The Soros of Comedy

 

Photo via Yiddish Book Center.

On a hunch, I asked Dr. Google to find out for me if National Review had published a memorial tribute to the late Norman Lear. No, apparently, the closest they came was this, by their then TV critic Kyle Smith (he moved on to Wall Street Journal last year), from 2019, when the great producer was a still-lively 97, reviewing an ABC experimental restaging of a couple of old episodes, one from All in the Family and one from The Jeffersons:

Edith is a simpleton, Archie is a bigot, and Mike and Gloria are mouthpieces for grindingly dull liberals like the show’s creator, Norman Lear. Occasionally the show would allow Archie to score a point, which was the only time things were a bit surprising, hence a bit funny. Far from being “brave,” All in the Family was mostly content to tread water, returning to the same tropes week after week.

Interestingly, Smith liked, or claimed to like, The Jeffersons better, but not mentioning Lear had a role in that one too:

Elon Musk's Great Replacement

I'll try to post a real post here very soon. Meanwhile this.

Poor Bret, Foiled Again

Drawing by Caitlin Mavilia.

My unpopular opinion: Mr. Bret Stephens is actually making a sincere and conscious effort to not be a racist in this column ("The Secrets of Jewish Genius") where he explains why the thinking of Ashkenazi Jews is so much more original than other people: because he specifically says, and none of the critics appears to have noticed, that he's not claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people, or that it's their (reportedly) genetically transmitted higher IQs that do the trick, or rather not interested in claiming it, because he has a more interesting reason (in his self-estimation) for claiming it, depending on how you work your way through the maze of the key paragraphs:

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

But the “Jews are smart” explanation obscures more than it illuminates. Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.

Let's start with the linked paper, which Stephens cites as evidence that Jews of Central and Eastern European origin really are in fact smarter than other people, but is about something quite different, a hypothetical explanation of the purported difference (as measured by IQ) claiming Jews literally bred for management, as Kiryn Haslinger explained it in Scientific American at the time:

Literary Corner: Rodolfo

Extracted from Olivia Nuzzi's remarkable report on brunch with the president's personal attorney, at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurant in The Mark Hotel on Madison at 77th (he ordered an omelet with extra-crispy bacon and a Bloody Mary, which is going to run you something over 50 bucks and not what I'd be ordering at those prices, I'll tell you right now):

Song of George Soros

by Rudolph Giuliani

Don’t tell me
I’m anti-Semitic
if I oppose him.
Soros is hardly a Jew. 

I’m more of a Jew than Soros is.
I probably know more about —
he doesn’t go to church,

he doesn’t go to religion —
synagogue. He doesn’t
belong to a synagogue,
he doesn’t support Israel,
he’s an enemy of Israel. 

He’s elected eight anarchist
DA’s in the United States.
He’s a horrible human being.

It's not anti-Semitic for a Catholic to hate a Jew if he disagrees with the Jew's theology?

I was just telling somebody the other day that atheism is the most Jewish thing there is. Atheism was probably invented by Jews, given that the poet calls it out in Psalm 14 (probably composed in the early 6th century B.C.E., if I'm reading this right), calling atheists "fools", but not takfiring them as non-Jewish. One of the things Rudy knows is that "church" is the wrong word, as you see, but he doesn't know it quite fast enough.

Another one of the most Jewish things there are is not supporting Israel, especially the current government at any moment in the country's history, at which at least half the population, Jewish and Arab and Druze alike, is normally violently enraged, but general opposition to the whole Zionist idea is a Jewish thing as well across the political spectrum, from the ultra-conservative Haredim who regard it as blasphemy, since the Messiah hasn't shown up yet, to the socialists and anarchists who see fascism in the concept of a state founded exclusively for one ethnic-religious community, a "Jewish state" as if a country could have a circumcision and bar mitzvah.

Oh right, anarchism is pretty Jewish too, though Americans often think of it as primarily Italian. Soros really did spend $3 million on district attorney races in 2016—seven, not eight, but as you can imagine, they were probably not anarchists, since if you're opposed to a legal system that guarantees property rights you won't be able to do the job at all in the normal way, but

African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial.

according to Politico's excellent piece by Scott Bland on the effort. Ideas that have more recently been adopted by such anarchical figures as the Texas House delegation and—oh, Donald Trump. Who's not an anarchist but a nihilist, and probably not Jewish in any sense, but you get the picture. Happy Hanukkah!

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

For the Record: Just to make sure it's clear

No, exactly not like the pope. Judaism is among the most democratic of religions. "Two Jews, three opinions" is how it works. The chief rabbi in UK represents only Ashkenazi Orthodox, to begin with, now probably outnumbered by the Haredim so not even a majority.

— Gastroblyansky 🦃 (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2019

This still works in Russia, where the Chief Rabbi, an ultra-orthodox Chabad member, is a Putin tool https://t.co/5u8eonjVli

— Gastroblyansky 🦃 (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2019

Grift for the Mill

Haunted by the story of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is where the Justice Department's immigration policy is administered from, and thus the employer of the nation's 400 immigration judges, and sends all its employees a near-daily bloggy compilation of memos and news clippings and the like:

But on Monday, tucked between stories from The Washington Post and a public radio station, the briefing included a summary of and a link to a blog post from what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “Hate Group”: Vdare.com, a frequent platform for white nationalists espousing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Vdare post singles out immigration judges by name, uses their photos and refers to them with an anti-Semitic slur. 

Coming the same week, as Reis Thebault notes at the Washington Post, as Trump scolded American Jews for being "disloyal" when they vote for Democrats and singled out the fanatical Jew-hater Henry Ford for praise, and a growing recognition that the White House may have an anti-Semitism problem. As the president of the judges' union, Ashley Tabbador, explained in a letter to the EOIR director James McHenry, the post was creating a hostile work environment:

Scapegoating the Collective

Update: Welcome Cowpokes from Mike's--Thanks Batocchio!

Via The Root.

Well hello, it's Chris Buskirk of the ultranationalist blog "American Greatness" (who's increasingly getting normalized on NPR's Morning Edition in the slot of representative conservative as they cast around more and more for Trump supporter journalists who sound as if they're educated) showing up on Good Friday on the New York Times op-ed page (last time was Guy Fawkes Day) with a piece denouncing the way

members of America’s ruling class, especially those in the media, the academy and government, have operated on one central, unquestioned assumption: orange man bad. This stifling orthodoxy led to a blind, counterfactual faith in the theory that Mr. Trump had somehow colluded with “the Russians” (never well defined) to win the election.

Actually it was the word "collusion" that was never well defined (which is why William Barr quoted Trump's use of it, "There was no collusion," at the press appearance Thursday morning, because it's not meaningful enough to count as an outright lie and he knew Trump would enjoy seeing it on his TV). "The Russians" is pretty simply defined as the government of federation president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the military intelligence service GRU, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, and a handful of supportive billionaire boyars dependent on Putin, with names like Prigozhin, Agalarov, and Deripaska, and the "faith" was that the Russian perceptions and the Trump campaign expectations, as the Mueller team would eventually summarize them—

For the Record: The End of Omar

Under pressure of extreme irritation from some Twitter guy I assembled a lengthier set of thoughts starting with Representative Ilhan Omar and carrying it somewhere I haven't entirely been before. It probably duplicates some stuff I've said before, especially in the earlier bits, but I'd like to keep it here for the record in this format.

Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar complained when Irish Catholic Kevin McCarthy pressured her to show "allegiance" to Israel. She said nothing about Jews and "dual allegiance". It is time to stop misinterpreting this story. https://t.co/FZef1EiwJk

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

That's all Democrats have to do is apologize, not the same for Conservatives

— Maria Gillette (@mariapa1776) March 16, 2019

Do you have a reading disability? Relevant text highlighted in screenshot: pic.twitter.com/VBfARYUkq4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

She and Tlaib were put under particular pressure, threatened by McCarthy. No Jews are singled out as having "dual loyalty". pic.twitter.com/CkDJ9BWeeo

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

I probably should have realized at this point that I wasn't going to be able to make him understand what I was talking about.

Dual Loyalty Postscript

Also Kevin McCarthy is the most classic Elders-of-Zion believer in the House. Him accusing anybody of anti-Semitism is like Joe McCarthy calling somebody a drunk.

The fact that Kevin McCarthy is allowed to comment on and criticize Ilhan Omar with a straight face is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/jfrDHVWwF0

— the fair contract ratifier (@pblest) March 6, 2019

I'd completely forgotten about that ghastly meme of the three Jewish billionaires (Steyer's only half-Jewish, like me) threatening to buy the entire US political system which you could only save by sending Kevin McCarthy money, #MAGA.

And he's never apologized, unlike Ilhan Omar, merely denied:

Asked by Fox News Channel’s Harris Faulkner about his October tweet, McCarthy responded, “Well, that had nothing to do about faith; that was about Republicans versus Democrats.”

"Nothing to do about faith"! "Faith"! That smarmy word. No indeed, it was about race. Speaker Pelosi, please reprimand this man.

Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:

Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.

After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.

Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing:

Baby

I got this screenshot after the tweet itself had been deleted, for obvious reasons: the doctor hadn't really meant to argue that fabricating quotations is OK as long as one's intentions are genuine. So I don't actually know what it's referring back to. But I think it's such a precise representation of the intellectual spirit of the Trumpery, in which Anthony Scaramucci can tell us that Trump deserves special regard because he's not an ordinary liar but lies "intentionally", to troll the left. 

It was the Hebrew Immigrants Aid Society, I realize, that met up with Aleksey Yastreblyansky, may his memory be a blessing, in Galveston early in the 20th century, a couple of years after he survived the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, and suggested that he might want to call himself Alec Bloom instead, to make himself a little more digestible for American society. In family mythology in the second and third generations, we just called them "German Jews", that is representatives of an earlier wave of immigration, with a slightly resentful sense of how they didn't trust their eastern European brethren to be wholly civilized ("My zeydi spoke more languages than your zeydi!"), but it was definitely HIAS, and I'm making peace with them, with effect from right now. They were right about Yastreblyansky, how would anybody even have spelled it? And they were right 20 or 30 years ago when they began broadening the scope of their work to include distressed and abandoned and persecuted people from everywhere, of every religion, putting the Passover commandments into the most powerful possible effect. They are the best.

Sunday morning

Tree of Life Holocaust memorial at the Great Synagogue in Budapest, via.

Donald just found out about Dinesh D'Souza and his theory that Donald is basically the same as Abraham Lincoln, and he's intrigued:

Very interesting! https://t.co/ZmSA4v5fKi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2018

Interesting! He's got that way of watching his own TV show from the real outside. He's a student of himself, but he always retains the ability to be surprised by the remarkable things he does, when an eminent critic points it out.

Dinesh is kind of like the Frederick Douglass of our time, in the sense that he's doing an amazing job and getting recognized more and more, and has understood that Lincoln is just like Trump because he owned the libs and drove them nuts.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 28, 2018

Jew Hear That?

Jerusalem Post.

I had Dr. Google looking for "Trump shekel -Eric" to filter out references to the current scandal. Most of the results were about a commemorative coin, a half-shekel, being issued in a grift operation of the "nascent Sanhedrin and the Mikdash (Temple) Educational Center", with Emperor Trump's profile laid over that of Cyrus the Great, getting rendered into Caesar as it were, but then there was that really useful bit on the 2016 rallies. I'll get back to it at the end.

The current scandal being, you know, this one:

"Don't you think people look through the fact that you can write a sensational, nonsense book, CNN will definitely have you on there because they love to trash the president," Eric Trump said on Wednesday's "Fox and Friends," the network's morning show, when asked about Woodward's book. 

"It will mean you sell three extra books, you make three extra shekels," Eric Trump added. "Is that really where we are? I think people see through this." (CBS)

Jew know what I mean?

12th-century German painting of two Jews for which I'm not finding a helpful source. Is the one on the right a little on the sleepy-eyed side?

I don't know if everybody's heard about the theory that Trump calling an NBC newscaster "Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd" is an anti-Semitic slur. Like a lot of people, I'd never heard of such a thing, but this thread from Stonekettle (who had also never heard of such a thing) made me take it seriously:

I did not know "sleepy eyes" was an anti-Semitic slur.

When I was told such here on Twitter, I went and looked it up.

It is. And it's much worse than that.
1/ https://t.co/jZmMplHrtE

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) April 22, 2018

Dinesh D'Souza, of course, didn't believe a word of it. Show me some evidence! I couldn't resist the challenge and gave it about five minutes of Dr. Google:

Hey, some of my best friends are lizard people

I really do live in a bubble—when I've seen references online to the shape-shifting lizards running the US government, I thought they were snarking, but it seems there is a guy who makes a living hustling this theory for real, and 12 million Americans who believe him. You still wondering why Trump got 63 million votes in November? I'm guessing he's a shape-shifting frog, and folks see him as their only defense against the reptilians.

A funny thing happened to the international Jewish conspiracy led by liberal financier George Soros, the shape-shifting lizards who constitute the world's elite, including the British royal family (who knew?), and the pallid, hook-nosed, grasping members of the Bavarian Illuminati and their Masonic associates: they started focusing their immense and evil power through former Israeli Labor prime minister Ehud Barak and attorney Eldad Yaniv, head of the anti-corruption Eretz Hadasha party,  on....

With friends like these, who needs anti-Semites? Er, that is...

Bibi in the Dark Tower, via The Forward (and another take on how somebody could be an anti-Semite and a Zionist at the same time).

Great piece in Tuesday's Times by Omri Boehm ("Liberal Zionism in the age of Trump"), in the philosophical opinions rubric, dealing with the current strangeness in the American Jewish community, with regard to US and Israeli politics, where most vote Democrat here and feel increasingly alienated with the far-right government there and illegal settlers in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, while much of the traditional leadership continues to treat the Israeli right as sacrosanct and beyond criticism and finds itself increasingly accommodating to the incoming Trump administration, even to its anti-Semitic associations in the person of Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, who has consorted with Nazi-inspired denizens of the so-called "alt-right" in his professional life as chairman of Breitbart News and has been reported (including in a sworn deposition) to have made vicious remarks about Jews in his private life. And who was invited to the Zionist Association of America annual gala in late November, to meet Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett and ambassador to US Danny Danon.

Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. “It is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their politics,” he pointed out.

In the end Bannon skipped the party, showing that he may indeed be uncomfortable socializing with Jews in quantity, just as he told his ex-wife (apologists claim he was afraid of the protesters out in front of the Grand Hyatt, but Phil Weiss is pretty sure he was just blowing the Jews off).

It's funny how Dershowitz seems to have misspoken there; surely he meant "unless you disagree with their politics". Or Israeli politics in particular, since that is what he habitually does, throwing the term freely at those who oppose Likud policy, and refusing to use it on anti-Semites like Bannon who agree with Likud.

Ugh

Vladimir Vladimirovich has a secret. It's probably not the one he's telling everybody. Photo by Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti via Mosaic.

This is really unpleasant: in today's edition of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's annual Tsarist audience ceremony, where he entertains questions from the Russian masses for a four-hour session, he was asked about the Panama Papers showing some of the extensive shell company holdings of his closest friends, including the official VVP best friend cellist Sergei Roldugin, who seems to have become a secret billionaire by sheer magic, and replied, according to Sputnik Deutschland (the German equivalent to RT in the US, an outlet for Russian international propaganda),

Uns ist bekannt, dass sich dort Mitarbeiter offizieller amerikanischer Institutionen befinden. Wo ist der Bericht zum ersten Mal erschienen? In der Süddeutschen Zeitung, die zu einer Medienholding gehört. Und diese Medienholding gehört zum amerikanischen Finanzunternehmen Goldman Sachs, also sind überall die Ohren des Auftraggebers zu sehen, die noch nicht einmal rot werden. Und wir brauchen keine Reue von ihnen erwarten. Sie werden so weitermachen“, so der russische Staatschef.

("We are aware that there are employees of official American institutions on that. Where did the report appear first? In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which belongs to a media holding company. And this holding company belongs to the American finance company Goldman Sachs, so you can see the ears of the bosses everywhere in this, and those ears are not even turning red. And we don't have to expect them to show any remorse, they'll keep doing the same thing," said the Russian head of state.)

It's true that Goldman is an important investor in SZ's owner Südwestdeutsche Medien Holding, since 2007, obviously not true that the firm runs the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

What I hear there (I just caught the story on BBC, but the only written version I could find quickly was this one) is something I hear a lot in Russian propaganda, particularly in the accusations against George Soros's Open Society Foundation as the hidden mastermind of the Ukrainian revolution, making my own ears red not with embarrassment but with appalled discomfort—classical Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semitism, the paranoid picture of a world ruled from behind the scenes by a cabal of Jewish financiers, sometimes more explicit as in last year's RT story about Hillary Clinton as the "Illuminati candidate", always just scary even when it's laughable. There's serious and deadly anti-Semitism around, and a lot of it rolls out of Russia. I don't know why more people don't talk about it.

Happy National Review Year

St. Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), curé d'Ars, who wrote: "We cannot dwell upon the conduct of the Jews, my dear people, without being struck with amazement. These very people had waited for God for four thousand years, they had prayed much because of the great desire they had to receive Him, and yet when He came, He could not find a single person to give Him the poorest lodging. The all-powerful God was obliged to make His dwelling with the animals. And yet, my dear people, I find in the conduct of the Jews, criminal as it was, not a subject for explanations, but a theme for the condemnation of the conduct of the majority of Christians. We can see that the Jews had formed an idea of their Redeemer which did not conform with the state of austerity in which He appeared. It seemed as if they could not persuade themselves that this could indeed be He who was to be their Saviour; St. Paul tells us very clearly that if the Jews had recognised Him as God, they would never have put Him to death. There is, then, some small excuse for the Jews [Well, that's very white of you, Father, as they say]. But what excuse can we make, my dear brethren, for the coldness and the contempt which we [i.e., Christians] show towards Jesus Christ?" 

In the Kathryn Jean Lopez interview technique, as I understand it, there is no actual interview; the subject emails her a list of prepared things she wants to say and then Lopez writes a set of questions for each, to make it look as if an interview had taken place. What I like to do (well, what I did once, anyway) is just print (some of) the questions without answers, and then wonder what drugs she's on.

Today's is from an interview with Kathleen Beckman, author of Praying for Priests: A Mission for the New Evangelization (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2014):

Core element of their mental architecture

The Tehran Twist, 1960s, via Dr. Kaveh Farrokh.

Brooks asserts today that there are "three major strains of anti-Semitism circulating, different in kind and virulence, and requiring different responses," but seems to have lost track and made his 800 words with only two strains, strangely, and it's pretty clear there's only one he really cares about:

Verbatim David Brooks, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism", New York Times, March 24 2015:

In the Middle East, anti-Semitism has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray....

This form of anti-Semitism cannot be reasoned away because it doesn’t exist on the level of reason. It can only be confronted with deterrence and force, at the level of fear....

Cheap shots 8/3

Rick Santorum is back! At least for a visit. And commenting on the Jerry Sandusky case, about which as you can imagine he knows quite a lot. Or at least as he can imagine, and does. Via Minjae Park at Washington Monthly,

In an interview with Dallas-Ft. Worth’s KSKY 660 AM on Friday, Santorum, a Penn State alum, called the evidence “pretty darn thin” and said, “I’m sort of sitting back and waiting for the facts to out as opposed to, at least as I’m being told, a version of the facts.”

Speculation is that he thought Sandusky was a priest.

Romney, explaining why Jewish Israelis are more prosperous than Palestinian Palestinians, at breakfast in Jerusalem:

"And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognise the power of at least culture and a few other things," the presumptive Republican candidate told his audience. He cited a climate of innovation, the Jewish history of thriving in adversity and the "hand of providence".

Sounds an awful lot to me like, "You people are just so good with money." But it took the Arabs to call him out for racism.

"Not so sure about those krep--those krep--those dumpling thingies, they wouldn't have any chopped Christian baby in that, would they? Get 'em at 7-11?"

Attack of the killer snails: the giant African land snail, achatina fulica, has been invading the Americas—well, South America and Florida, anyway—according to BBC News.

In one Colombian town alone, Buenaventura, more than eight tonnes of snails have been collected since an invasion began two years ago. In Ecuador the problem is so widespread that they have been found in half of the country's 24 provinces, including the Galapagos Islands.

In the fields, they are an agricultural nuisance. In the cities, they clutter up the sidewalks and rip the stucco off houses. Such is the density with which they congregate at the height of an invasion, that they have even been known to cause slicks on highways.

The good news would be that they are not likely to give you eosinophilic meningitis—

The parasite that causes eosinophilic meningitis is called rat lungworm (angiostrongylus cantonensis). It has evolved to use snails as hosts and also spends part of its life cycle in a rat's blood system and brain.

After a rat eats an infected snail, thousands of worms - up to 60mm long - may grow in its brain. In human brains, it seems the worms cannot find their way out again. The worms soon die, but this causes a huge immune reaction and brain swelling.

—unless you hunker down and eat one. The bad news is, we already have rat lungworms anyway, in tiny slugs that can hide out in inadequately washed lettuce.

The BBC says you don't see them this big any more—just an inch or two. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Ruy Almeida.

I don't feel as sorry as I might for Jonah Lehrer, the youthful science writer at the New Yorker who was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotations and lost his job, horrible as that must be, because if you want to fabricate Dylan you should at least make it sound interesting:

“But then,” Mr. Lehrer wrote, “just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. ‘It’s a hard thing to describe,’ Dylan would later remember. ‘It’s just this sense that you got something to say.’ ”

I mean, what the hell kind of Dylan quote is that? That's not Dylan, that's any soulful guitar player in Long Island showing up on NPR to pimp his first album. Dylan doesn't say he finds something "hard to describe," and if he has something to say he doesn't talk about saying it.

"Yaz," said Bobby, looking up innocently, "it would be a hard thing for you to describe, but that's only because you're so fucked up. Do you realize that man in the only animal that looks in the mirror and sees something that isn't there?"

Like, gnomic.