We in the States are enduring the utter chaos and absurdity of the Democratic Party’s new health care scheme. One of its few bright spots is the opportunity it provides for amusement at the sheer madness of it all. At City Journal, Dalrymple writes a short piece about one aspect of the new regulation: that all new insurance policies must provide coverage for addiction and mental disorders, which are to be treated as physical diseases. This is rather foolish, given that they are not like physical diseases at all.

At FrontPageMag, Dalrymple reviews The Black Book of the American Left, a new collection of essays as well as a partial autobiography by the indispensable David Horowitz:

Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.

Read it here

Dalrymple finds a safety notice in a Christmas cracker:

What crushing responsibility pulling a Christmas cracker now confers upon modern man!

Who would read an eighteenth-century book called The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life…, especially when it recommends taking “two spoonfuls of syrup of snails” every morning? Well, that’s just the sort of thing for Dalrymple. At least the book recommends against “broth of vipers”.

Dalrymple in National Review (purchase required)

Dalrymple discusses an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on prevention of childhood obesity:

The article is a typical example of what might be called risk factor medicine. A disease or disorder is found to be associated statistically with some independent variable which may or may not be causally related to that disease or disorder, so that doctors hope that by reducing the prevalence of the risk factor in some way they will also reduce the prevalence of the disease or disorder. Since many of the risk factors are behavioral rather than biological, and there is nothing as difficult to change as human behavior, doctors’ hopes are often frustrated.

At the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple calls attention to the two most obvious characteristics of Paul Krugman’s writings: nonsense and incivility.

Mr Krugman’s argument is not the argument in favor of labor market rigidity as above, however. He is what one might call a slice-of-cake man, where an economy is a cake to be sliced rather than a dynamic organism to be nurtured, and where supply and demand can be managed without reference to price. There may be cruder economic ideas, but I don’t know what they are.

I knew Dalrymple would have a piece on Nelson Mandela’s passing, and he does. It appears at Taki’s Magazine. I’m only disappointed we are so tardy in posting it. He praises Mandela for helping the country to avoid interracial violence but also downplays Mandela’s impact, arguing that he essentially went along with the rest of the ANC and that he benefited from an event he did not want, the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the end, he was in the right place at the right time and “was a nice old gentleman”.

The can’t-miss part of this piece is Dalrymple’s anecdote about his interview with ANC leader Joe Slovo which deserves its own separate post in good time.

Read it here

On a TV outside a shop in South Korea, a small crowd watches one of North Korea’s dictators being led away to execution by North Korea’s other dictators. The cell phone ad in the corner seems out of place:

We are astonished at the insensitivity of the Georgians and early Victorians in turning public executions into festive occasions: but at least they had the courage of their insensitivity. We, on the other hand, notice nothing about ourselves. A man is killed; a phone is advertised. It is all one to us.

In the Express, Dalrymple comes out strongly in favor of David Cameron’s recent decision to double Britain’s public funding on research into dementia:

There are millions of people in this country who face the slow agony of dementia, either in themselves or in the people close to them. Indeed, so prevalent is the disease that most of us will come into close contact with it and will have to deal with it at some time or other in our lives… There are few diseases whose prevention or cure would relieve more human suffering.

Read it here

Praise for celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who recently testified under oath that she had not “a drug problem” but “a life problem”:

I am glad that she stuck to her guns, for to have admitted that she had ‘a drug problem’ would have been to imply that the problem was with the drug rather than with the person taking it (or them). And this would have been to get everything exactly the wrong way round. It is not the drug that takes the person but the person that takes the drug. Therefore Nigella Lawson was being absolutely honest…

Read the whole thing