One thing is often overlooked in the debate over whether Britain should leave the EU: doing so might improve the country, but it won’t solve the underlying problems.

In the end Brexit is almost a distraction from the real problems of British society. Its partisans argue that the European Union is destroying our traditions, but the British people have long shown a less than robust attachment to them, anyway. There was not so much as a sigh, let alone a protest, when the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, changed the constitution on a personal whim.

The notion of the free-born Englishman has long since been of no application. The average Briton wants to be a ward of the state and regrets only that the state is not generous enough. The threats to Britain come mostly from Britain, not from the European Union.

The test of a new “treatment” for drug addicts reported in the New England Journal of Medicine seems to assume the answer is yes, but Dalrymple notes the study has a glaring flaw:

As far as I can tell, the control group received no sham injection, so that the members of both the experimental and control groups knew exactly to which group they had been assigned, as did the experimenters assessing the results. In a ‘condition’ (if that is what heroin addiction is) in which psychology plays so large a part, this is no very slight criticism or caveat. It vitiates the whole experiment.

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Dalrymple writes at PJMedia on a “refreshingly unusual” paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, unusual in that it not only establishes a correlative relationship between “lower levels of triglycerides in the blood” and a “lower prevalence of coronary artery disease” but identifies a causative relationship as well.

Dalrymple writes at Taki’s Magazine on one of his favorite places to visit, Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where one encounters the graves of all manner of interesting people:

There are Iranian communists, Palestinian terrorists, Armenian writers in exile, Spanish aristocrats, and—of special resonance for me—the consul general and chargé d’affaires of Liberia in Haiti, both countries for which I have a weakness, a man with the wonderful name of Dupré Barbancourt.

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This piece is a short review in The New Criterion of The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal, which Dalrymple describes as “a literary macédoine, as it were, of the history of porcelain, autobiography, travelogue, and philosophy”. Dalrymple credits the book for opening the reader’s eyes to a fascinating artistic medium about which most people, himself included, are ignorant. Still, he says, he would have retained more of the medium’s history had the book “been set out in a less fragmented and personal way than it is here, where it is recounted like a pilgrimage to the sources of de Waal’s art”.

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In this piece at New English Review, Dalrymple thinks back to the places he visited during his extensive travels as a young man. Some of them seemed to hold out the hope of a fairy-tale life:

…a pleasant reverie of a life without politics and ideology, a cultured utopia in fact, where there is an abundance of beauty and taste rather than of things, where people treat each other with ceremonial courtesy rather than in business-like fashion at best, and even the smallest and most ordinary of things are infused with a concern for aesthetics. A more fully-human life, in fact.

All those places have “since descended into chaos and massacre”. But of course, he knew even at the time that such a life does not really exist.

If euthanasia is so efficacious nowadays (one Swiss company seems successful at providing swift and painless death), why then are there so many examples of botched executions? Is it just normal government incomptenence or something more sinister? Says Dalrymple:

I am inclined to the former interpretation. But in my more paranoid moments, I sometimes wonder whether the incompetence of state agents is more than just incompetence and tips over into sabotage.

Read the whole piece at the Library of Law and Liberty

Dalrymple writes at City Journal on the El Bakraoui brothers, the Belgian terrorists who lived lives of crime long before they committed their atrocities. Their lenient treatment by the Belgian criminal justice system reveals its sheer frivolity:

Given that so many Islamist terrorists graduate seamlessly to politico-religious crime from common delinquency, one can say with tolerable certainty that one of the root causes of such terrorism in Europe is liberal penology, with its view that punishment is therapy and prisons are hospitals for the temporarily disturbed or naughty.

Read the piece here