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Whoa. The food must be really bad.

Jim Goad shares his puzzlement with us.

A very common sexist stereotype is that women are absurdly hypersensitive. Funny enough, these days that stereotype persists mostly due to the absurdly hypersensitive real-life behavior of feminists. Supposedly it’s feminists’ job to defeat anti-female stereotypes rather than validate them, right? Perchance they changed the rules when I wasn’t looking.

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So what? Bet you money they can get some from the North Koreans, especially since the Saudis have oil and the North Koreans probably don’t.

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Victimologists are busy expanding the catalogue of officially certified categories of victims; multiculturalists are people who never disliked a culture, however bizarre. Yet policies inspired by these ideologies are frequently initiated by morally admirable individuals. What decent person could possibly object to a law against sex trafficking, or to educational programs that protect the rights of religious minorities? Well, sometimes things get a bit more complicated. A sociologist may remember Max Weber’s concept of unanticipated consequences; the Irish sage who formulated “Murphy’s Law” had the same idea in mind (“What can go wrong, will go wrong”). But there is a more ancient wisdom that can serve as a lesson here: Confucius’ “Doctrine of the Mean”—the middle way that avoids all excessive zeal, in private as well as public life. Murphy might have said: “Virtue carried to excess leads to vice”. This is what Anglicans have called their “via media”, a calm attitude in the face of both Catholic and Protestant zeal. The comparison with Confucians may indicate a deep affinity. The Mandarins of imperial China shared with the elite of the British Empire the conviction that they were morally superior to anyone else on earth; that conviction was instilled by an education that involved the acquisition of perfectly useless achievements, such as calligraphy or cricket. But I must not digress….

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Sweden was, perhaps still is, in the vanguard of progressive causes. When I first visited there around 1970, a group of feminists seriously proposed that public urinals should be prohibited, because they were discriminatory—the men should be forced to sit down. I don’t know what happened to this project.

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Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist most famous for his 1995 article “Bowling Alone” about the decline of social capital, is the liberal Charles Murray.

Putnam has long benefited from being the slightly dull but ideologically respectable alternative to Murray. It helped Putnam’s career that his “Bowling Alone” article came out the year after The Bell Curve. Although less interesting or impressive than Herrnstein and Murray’s magnum opus, it was popular with Clintonian moderate liberals because it was a sort of Bell Curve Lite: a tiny bit politically incorrect, but careful not to push the envelope of acceptability too hard.

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Putnam is notoriously torn between his decent skills as a quantitative social scientist and his desire to avoid trouble with anti-science progressives who vehemently denounced Murray for co-authoring The Bell Curve. In a comic 2006 episode, Putnam admitted to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that he had socked away for a half decade the results of his huge survey of American communities while he tried to figure out how to spin its finding that ethnic diversity was disastrous.

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MC’s latest essay looks beyond the Holocaust to consider the other programs of mass murder during the 20th century, and the general tendency of socialism to engineer slaughter on an industrial scale.

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I have to confess, that sort of care is pretty affordable, at least for the insurees. The taxpayers? Not so much.

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No doubt just a misunderstanding.

Freeberg, as usual, has the definitive treatment.

Actually, I’m a bit on the fence about this issue. On the one hand, of course I’d like to slap silly the next feminist who whines away about it when she doesn’t spend any time on the subway, and it’s completely obvious that any space a man occupies, regardless of how small, is going to be too much for her. As well as for a lot of other people in our modern culture of “all problems are due to men having too much, and all solutions come from threatening or revoking the status of men.” But, that’s not a a man-abuse thing, that’s a thing with people pretending to solve problems who wouldn’t know a real problem, or a real solution, if it walked up and kicked ‘em square in the ass. Very common occurrence these days.

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“Pathological altruism” (PA) is a relatively new concept; the term entered the scientific literature only in 1984. There has been very little written about it, partly because altruism is so highly regarded in the West that few scientists dare criticize it. This book makes it clear that PA is a problem well worth studying.

And it ain’t pretty.

PA is generally defined as a sincere attempt to help others that instead harms others or oneself, and is “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs.” Several of the contributors offer tantalizing definitions: PA is likely when people “falsely believe that they caused the other’s problems, or falsely believe that they have the means to relieve the person of suffering.” Or, it is “the false belief that one’s own success, happiness, or well-being is a source of unhappiness for others.” PA “often involves self-righteousness,” and can result in “impulsive and ineffective efforts to equalize or level the playing field.”

In other words, the core of the modern ‘progressive’ viewpoint, as it has developed.

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This indicates to me that America, even the bobo class, had not entirely thrown away all of its common sense. We all know that the problem with poor people is not that they lack money, but that they behave poorly. No one has too much of a problem living next to poor college students, who are technically poor because they lack income and assets. College students occasionally are over-exuberant in their partying, but you don’t have to worry about them mugging you, or that their children will beat up your children.

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We now live in a world in which we are required to believe lies, where telling the truth is condemned as “hate,” and where strangers feel qualified to diagnose you as suffering from an irrational “phobia” if you refuse to cooperate with their political agenda. As I remarked a couple of months ago, “Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement.”

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Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

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So why do people steal copper cables, pipes, and wires year after year? The main factors are simple: copper is all over the place, and it is valuable.

The old saying that people will steal ‘anything that isn’t bolted down’ doesn’t matter in the world of metal theft. “People will steal the bolts.” says Kevin Whiteacre, an expert on metal theft who teaches Criminal Justice at the University of Indianapolis.

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Well, eight and a half, at most. Nobody can (with a straight face) that Lindsay Graham is ‘on the GOP side’ in any meaningful sense.

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There’s a ‘man bites dog’ story for you.

For the record, I don’t have a problem with it.

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If Hillary has lost hipster Voice of the Crust Salon, she’s got no chance.

(Remember, Hillary: Pillage first, then burn.)

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I’ve seen women from Barnard; I doubt that anyone will notice.

The Other McCain continues peering under the rock.

It should be noted that, according to federal research, 2.3% of the U.S. population (about 1-in-40 American adults) is either gay or bisexual. Yet lesbianism is vastly overrepresented in the faculty and curricula of Women’s Studies programs to such an extent that Carmen Rios, communications director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, jocularly described these departments as “Lesbo Recruitment 101.” This anti-heterosexual bias is reflected in the contents of Feminist Frontiers, which includes selections with titles like “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (p. 153), “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality” (p.  309) and “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (p. 536). Among the lesbian feminist authors cited as references by the contributors are Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin, Celia Kitzinger, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Marilyn Frye, Gayle Rubin, Audre Lorde and Arlene Stein.

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The industry doesn’t talk much, or at all, about the downsides of manufacturing solar panels or where all these panels will end up when they conk out. Think of how much toxic waste is generated by consumer electronics and you get a small inkling of what a world lit with solar power, and the batteries needed to store their energy, might look like.

Solar power is still a marginal energy source, accounting for about 1 per cent of global electricity production. Yet, its environmental impact is already considerable, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. The San Francisco-based group started out three decades ago tracking the e-waste produced by high-tech industry. It now produces an annual Solar Scorecard on panel manufacturers that depicts an industry that has got worse over time. Most producers refuse to provide any environmental data on their supply chains or manufacturing operations at all.

Richard Fernandez does the modern unravel.

In the last few hours two news stories have developed in parallel but with strikingly contrasting plotlines.  The first was the re-election by a convincing margin of FIFA president “Sepp” Blatter.  The second was the indictment for making false statements in connection with blackmail,  of former speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

If these were television shows, a reviewer juxtaposing them might be tempted to conclude that the joint moral of the stories isn’t that “crime doesn’t pay”, but that crime should pay enough to provide for its own defense.  For in the one relative “innocence” — if such a term exists — is no protection against punishment.  The other show proves the only protection against payback is power.  Innocence and guilty are empty terms.  It is the power to hire lawyers, or intimidate  your pursuers that really matters.

Thus the surest protection against retribution isn’t a lack of guilt but the surfeit of it.  If one plans on being a crooked sports association president the smart strategy is to go all the way. For it doesn’t pay to corrupt only some parts of the system, leaving the honest bits to turn against you.   The only logical course is to corrupt all of it.  Nuke its governance from orbit.  It’s the only way.

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Police in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, reportedly chased 36-year-old Kevin Allen into a local library, and shot and killed him on the second floor. Fox 5 in New York reported he may have been armed with a knife, but police would not confirm or deny that.

I’d recommend staying out of New Jersey.

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n February, Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis denounced the sexual paranoia taking hold at American college campuses. Soon after, she learned that her essay on the subject had triggered protests, petitions, and even formal Title IX complaints from students who disagreed with her.

Now Kipnis has penned a second essay for The Chronicle Review detailing the formal review process she underwent as a result of those complaints—which, again, were filed because students objected to the content of a tenured professor’s speech and asserted that federal anti-harassment laws entitled them to protection from opinions that bothered them.

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Ask the ‘people of color’ in Baltimore how they like that idea.

Why might that be? Astonishingly, neither the ACLU report nor the Star Tribune story on it ever mentions the Asian “disparity,” even though the ACLU casually assumes that “[t]he numbers show a startling disparity in the way police enforce low-level offenses.” Would the ACLU have us believe that the Minneapolis police are conspiring to cover up low-level crimes by Asians? Presumably not: it is obvious that Asians are “under-represented” among such arrests because they rarely commit such crimes.

But if that is true, the whole racism hypothesis falls apart. How do we know that blacks and Indians are not “over-represented” in low-level arrests because they commit a disproportionate number of such crimes? In fact, it is a well-known and easily documented fact that these demographic groups are over-represented in the criminal population. The ACLU report never mentions this uncomfortable fact.

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“Islamophobia studies” is the latest addition to the academic pantheon of politicized, esoteric, and divisive “studies” whose purpose is to censor criticism of differing views by stigmatizing critics as racist or clinically insane.

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Astonishingly, the incessant dodging, dissembling, duplicity, deceit, deceptiveness, and dishonesty are so widely understood to be inseparable from politics that sophisticated pundits and professors treat with contempt any and all suggestions that the prevalence of such dishonorable qualities among politicians is a good reason to dial down government’s powers.  The theory seems to be that if an eight-year-old child can easily spot and be repulsed by these unattractive features of politics, then these features are far too mundane and obvious to serve as a basis upon which serious arguments for reducing the power of governments can be built.

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Here’s a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank – finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 billion, would they then let the Exim Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down?

I ask this because the airplane manufacturing company is, of course, the largest beneficiary of the Exim Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Exim Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington. Think of the bank as food stamps for America’s Fortune 500 companies. Ever since the early Reagan years, conservatives have been trying to eliminate the subsidies, but the bank has multiple lives.

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What is most insidious about the Exim bank, beyond the cronyism and risk of its $140 billion portfolio of taxpayer guaranteed loans, is that it turns business into advocates for big government. (This may explain, in part, why liberals like Nancy Pelosi who normally hate corporations, love the program so much.) This also explains why the largest business lobby in America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is spending more than $1 million on a lobbying campaign to save the program . There’s something that stinks to high heaven about a government racket in which businesses profit from government subsidies, and then turn around and employ lobbyist organizations to lobby for more tax dollars.

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WHO seems intent on keeping Interpol out of the discussion, despite the international police organization applying for observer status. The reason cited is that Interpol has a financial agreement with Philip Morris International (PMI), the largest publicly traded tobacco company. PMI contributes 15 million euros a year to help lower the underground tobacco trade.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. Any bureaucracy knows that if you get rid of the problem you’re supposed to be getting rid of, then you’ll be gotten rid of as well — and the UN is all about the bureaucracy; it would never endanger the goose that lays those golden, golden eggs.

Terrorist organizations find tobacco ideal for smuggling because, as Interpol notes, “The product is small, lightweight and profitable…the sale price is many times the cost of manufacture, mostly due to high levels of local tax in most countries.” A report from the EU Commission found that illicit tobacco trade, driven almost exclusively by criminal groups, results in a €10 billion loss of tax revenue every year for European Union member states. Cities and states often increase cigarette taxes to discourage consumption.

In other words, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the government weren’t profiting from it so much. I guess ‘irony’ isn’t a word that most bureaucrats understand.

Tobacco smuggling by terrorist organizations is pervasive and increasing. In some cases, authorities have seized 10 million cigarettes, but backlash from law enforcement clearly hasn’t dissuaded groups that stand to gain tremendously, as a result of selling cigarettes in exchange for cash, drugs and humans. Prominent Middle Eastern terror groups profit considerably from illegal cigarette operations in the United States.

So of course the WHO wouldn’t want to get in the way of that, doing so would be ‘Islamophobic’.

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The North African country’s Prime Minister, Khalifa al-Ghawi, today likened any forceful action co-ordinated by Brussels to the “colonial mentality” of Libya’s Italian occupiers in the 20th century.

Warning of his country’s “ability to defend our sea and our land”, Mr al-Ghawi said the deployment of European armed forces during the ongoing migrant crisis is “completely unacceptable in the modern world”.

Sticking up for their right to invade and conquer. Sounds pretty Muslim to me.

Of course, Mexico makes much the same noises. So you never can tell.

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Perrine’s brother is one of 36 people killed in Baltimore so far this month, already the highest homicide count for May since 1999. But while homicides are spiking, arrests have plunged more than 50 percent compared to last year.

The drop in arrests followed the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered in police custody. Gray’s death sparked protests against the police and some rioting, and led to the indictment of six officers.

Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them. In recent weeks, some neighborhoods have become like the Wild West without a lawman around, residents said.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was arrested.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I’m not sure whether this is an example of Biting The Hand That Feeds You or Be Careful What You Wish For, or maybe You Made Your Bed Now You Have To Lie In It.

Or maybe it’s just evolution in action.

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A leading scientific journal on Thursday retracted a highly publicized study reporting that attitudes toward same-sex marriage could be altered by brief face-to-face conversations with people who have a stake in the issue.

The study, published by the journal Science in December, came under question this month when a pair of graduate students trying to follow up on the work found evidence that the data had been misrepresented.

The study’s senior author, Donald P. Green, a prominent political scientist at Columbia University, asked that the study be retracted last week, after his co-author, Michael J. LaCour, a graduate student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, declined to furnish the raw data he had used to reach his conclusions.

Nice try, Child of the Crust.

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BRITISH lorry drivers are avoiding Calais because of iron-bar wielding illegal immigrants trying to force their way on to their vehicles.

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The Home Office said more than 40,000 attempts by illegal immigrants to get to the UK had been thwarted in 2014 but drivers say the situation is now far worse than last year.

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All no doubt richly deserved — people with tattoos are all narcissists to a greater or lesser degree, more worried about how they appear to others than what they actually are.

More here: In Addition To Regret, Tattoos Can Pose Serious Health Risks

Not to mention that it makes you look like a douchebag Underclass wannabe.

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Now that’s comedy.

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Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. (More accurate: ‘These usually have consequences the exact opposite of what was intended.’)

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. “For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

Saw that comin’.

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study led by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

Economics works even when you don’t want it to. Politicians need to learn that the world is not Burger King, and you can’t just wave a magic law and Have It Your Way.

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Hey, rules are for the little people, not the insiders.

For much of the past eight months, labor activists have argued against special considerations for business owners, such as restaurateurs, who said they would have trouble complying with the mandated pay increase.

But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economits, pulls back the curtain.

An irony that would be comical if its consequences weren’t so dire is that government’s power expands as voters demand that politicians protect them from being deceived and cheated in private markets. Ponder this strange fact: Politicians whose deceptions in elections are readily tolerated are asked by voters to police against possible deceptions by entrepreneurs in private markets. It’s like asking the brute who just robbed you at gunpoint to serve as your personal bodyguard. True, he’s got a gun and isn’t afraid to use it, but why would you trust him to wield his weapon in your interest rather in his own interest?

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One of DNAinfo’s first projects was also one of its most ambitious: a timeline of every murder within city limits. When the hyperlocal website launched its Chicago branch in late 2012, they hoped to raise the standards of local crime reporting. “The idea is to do old-school reporting in a new medium,” the Reader reported. “Knocking on doors. Shoe leather.”

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DNAinfo’s murder timeline raised the bar for crime reporting in Chicago, but also raises some fundamental questions: Why should we tell isolated stories about violent crime? Do reports of shootings serve impoverished neighborhoods or illuminate institutional violence? What, to put it simply, is crime reporting for?

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But of course they can’t do anything special for Memorial Day.

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The mainstream media adjunct of the Democratic Party is not loosening its grip at ABC News or anywhere else among the mainstream media. It’s time for Stephanopoulos to go, if only to help them keep up the pretense that they are something other than what they are. ABC News, however, must not see it that way. I therefore appreciate the opportunity afforded by Stelter’s interview of Continetti to return to this illuminating story.

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Thanks to the folks at Esri and elsewhere, we now can explore the canyon’s sprawling geography of death. “Over the Edge 3D” is an interactive, comprehensive map of the landmark’s bloody legacy, inspired by the 2001 book Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. True to its name, the map can be viewed in 3D if you have Chromadepth glasses. But exploring it with no special gear is also depressingly gripping, like doing a scavenger hunt where all the “prizes” are helicopter accidents, drownings, heart failure, or being crushed by a falling mule.

Think of it as evolution in action.

David Cole turns over a rock.

The NAACP’s sole weapon is fear. The organization gets its way because many businesses and public figures live in fear of being slapped with the label “racist.” But what, if anything, frightens the NAACP? No, it’s not your conservative blog or podcast, so don’t flatter yourself. The NAACP isn’t scared of you. The NAACP witch-hunters aren’t scared of anyone who tries to counter their fear tactics with logic and rationality, because they know that in the end fear always trumps reason.

However, there is one person who scares the bejesus out of the NAACP leadership, and he’s one of their own officials: an unstoppable, unkillable bugbear named Reverend Curtis Everette Gatewood. NAACP leaders cower in his presence. Gatewood dislikes Jews, Israel, immigrants, and non-Christians. He’s damned Hillary Clinton supporters to hell, applauded the Baltimore rioters, compared black moms who stop their sons from rioting to white slave masters, co-organized a protest meeting at which Obama was repeatedly called a “nigger,” and pledged the NAACP’s support to an organization that opposes the NAACP, hurls racist bile at Asian immigrants and Jews, and calls Martin Luther King an “uncle Tom.”

And yet the national NAACP can’t, or won’t, get rid of the guy.

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The Fifth Amendment, which says that government may not take private property for public use without due compensation, was once interpreted to mean that government cannot take private property for private use at all and must pay compensation when it take it for public use. But over time it has come to be reinterpreted to mean that government can take property rights through regulation without compensation and it can take private property from one owner and give it to another private party with compensation.

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Today, nearly 5 percent of Americans have Asian ancestry, tracing to countries from India to Japan. The Pew Research Center reports that they are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

They are overrepresented in fields like medicine, engineering and computer science. In Silicon Valley, they hold half of the tech jobs. For immigrants once associated with menial or subservient work, the transformation has been titanic.

But some things have stayed the same—such as the representation of Asian-Americans at Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university. In 1992, they made up 19.1 percent of the undergraduate student body. In 2013, they made up 18 percent.

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Today, according to a survey by The Harvard Crimson, Asian-American freshmen had higher SAT scores than any other ethnic group. It’s not enough for them to be as good as everyone else: To get in, they have to be considerably better.

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Apparently Black Lives Matter, but Yellow Lives Don’t.

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In the May 11 issue of Finance and Commerce, Matt Kramer, a local Chamber of Commerce representative lobbying for additional public transit and transportation spending (currently being debated at the Minnesota Legislature) is quoted as saying “Every person who is riding transit is one less person in the car in front of us.”

This is a fascinating quote. First is the use of “us.” So the Chamber of Commerce (probably correctly) identifies riding transit as something someone else does (since “we” are still in the car) and goes on to imply that it benefits us because there will be fewer cars. (Actually he says fewer people per car, but I think he meant fewer cars, not that it would reduce carpooling.) And I suppose he could mean he rides the bus, and the car in front has fewer people (or there were fewer cars in front), but I don’t think that’s what he meant, since the arguments in the legislature are mostly about building and operating new facilities — such as LRT lines or freeway BRT, rather than supporting existing buses driving in traffic.

‘Get those proles in their POS cars off our roads and out of our way!’ is a key building block in the ‘progressive’ program — not that they’ll ever admit it.

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His father, Dr. Wiener, worked at Johns Hopkins in the Baltimore ‘hood, so it’s not implausible to wonder if the Wieners were guilty of the the now much denounced practice of “white flight.” As we all know, when white people leave cities due to black criminality, they are actually causing, using their White Privilege Time Machine, the black criminality they reacted to.

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But having engaged in white flight is a psychologically fraught topic for white liberals, especially for white liberal Jews who are in the business of telling everybody else how to remember the past, so it tends to lead to issues that may ramify in indirect fashions.

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As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.

The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad.

Have you ever wondered how come people who want the world to return to how it was before 1900 (except for bicycles instead of horses) are called ‘progressives’? Wouldn’t ‘regressives’ be a better term?

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, does what he does best.

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Reading the speech left me thinking that if this is America’s designated Science Guy, I can be the nation’s designated swimsuit model.

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What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality.

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Something is rotten in the NHS: Julie Mellor, the UK’s Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, has released a report finding that “hundreds of thousands” die in miserable circumstances because the NHS’s end-of-life care can be “appalling.” The report, which draws on the complaints of family members, describes a system in which palliative care is neglected, medication administered incorrectly, and the dying go unserved because of state mandated limits on working hours.