The Thing With Feathers

This is the latest installment in the series “Dymphna’s Greatest Hits”. It was originally published on March 11, 2005. As previously, some of the embedded links no longer work.

The Saga of Mukhtar Mai, Continued

This week, the Canadian High Commissioner in Pakistan, Ms. Margaret Huber, has given Rs2.1 million to Mukhtar Mai for the continuation of her educational work in Punjab.

This follows the public outcry, going on for three years now, against the brutal gang rape of this village woman who was set up to take the retribution required for her young brother’s alleged dishonorable behavior. The whole ugly story was a set piece, a frame-up to distract attention from the fact that her brother was the first victim in this story: he was kidnapped and taken to a field to be sodomized by a group of men from a powerful family in his village

On June 22, 2002, three Mastoi men kidnapped Abdul Shakur, a tall boy 11 or 12 years of age. They took him to a sugar cane field. Then they took turns sodomizing him. “They asked me if I would tell my family,” Abdul recalled. “When I said yes, they beat me up. Then they locked me up in a room.”

Subsequently, Abdul was joined in the room by a young woman, Salma Naseen, from the Mastoi family. Then the police were summoned and the boy was accused by his sodomizers of having an affair with Salma. He was arrested and jailed.

It is at this point that Mukhtar Mai becomes the next victim. When the powerful Mastoi clan convened the village council to address their grievance, the outcome was never in doubt. The sentence in the case could have been the forced marriage of Abdul and Salma, but the Mastoi were hardly likely to agree to the union of one of their clan with a member of a poorer and less prominent family. Instead, Mukhtar was dragged from the village to the field where the tribal council had convened. In retribution for her brother’s ‘crime’ she was ordered to be raped by four men.

For an hour and a half, as other Mastoi people “danced in jubilation,” Abdul Khaliq and three other men raped her. Then Mukhtaran Mai was forced, before perhaps 300 people, to walk home naked.

Her father covered her with a shawl and took her in.

Usually, a woman thus humiliated simply commits suicide. There is no life left for her in her village after such an experience. Mai considered doing just that, and then…and then, in some mysterious transformation that can occur in the midst of devastation, Mai decided instead to fight back. She brought charges against the men. She stood firm against the death threats. The ostracism? What had she to lose after her long, naked walk home?

The higher court in Lahore overturned the convictions of the men who raped her, a legal decision which threatens her safety. But three years into this battle, Mai is too strong to kill. And the Islamofascists know it. Money has poured in from all over the world. She has used it to start schools, have them wired for electricity, buy textbooks and supplies, and begin to look for ways to make her projects self-sustaining.

Stories of courageous transcendence are universally compelling. Ms. Mai embodies the magic of transformation: a small woman in a remote village in Punjab is gang-raped. Just like so many before her, she is used and disposed of. Phoenix-like, she rises from the ashes of her humiliation and sets out to tell the world. Her story is proof that there is more to the news than simply bad news; there is also a desperate and overwhelming need for stories of personal redemption.

This case will go on to the Supreme Court. Given the outcry in all of Pakistan, the rapists may yet be sentenced. This excerpt from The Daily Times (Pakistan) illuminates the changing of the guard:

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No Need to Turn Off the Lights and Don’t Bother Closing the Door

Below is the second in a series of Dymphna’s Greatest Hits. There will be another one next Monday.

Note: This essay is fourteen years old, so most of the external links no longer work.

No Need to Turn Off the Lights and Don’t Bother Closing the Door

by Dymphna
Originally Published June 27, 2005

The Pharisees are in the driver’s seat of the Mini Cooper that has become the Anglican Church in England. Following the map printed up for them by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network, the C. of E. is busy driving over the cliff. How could anyone with a lick of common sense believe one word coming from a “Peace and Justice” committee? Did these people sleep through the birth and (Deo gratias) death of Communism? Do they not see the bright neon socialist signage in “Peace” or “Justice” —good Lord, never mind the double whammy PEACE and JUSTICE.

Does the Anglican Communion in England have any idea how irrelevant it is? The Incredible Shrinking Church has just shriveled another centimeter or two. It’s sooo bad it’s embarrassing. You could go read the report here (it’s a PDF. You’ll need version 7), but why bother? You can recite the p.c. lines from memory by now: poor Palestinians, bad Jews. Let’s take our money away from the bad Jews and give it to the deserving Palestinians who only want peace but the Jews are too mean to let them have it. Blah. Blah.

Well, we knew it was coming; this was just a matter of waiting for the final mainstream sheep farm to sell out. The only surprise is that it took so long. Here’s Melanie Phillips’ take on this “defining moment” —

The APJN report is full of the most inflammatory lies, libels and distortions about Israel — and the fact that the amended resolution that was finally passed only welcomed part of it (a weaselly caveat to provide deniability) does not alter the fact that it provided the ammunition for a poisonous onslaught against Israel. The document uncritically reproduced the Arab propaganda version of Israel’s history and the present circumstances of the Middle East conflict, presenting the Arab perpetrators of genocidal mass murder as victims and their real victims as oppressors merely for trying to defend themselves. But then what can one expect of a report which concludes by referring to ‘the honor of meeting the President of the Palestinian Authority, the late Yasser Arafat, who so warmly welcomed us in what turned out to be one of his last days among us’?

A warm welcome from the late pederast himself. How charming. Arafat was the father of terrorism, a diabolical Communist and one of the most truly evil people of his generation, so of course the Anglican Peace and Justice Network loved him. What’s not to love? Do you suppose they have a position paper on Castro, too? Another honorable sweetie-pie.

There are not words to describe the moral revulsion the name Arafat engenders. You could perhaps see why the naïve could be taken in by the man-in-the-street Palestinian: they’ve had years to work on and perfect their royal sense of resentful entitlement. And you might even decide to overlook the festering sores on a culture which produces suicide bombers who want to attack the hospital that treated them. But information on Arafat is readily available; his shameful history is there for the reading. One has to be willfully blind to refuse to acknowledge the depth and breadth of his malevolent iniquity.

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Let Me Tell You Something, President Bush

Note from the Baron: The following post is the first of a series of old posts by Dymphna, which I’m calling “Dymphna’s Greatest Hits”. I’ll post one every Monday unless something intervenes. They’ll be published under Dymphna’s byline and using her GoV UserID, which will otherwise no longer be seen.

The following post is from December 2005, and is from her series called “I Could Scream”. That was the title of her blog on Wretchard’s site from a few months before this one was posted at GoV. Unfortunately, Wretchard eventually had to close his umbrella site, and as far as I know all her posts from there were lost.

In those days she carried about 80% of the load here at Gates of Vienna, sometimes posting three or four times a day. In recent years she had been despondent about her declining abilities — it was hard for her to focus well enough to write like she used to. In 2004 and 2005 she was a powerhouse.

Let Me Tell You Something, President Bush

by Dymphna
Originally published on December 27, 2005

I wasn’t going to post on Nour Miyati’s suffering again. I swore I wouldn’t. Maybe I thought if I didn’t put up anything, then it would all just go away. However, being an ostrich has real limits. And if we aren’t at least willing to bear witness to another’s agony, then do we have the right to speak at all?

What the Saudis have done, what they have permitted to be done, to Ms. Miyati is so inhumane that it almost beggars description.

Let’s begin with some background from previous posts.

First of all, this woman didn’t go to the authorities — her owner dropped her bruised and battered body at the hospital, denying any responsibility for her condition:

A 25-year-old maid who came to Saudi Arabia as a guest worker will leave behind most of her fingers and toes and part of her right foot when she is repatriated to Indonesia. In addition to the amputations, necessitated by gangrene, several teeth had been knocked out and she is in danger of losing an eye as a result of severe beatings.

That was back in April of this year. I warned then that she would be under the aegis of sharia law, and thus her life — being a mere female, Muslim or not — wasn’t worth much. I also noted that the jerks who did this to her would be let go. Prince (at the time) Abdullah, busy doing a quick cover-your-a** move, stuck his big nose into it, insisting that she get good care and transferring her to the lad-de-dah King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. Abdullah even sent the Health Minister over to check on her. They both declared her experience at the hands of her employers “disgusting”.

That was then. In May, things started to go sideways. All of a sudden, it wasn’t the employers’ fault. Or if it was, they were only guilty of neglect. But the maid, she was really the guilty party. That woman had the nerve to accuse her owners employers of mistreating her. Therefore she had violated the law by making false allegations. Here are my remarks in May, followed by the hideously criminal medical report from a bunch of Saudi butchers with M.D. after their names:

Brutalization is not just a family affair in Saudi Arabia. The state is a willing and eager partner. And it can twist arms with a mighty force, especially arms with hands whose fingers are missing. On the one hand, there is the medical committee’s report:

A medical committee set up by Riyadh Governor from a number of specialists from the Ministry of Health concluded that the maid suffered wounds and bruises to her body, “suggesting she has been the victim of violence and that the gangrene could not have been caused as a direct result of beating and that it probably was caused by an inherent disease suffered by the patient.”

Her “inherent disease” is simply the grinding poverty which drove her to seek employment far from home. She wound up in Hell. The “inherent disease” of the Saud tribe is corrupt, terminally evil governance. These spawn of Stalin are unspeakable.

Now, to bring you up to date, in case you’ve managed to avoid this until now. It’s hardly “news” anymore, since it’s been floating around the blogosphere for awhile. The Religious Policeman (whose blog is dedicated “In Memory of the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter”) had a few sardonic things to say about how judges arrive at their numerology when it comes to handing down lashings for false allegations:

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Mark’s Latest Mailbox

In his inimitable style, Mark Steyn looks at where the world is going and why. He sorts it all, beginning with the tradition of seat-warmers.

Enjoy:

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See also his essay on the anniversary (today) of the Grenfell Towers conflagration. His details make it come alive again, especially his observations about the Queen’s visit to the site.

Conspiracy Theories? We Have Them A-Plenty

Ever since J. Christian Adams, a career Department of Justice attorney, resigned in 2010 (during Obama’s first term) due to his own unwillingness to turn a blind eye to Eric Holder’s highly charged racialist program within the DOJ, I’ve been wondering when the corruption would be called to account. But it never happened. It never happens in the Democrat Deep State…unless, like Sidney Powell, you know where to look.

No, I didn’t know of her either, but I sure plan to follow what she has to say as this plotting is unloaded on a sickened American electorate. Can They manage to kill off the first capable president we’ve had in more than a generation??

This is a woman after Diana West’s own heart. Mine, too. She not only knows American jurisprudence, but she knows where (some of) the bodies are buried.

From her book page on Amazon from 2014 [five years in, and it’s still selling]:

Sidney Powell was an Assistant United States Attorney in three judicial districts under nine United States Attorneys from both political parties. She represented the United States in 350 criminal appeals and represented private parties in another 150, all resulting in more than 180 published decisions. She was the youngest Assistant U.S. Attorney when she began practicing. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the past president of the Bar Association for the Fifth Federal Circuit and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is a book she prayed she would never have to write. It’s written in the style of a legal thriller to be enjoyable and understandable to non-lawyers, but it is the true, behind-the-scenes insider perspective on major litigation during the last decade. If you think you know the truth about what happened to Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Enron, and former United States Senator Ted Stevens, think again. You won’t know the truth until you read LICENSED TO LIE. It tells a very human story that every informed citizen, lawyer, and judge should know. The foreword to the book is written by Judge Alex Kozinski, one of the most brilliant legal minds in the country. He is the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but he wrote the foreword in his personal capacity.

She also writes for the New York Observer…and her opinion pieces have received over 16,000 facebook posts, countless tweets, and other methods of “sharing.” […] They include 1. All the President’s Muses 2. Holder Protects Corrupt Prosecutors 3. War on Wall Street 4. Meet Emmet Sullivan (the IRS Judge who scheduled a hearing for July 10); 5. One Two Punch (IRS faces Two Federal Judges), and others. Her news articles and opinion pieces may be found here. These outstanding stories have been picked up multiple times by the Drudge Report, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart, Fox News, Greta Van Susternen, and countless other blogs and reporters. She is the only published authority on federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, former White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, and now Mueller team special prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and others.

She has been featured on Fox News, the CATO INSTITUTE (broadcast on C-Span), NewsMax TV, and countless radio shows. She has spoken on the topic of prosecutorial misconduct for two federal judicial conferences and numerous bar associations. Her website is here.

This book has over nine hundred customer reviews, overwhelmingly five-star, and they have continued to accrue over the five years since the book came out.

[NOTE: This post has been moldering in my Drafts since the video was brand-new. I’m sorry it’s no longer au courant, but my health (or lack thereof) interfered. While not breaking news, the main elements in this story will continue to drag their sadsack selves through the purgatory of American national politics. If I find any further Sidney Powell commentary, I’ll post it for you.]

President Trump Visits That Sceptered Isle…

Long may it reign.

With Winston Churchill’s bust back in the White House, one prays it is not too late to celebrate our friendship.

For our British friends, a favorite quote from Richard II, describing your kingdom:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,–This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Near the end of the play, Shakespeare has Richard sigh, “I wasted time, now time doth waste me…”

God save the Queen and keep her country safe from Charles.

Why Big Brudder Will Never Thrive in America

These guys are “Right Angle” – Bill Whittle of Eject, Eject; Stephen Green, aka Vodka Pundit; and Scott Ott, better known to old bloggers as Scrapple Face. They’ve all been around for a long time.

This tripartite discussion is interesting as anthropology if you’re not from here. On the other hand, it’s got a familiar ring if you are from around here. They’re right: this is where the dinky hall monitor ends up in adulthood and he’s still a dink.

We need a laugh, so enjoy.

The Sad Reality of Memorial Day 2019

It’s back to work tomorrow after a weekend of Remembering with cook-outs and family gatherings.

As the wrappings around the treacheries of World War II begin to rot and drop away, the emerging truths are difficult for the average person to comprehend, much less metabolize. When you know our government policy was to leave behind living, breathing men from three generations to the mercies of Communist butchers, it is hard to memorialize what remains. Or perhaps it is easier to turn away from the despair…

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Yesterday, the nationwide group, Rolling Thunder, remembered kinetically these MIAs and POWs -more than 85,000 souls – still honoring them on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. This year was to have been the last ride through Washington because of the expense and red tape, but President Trump and some anonymous donors have stepped in to say they will facilitate the run in 2020.

I have mirrored Diana West’s account of these losses; the cynical and barbaric disappearance of our young, then-living American POWs who were disappeared by Communists is truly tragic. And make no mistake: it has indeed been Communism that is responsible for this bleeding loss. As she says in her post,

Ever since I delved into the darkest corners of our past and came up with American Betrayal, this season of national holidays and observances, including VE-Day on May 8 (but really May 7), Memorial Day, D-Day, for my own family, the day in July my dad was wounded at the Battle of St Lo, and the anniversary of Hiroshima on August 15, has become an unnerving time of year. That’s because this annual procession of national holidays and observances serves to bury in red, white and blue bunting the amalgam of Big Lies — “court history,” error and disinformation — which Americans are instructed to hold to be as sacred as truth. As the late M. Stanton Evans put it here, all of that Establishment-history or consensus-history is “pretty much bogus.”

It is this bogus history that hides a cascade of lies and treachery, including communist and Soviet influence inside our highest government circles and even war councils, all of which becomes difficult for the American patriot to fathom, when the conditioned behavior is to look the other way at Old Glory passing by and salute.

Thanks to Stefan Molyneux, I had the opportunity to discuss what is the greatest American betrayal of all, the betrayal of our own fighting men, our POWs/MIAs who never came home because they were abandoned by the US government in successive wars and proxy wars against Moscow and Beijing. This includes the story of the American GIs in POW camps who, as Nazi Germany crumbled, came under Soviet control … forever.

The US government continues to pretend these American sons never existed, but, of all days, We, the People, should remember them on Memorial Day.

Here’s her eloquent dialogue with Stephan Molyneux:

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She doesn’t mention the sudden death of General Patton, that staunch anti-Communist who was a driving force in the attempt to rescue the World War II Allied POWs held in Germany; I doubt he had any illusions as to their fate if the Russians got there first. But he died suddenly in a motor accident, and the Russians did get there first.

As Diana mentions, this also happened to the doughboys being held in World War I [welcome to the 20th century]. Yes, it really does go that far back. Our government can be forgiven its ignorance about Soviet Russia and world Communism at that point, but not in later wars.

Here’s her latest book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Only a hundred pages long, or you can get the audio or Kindle version. I read the e-book and recommend it for her detailed discoveries about the ways Communism still infects our body politic at the highest levels.

Meanwhile, read her earlier post, from Friday, in which she delineates Roosevelt’s betrayal, leaving thousands of G.I.s to be disappeared into Stalin’s gulag. The photo is a stunner.

A New Conservatism: Nationalist, Populist and Converging

Dr. Turley sums up the realignments that even the New York Times is admitting. From India to Australia to Japan, a form of “Trumpism” is coming into being. And the EU is trembling as it feels the earth moving under its old globalist certainties:

That doesn’t mean the realignments don’t hurt. Some people will be discombobulated; change is inevitable and rocky. Those who can see their loss as an opportunity will flourish. Others, like PM May in Great Britain, could be looking at the end.

With these changes, Gates of Vienna needs to update its categories. No longer is it enough to have the “EU” without naming its constituent nation-states. We will probably have to list “globalism” as a thing, even as it shrinks into something less…well, less global.

Milo Speaks Truth to the Powerless

The fellow who went through the trouble of re-creating this event says:

The livestream of this was censored and, with it, the original sound of Milo’s mic was lost. I have reconstructed the sound from multiple sources and used my own video copy of the event.

Erste Konferenz der Freien Medien im Bundestag (The first conference on the free media in Bundestag) was an event organized by the AfD fraction in Berlin on May 11, 2019.

Support this channel (gib shekels)!

Partial text of the speech is below the fold (hat tip WRSA).

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Police Terrorise Tommy Robinson Again

Paul Weston’s fisking of the Greater Manchester Thugs Police is dictionary-perfect.

What precisely is the point of the useless royal eunuchs who pretend to preside over a country and yet permit lawlessness not only to exist but to prevail? This on-going mess has turned me into an anti-monarchist. There’s not enough pomp and circumstance to cover this Greek tragedy in what has become a third-world, unsafe, and bitter green isle.

Paul is more eloquent than I in describing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the police enforcers:

May God have mercy on them all.

China: Steve Bannon Is a Demon? A Dragon? Whatev.

Talking to Fox from France, Bannon points out that the Chinese attack on him, is aimed at a now-private citizen, not a politician. Is he intended to serve as a stand-in for Trump, who scares them more?

[Don’t forget that Mr. Bannon is one of the leading lights in the action group, The Present Danger: China. That title deliberately echoes the period of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, when conservatives fought against Russia’s attempt at world hegemony while many on the left played footsie with the Kremlin.

Now the players have changed: China’s questionable deals with Joe Biden and family are being ignored in the MSM while Steve Bannon’s continuing depth charges shake China’s façade.]

So here’s the latest salvo, served and returned:

What is of great interest is Bannon’s decision to work with the nationalist movement in Europe. He was certainly doing just that job as a leading strategist in the Trump campaign; when he came on board, the tone and focus became much more oriented toward our country qua economic nation. He convinced Trump to ignore the polls and focus on the people.

But previous to that, ever since the unexpected death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, it would appear that Mr. Bannon began to lose whatever heart he had for team sports. That loss probably made his work in the Oval Office, post-election, feel confining. It was a fiery exit.

What he is doing in Europe now is strategic assessments for a number of nationalist teams without having to belong to any one of them. His work is vital and important; he knows European history (the man has been devouring books for decades) and he has mastered the geo-strategic goals of the major world players. That’s why China is bashing him so hard. They badly need to damage him before he spoils their game utterly.

Meanwhile, Bannon is attempting to support a refuge in Italy for the future of Judeo-Christian culture. This video from German media tries to undo the work of Trisulti. Given the continued rise of economic populism in the smaller countries of Europe, all left-wing media repetitions of “ultra-conservative”, “obsessive cults of identity”, etc, ad nauseam, is spitting in the wind of reality. Globalism is on the wane.

You will be hard put to find a reasonable media explanation for Bannon. I couldn’t find nary a one through three pages of searches. Acres of vitriol and venom, though. He could be even more demonized than Trump…may he enjoy his dragon costume. Thanks to Fox for giving him a small window from which to speak.

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Conservative Tree House hat tip for the Fox video.

And Yet Another Symptom…

Once more Tucker Carlson’s people go out and about to film the homeless human wreckage on the West Coast while he adds commentary. I like the way he stays off the screen for the most part.

[I was under the impression he was a California native, but it turns out Carlson was born and raised in the D.C. area. Back in November, his home was attacked by a bunch of speech suppressors while his wife was there, alone. The Antifa mob managed to break the front door before police arrived.]

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This time he opens with California’s boat people but then moves quickly on to Eugene, Oregon, where he finds some hope.

Eugene, a smaller city, has a college, making it a liberal bastion. But it also has a group of Vincent de Paul workers who have set up tents for the homeless. Unlike my experience with the Salvation Army – a hard-working group in Charlottesville – the Vincent de Paul workers take in the drunks and drugged out. That’s quite impressive and unusual. Like Jordan Peterson’s advice on how to take charge of your life, the workers do require that beds be made and personal gear be stored away. The large tents they use appear to be old military surplus equipment.

I wish they’d had a longer interview. When I was first placed in an orphanage, the whole routine was healing in the long run. And it included making our beds each morning. The experience made me love routine. This all-too-brief interview left me wanting to know more about the program. [For some reason, I keep thinking of an early poem of the Baron’s titled The Decay of the Social Fabric in Tidewater VA…can’t find it in my files, though.]

For those who are interested, here’s more information on St. Vinnie’s, as they call it.

Another Symptom of Our Growing Social Problem

This is the third in a series by Tucker Carlson on homelessness. He is focusing on the west coast, but the social evil is ubiquitous. [I searched in vain for the second part of the series yesterday. If anyone finds it, please leave a link in the comments.]

In my experience with the homeless, the issues he mentions – mental illness and broken families – are all too true. The roots of those causes are deep and difficult to unravel. For those I worked with who were using only their prescribed medications, family shunning was common and long-standing.

Very often mental illnesses don’t show up until mid-or-late adolescence. When it occurs, families are not prepared to deal with the attendant out-of-control behavior; their child has become a strange monster. Send a teenager to his room? He’ll break up the house. Impulsive, destructive behavior escalates as the mental problems increase. Unprepared families have no idea how to cope. For intact families not riven with their own unresolved issues, things can be turned around but it’s a painful process.

One grassroots group, NAMI, has been particularly effective in resourcing help. This is not a government bureaucracy:

NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.

What started as a small group of families gathered around a kitchen table in 1979 has blossomed into the nation’s leading voice on mental health. Today, we are an association of more than 500 local affiliates who work in your community to raise awareness and provide support and education that was not previously available to those in need.

I found our local group and wanted to attend so I could figure out how to effectively help my daughter. She died of a methadone overdose the day I’d chosen for my first visit. I never had the heart to go back.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, there are unexpected consequences. One is
contaminated seafood:

As more and more American communities grapple with opioid addiction, the human toll of the epidemic has grown in both scope and severity. And now, scientists at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that drug’s impact has literally flowed downstream to affect marine life, as well.

Specifically, they used mussels as a barometer of pollution in the waters off Seattle and discovered that oxycodone is now present enough in the marine environment there for shellfish to test positive.

The surge in homelessness has many causes. The hollowing out of the American family is one. And the loss of manufacturing jobs which led eventually to the opioid crisis is another. When meaning is lost, people will find substitutes.

I hope Tucker Carlson builds on what he learns about homelessness in America. And I also hope he addresses, however briefly, the surge in the “retired” population, many of whom live in their vans or cars, moving from job to job.

It’s not just a California/west coast problem.