watch her shake her poms
It’s the new rom-com

You’ll move to Panmunjom

Until the shitstorm calms

Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
Mama buy your credits now
Legacy admit, got my eyes on you
The way you boogie all night
To your heart’s delight

While Mama makes it right

With her online sleight

The Court of Appeal upholds Quebec’s secularism law.

[A]s an image, the blacked-out face of a woman, the alleged obscenity of a woman’s face and hair which must apparently be hidden from view to please God, is not conducive to the post-religious value of democratic equality and democratic engagement.

Writers can only be so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed…

We have lousy memories. Proust had a lousy memory. (There is no “little patch of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft.”). Memory is a liar. It’s a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions. The stories make cumulative lies – or, give us a break, conjecture – of our lives…

Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing.

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The spectacular writer and art critic Peter Schjeldahl thinks about life as he approaches death.

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On meaning and nothing, see also John Cheever:

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

Lat year, our fraternity system killed a student; this year it only almost killed a student. WE ARE GETTING SO GOOD! This tape is ready for this year’s ad campaign. Watch our ranking soar!!

The Magic Kingdom: Where a violent demented man pursues a fine living as an Islamic preacher who throws shoes at women on the street if they’re only wearing a hijab and abaya.

“If a woman reveals her face and allows men to smell her perfume, she is an adulteress,” he spoke at the top of his lungs.

Ladies of the world! Saudi Arabia is currently making a big tourism push! Remember to pack black gloves, black tights, black flats, a hijab, an abaya, a chador, a burkini, a niqab, a burqa, Moccasin Joe, and a helmet.

… I love the photo of the amphorae.

All they do is hang out, fuck, and demonstrate against the government. They’re even draft dodgers! It’s all so ‘sixties.

… having finally written a letter to that school’s president about their dirty sports programs (tennis, basketball, and particularly basketball), they would have done better to band together a few years ago and try everything to keep basketball player recruiter Kevin Broadus from being hired.

The New York Times refers to his time at SUNY Binghamton as the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” Dude gets his own era and ever so serious Georgetown University not only scoops him up, but does a whole 1984 on his corrupt record and simply expunges it from his university About page!

Where do you think the sort of players who land your school in the scandal sheets come from? They come from recruiters like Broadus, whose apparent indifference to the danger some recruits might pose to the campus community was fully known to Georgetown when they hired him.

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PS: Don’t forget that Georgetown’s scandal plate runneth over: They are revoking Varsity Blues student degrees as well.

And if this particular Kenyan culture celebrates bloodying primary schoolgirls’ genitalia in the public square (the little ones, after all, “handed themselves voluntarily to the circumcisers”) it’s not the business of the state to try to stop it, even if Kenya happens to ban FGM.

There was some violence in one town as police broke up the fun; six people were arrested, and the authorities claim that when they identify the parents of the two slashed girls, they too will be arrested.

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No surprise that there will be resistance to anti-FGM efforts. You’re interfering in two of humanity’s most basic, most beloved activities:

1. Destroying women.
2. Making a living destroying women. (Well-compensated FGM butchers stood at the ramparts during this rebellion.)

[He] moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.

This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it. Johnson now has a mandate to enact this new Tory alignment, and he will be far more competent than Trump at it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich… [If Boris succeeds,] he will have found a new formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup.

The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state… If Johnson succeeds, he’ll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public spending on the poor and on those who are “just about managing”; increase taxes on the very rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke; and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support). That’s where the GOP will have to go if they want to recover from becoming an authoritarian cult.

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Also: An interview before the election with Nimco Ali.