During the holidays, all of the days of the week begin to blur for me. I have a business meeting today, so I ought to be on my game. At the same time, the world and life itself seem surreal during the Season. Yesterday I took a daughter and a grandson to a place that serves great pastrami sandwiches – and I ordered tuna salad on a roll. My daughter asked me what was wrong. After eating rich holiday food for a week, I thought that my body would thank me for taking the more prudent option. And it begs the question of whether I’m getting old – or getting smarter.
Running around with kids, grandkids, and friends during the holiday in the city is disproportionately expensive. I have a feeling that it’s a portent of 2026.
According to one commentator, “Wasn’t there an occasion at Sagamore when Pres. Teddy Roosevelt (TR) was doing energetic outdoor work of some kind and cut his head, and when he came in, Edith (who was inured to it by now) brusquely told him to go and bleed in the bathroom.” Probably true. It’s what MRSLL would say. TR liked to chop wood, both for building and for firewood. He enjoyed the exercise. When TR was building the Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri River, he needed lumber. TR and two other men, his Maine woods guides Bill Sewall and Wilmot (Will) Dow, were cutting down cottonwood trees to start the building. TR wrote that Sewall and Dow were “mighty with the axe,” and that while he could chop “fairly well for an amateur,” he couldn’t do one-third their work. Someone asked Dow what the total cut had been, and Dow, not realizing Roosevelt could hear him, replied: “Bill cut down 53, I cut down about 49, and the boss — he beavered down 13. TR added that anyone who has seen a tree stump gnawed down by a beaver will understand the comparison. Somehow, I can relate.
Bullet Points:
** The United Nations is officially calling for the isolation of the United States. UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, calls on the 192 member states to isolate America. I hope America answers. By isolating, I hope that they will not send their political parasites and spies to the UN Headquarters anymore.
** South Korea’s intelligence agency formed Unit 684 in 1968, recruiting 31 street toughs and convicts for a suicide mission to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Il Sung after a failed Blue House raid by the North. Trained brutally on Silmido Island for years but never deployed as tensions eased, the squad mutinied in 1971—killing most officers with hammers and guns before hijacking a bus toward Seoul. Stopped by troops, 20 blew themselves up with grenades; the four survivors faced secret military trials and execution.
** Japan’s Cabinet has approved a record-breaking 9 trillion yen defense budget, signaling a significant shift away from pacifism to prepare for potential conflict with the People’s Republic of China (workers’ paradise) over Taiwan and the Japanese home islands.
** I didn’t come this far only to come this far.
** He needs to find a higher cliff to make it work correctly.
** Frank Herbert wrote the “Dune” novels as a warning against messianic prophecies and charismatic leaders. Most leaders are charismatic to some degree. It goes along with leadership. Adding a Mahdi or a hidden 12th Imam, the disclosure of which requires that oceans of blood be shed. It always seems to be a tool of oppression with a necessary priestly class that enriches itself and will go to any end to manipulate the faithful toward their own ends.
** If you claim to be “free,” I ask you only one question: Does the right of law arm you? That is always the litmus test. If a whim of a potentate can disarm you, you are not free.
In Senegal
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚: 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐈𝐬 𝐑𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭
By Karin McQuillan
Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, “a fecalized environment.” In plain English: s— is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces are blown with the dust onto you, your clothes, your food, and the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carry parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would it teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it is racism?
Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral. The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see. I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.
Senegal was not a hellhole. Impoverished people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultural terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.
As a twenty-one-year-old starting in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal. In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.
The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can’t understand anything in Senegal using American terms.
Take something as basic as family. The family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called “father.” Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this at what I thought was going to be a lovely coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)
Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.
What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.
Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.
The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you could to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.
We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn’t have money, drop dead. That was normal.
So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father’s Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn’t bathing him, I wasn’t surprised. It was familiar.
In Senegal, corruption ruled from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn’t know whether it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal.
One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides, who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working, collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal. Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.
We think the Protestant work ethic is universal. It’s not. My town was full of young men doing nothing. They were waiting for a government job. There was no private enterprise. Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy. It is also incompatible with the Senegalese insistence on caring for relatives.
Mauritanians owned all the little stores in Senegal. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes—end of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.
The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal understood that a job means work. A job is something given to you by a relative. It provides a place where you steal everything to give back to your family.
I couldn’t wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.
For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.
African problems are made worse by our aid efforts. Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country’s problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring Africans here.
Democrats lecture us that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist. I don’t need to demonstrate a thing. Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it. As President Trump asked, why would we do that? We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to donate my country.
Identify the Ship/Boat (if only by nationality)
It could be a tough ID (hint: 1913)
1 & 2
3
4
Lot of hints
End
1 The submarine looks like a Nautilus-class submarine in the Italian Royal Navy pre WW1. They were built in Venice.
1 – French submarine transport ship SS Kanguroo
2 – Peruvian Navy submarine BAP Teniente Ferré
3 – Peruvian Coast Guard Río Cañete class BAP Río Pativilca offshore patrol vessel
4 – Peruvian Type 209-1200 Angamos class – Maybe BAP Antofagasta
Identify the Ship/Boat:
1. S.M.S. Vulkan
2. French Pluviôse-class submarine
3. BAP Rio Quilca of the Peruvian Coat Guard
4. Type 206 submarine
#2, yes, the French-built submarine that became the Peruvian boat, Teniente Palacios
“rich holiday food”
so instead of maybe a quarter of an ounce of honest beef fat, you had half an ounce of canola and half an ounce of egg yolk
what the health magazines call the better alternative;
please send any uneaten portions of the pastrami sandwiches to the following address:
You forgot the address.
.
There are lots of places to get great pastrami on the East Coast. In Southern California, I favor THE HAT.
Peace Corps – heh, yeah. Senegal isn’t even bad, for Africa.
– Kle.
Senegal is one of the better locations in West Africa, which speaks volumes.
The wife and I have watched the solo motorcycle adventures of a Dutch gal named Noraly on her YT channel Itchy Boots. This year she has been traveling through the Middle East and South Asia, most recently in Tajikistan. Last year she was traveling through West Africa. She plans her journey well, but there are inevitable hitches and difficulties. She is incredibly brave to do this as a solo woman, but things have gone well so far. There were days in West Africa that could have gone sideways pretty quickly, but she managed well until she had an accident that broke a bone or two, necessitating her return to Europe for a couple of months convalescing.
I’ve known people who have gone on heavily curated safaris in Africa over the past six months. It worked out well for both parties.
.
Things can go sideways for you, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. In the words of Hunger Games – may the odds be always in your favor.
Karin McQuillan’s viewpoint is anathema to the Donk Party, who hate America. They won’t be happy until they see Senegalese pooping in our streets. Like, for instance, the homeless already do in San Francisco. Home-grown filth isn’t enough; only the “best” foreign filth will do.
.
Already have that in Dem run cities….by “the homeless” (that has only gotten worse the more of our money they’ve thrown at it). Subservience and a reduced society is the Democrats goal…because their idiots, morons, and demented.
I don’t understand why democrats favor scat on the street.
“…because their idiots, morons, and demented.”
that’s why I’m unable to understand why democrats (and others of the ilk) are so supportive of picking up after your dog when the animal defecates on the sidewalk; do they savor the sensation of warm squishy brown material between their fingers (that really is gross, you should excuse the expression); the infantile passion of playing with their own feces
Fined if you don’t pick up after your dog…but some drug-addled homeless person gets a free pass. Only a Democrat can justify that sort of idiocy.
I recently invited my son and his family to a dinner at a bbq restaurant.
When I invite guests there, we usually order the family platter. It’s now up to about $75.
We were running late and told them to grab a table. I called and ordered the platter.
We arrived to find that his wife had ordered a meal and ordered individual Mac and Cheeses for the kids along with a few other things.
My son offered to pay and I told him no as I had invited him and should have consulted on the menu. I would have, had we not been running late. The bill came in at about twice what I intended, but I got to take home a lot of fine bbq.
I could belabor the subject close to home for me. I took my immediate family of twenty to lunch at a place with a great lunch menu that was half the price of the dinner menu. Some of them decided on the lobster. I paid the bill quietly, rethinking my largess. $150 – hold my quesodilla, EdB.
ProTip: Wait until you sit down before offering to pay for the meal, announcing it beforehand only acts like Welfare. (Not that I would do anything different than you both. Offering to pay – before or during the meal – is just that, a gracious offer no matter the outcome.)
Whenever I am invited out to eat, I always wait to see what the Host is ordering and make sure I’m not ordering anything more expensive than them.
Something I told my niece when she came to live with us. And that it transfers to being on a date.
A matter of scale 😁
As to the UN, I think that Trump should have an old-fashioned crane and wrecking ball roll up and begin banging on the building, while giving the occupants the rest of the day to depart forever. The real demolition people come that day and take down the building. While the building could be repurposed, it’s much more important to publicly destroy it. The wrecking ball would be a wonderful Kodak moment for the entire world.
As to the Senegalese eventually fixing their country, that hope is ill-placed. I had several friends who lived in Africa and their saying was “TIA – This Is Africa”. South Africa was once a rich and prosperous country, until people with no work ethic and no framework of law and rights, took over. Now it’s on the short road to being Senegal South. It matters not how many smart people live there, without a concept of personal property rights and the rule of law, nothing can be created.
I’m not sure where the UN should be. If you’re going to keep it in the US, there is plenty of desert land in New Mexico. Give the NYC location back to the Rockefellers.
thought for re-purposing the U.N. Secretariat Building
turn the entire structure, all 42 (above and below -ground) stories, into a public waste processing and management plant, all effluent leading into the East River; said action will not be able to change the (neither percentage nor variety of) bacterial content of this saltwater tidal estuary.
In the “I’m so glad you mentioned it” category
Here I am, in Manhattan (I hate to say NYC; someone might think I’m talking about the Bronx) in the late ’80s/early ’90s where it’s easy enough to pay well over $200 simoleons for dinner for one at a FFF (fine French fooderie), I’m walking (as usual) back uptown from a meeting/lecture at ~2100± crunching along on thinly crusted, snow-covered concrete on 5th in the 40s when what do I see but – – a white woman, dressed for her customers, hunkered over, back against the building for support (‘tho y’ can never tell what or who’s behind you if you face the building) crapping, by the smell, on the street. Yes! I’m coarse (preferred adjective, thank you) when the situation requires.
I walked on past. Silence, except for the sounds of my feet and her anal flapping, neither of us said a word.
Not just in Africa.
That night, when I got home, I began to speak to my wife about relocating. As the taxes were rising in Manhattan, the quality of life was descending.
You made your NYEXIT appropriately.
getting old – or getting smarter.
The following saying, in her ancestral language, was prominently displayed in my Grandmother’s home (first generation born in the US). Wir werden zu früh alt und zu spät klug (We get too soon old and too late smart).
I always considered this saying to be hooey, until I hit my late 60’s. Now, I recall that “gem” daily.
** Japan’s Cabinet has approved a record-breaking 9 trillion yen defense budget, signaling a significant shift away from pacifism to prepare for potential conflict with the People’s Republic of China (workers’ paradise) over Taiwan and the Japanese home islands.**
80 years since WW2 ended, Germany is starting to rearm and here goes Japan…
Japan is rearming because of Red China. Germany is finally rearming because of Putin’s Russia.
–
Funny thing about Japan rearming is the ChiComs have so pissed off everyone in the area that the South Koreans are being semi-inhospitable, instead of being totally inhospitable, towards Japan.
After observing Mexican workers allowed temporary work permits after a major hurricane, I have no illusions about a necessity to import foreigners; especially from third-world countries. Decades are required to assimilate only a few. Bringing in millions is madness.
Temporary workers are fine. License them, bring them in, monitor them, and invite them to leave. No schooling for children, no medical benefits, no anchor babies.
Have anyone that hires them post a security bond in an amount that will cover any civil liabilities, criminal prosecutions, and costs for incarceration. One million is a good start, but for those with problematic employees, let the surety companies determine the risk.
X2
Left Cleveland 49 years ago, Thanks for the trip down memory lane about Senegal, Not much difference,
Pakistani Air Patrol: Sooo…let’s bring these STEM geniuses here, on our, nickel…yeah, that’s the ticket. (Scary Version: Dem’s already have.)
***
Ms. McQuillan: Sad cautionary tale. This is what happens when culture collides with misplaced compassion, takes over reason. Similarly ‘the war of drugs’, homelessness, and a host of other feel-good baloney….throw more money and compassion at something that can’t be fixed except with tough love. My entire life I’ve heard about starving children in Africa…pictures and all…nothing has changed…in fact, gotten worse. Same here with Lib’s in America.
Seems the President of Iran has declared they are in a “full scale war” with us. While short of a formal declaration of war, does this give PDJT leeway to preemptively hit Iran?
————-
The U.N. Does the institution have any relevancy in today’s world? Do the “Peacekeeping” forces actually do any good? The saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, seems to apply.
They’ve been at war with us since the Shah fell. Obama paid them Danegeld.
He announced (with Bebe today ) his intention to hit them if they get out of line and hard and fast if he smells a nuke.
We don’t have to react to every declaration of war (The Mouse That Roared).
More about (a part of) Africa.
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https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/you-can-take-the-clans-out-of-africa
—
Getting older. Having made it this far should count for something. If not smarter, perhaps wiser.
I can’t get past Boron’s comment. The crapping part that is.
Have a fabulous day and week. :)
Me as well. The worst part is people accept it, fully failing any ‘good sense’. Astounding.
Yep, Africa is Africa, and they bring that attitude/lifestyle with them. Ethiopia is the same way. Friend got a PhD, couldn’t go home, family continuously calling him (collect) to send them his salary… ALL of it!
No offense to BRM, but whatever charm that Colonial Africa might have had, is gone.
Kim agrees, https://www.kimdutoit.com/2025/12/26/back-in-the-day/
Opening Art: Had to laugh, those two look like fun. (Or…they could be sociopaths, luring unsuspecting guests in with their quirkiness but there’s a dungeon in the dank cellar.)
I’m impressed by our hosts ability to invoke those images.
Meant to say so earlier, came back to and you had done it.
Yes, Christmas to New Year is an odd time, not unlike a layover in some airport. Not bad, perhaps, but a bit surreal. Of course we should be feasting throughout, there is that.