ZMan deals out some inconvenient truth.

Imagine a medieval city is under siege and the prince of the city is in his palace supposedly working with his advisors on how to break the siege. The people of the city are rationing food as no one knows how long the siege will last. The prince and his people, however, are living the good life. Now, imagine that the prince is quietly plotting a way to fling open the gates of the city at night so that the besiegers can rush in and have their way with the people of the city.

It sounds like an impossible scenario, but that is the world in which we find ourselves with regards to the immigration issue. The Constitution gives the federal government control over immigration policy. Supreme court rulings have recognized Congress as having plenary power over all aspects of immigration. It is one of those powers exclusive to the federal government. Congress passes laws on immigration and it is the duty of the executive to enforce them.

Of course, that is not happening. Congress has been refusing to pass sensible immigration laws for decades now. Whenever the Republicans have power, they start talking about amnesty. When Democrats have power, they start talking about granting citizenship to every human on earth. Meanwhile, the executive branch does nothing to enforce the existing laws. Instead, they scheme with both sides to increase the flow of illegals, while waxing romantic about the glories of immigration.

Read it.

An extreme trans lobbyist group is pressuring schools in the UK to stop calling pupils ‘boys and girls’ and use the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘he’/’she’, in an effort to “remove any unnecessarily gendered language” from the classroom.

In a properly ordered society (The Good Old Days) a mob of angry peasants with pitchforks and torches would take care of this problem.

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Urban elites are far more likely than other Americans to oppose gasoline powered cars, SUVs of all types, and gas stoves, according to a survey released last week by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The survey defined “elites” as people who have post-graduate degrees, live in households that earn more than $150,000 a year, and live in zip codes with densities of more than 10,000 people per square mile, which is about four times the average urban density in the U.S.

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Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Sahara Desert in terms of area and population, with 225 million people. Population was only 120 million in 2000. The economy has grown even faster, with per-person GDP reaching $4,000 by 2024.While that is high for Africa, nearly half the population lives in poverty, barely getting by. One reason for this is the low literacy rate of 62 percent. That explains the high unemployment rate of over 30 percent. Endemic corruption means the national police is not only ineffective but part of the problem. Criminal activity is widespread and often intense. Currently there has been a sharp increase in kidnapping for ransom. If you are wealthy, you can hire expensive, but effective, mercenaries to recover a kidnapping victim alive. Paying the ransom encourages the kidnappers to come after more members of your family. Hiring the mercenaries encourages the kidnappers to go after more vulnerable victims.

There’s a reason it’s called the Turd World.

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In the 2022 off-year election, nearly everyone expected Republicans to make big gains in Washington. But they didn’t: Democrats held the Senate and Republicans eked out a bare House majority. Meanwhile, gains in state elections were muted. In Minnesota, where I live, GOP hopes were dashed as the Democrats held the House, took the Senate, and won all the constitutional offices from the governor on down.

Why these disappointments? The defining issue in 2022, on account of the Dobbs decision, was abortion. Even in states where there was no serious chance that the election would lead to any restrictions on abortion–like Minnesota–Democrats campaigned on nothing else. And it worked. Swing voters, including millions of suburban housewives, turned out to insure that the precious right to abort babies would not be undermined.

Conservatives have hoped that this year, voters would move on to more urgent issues. But the Democrats have other plans

Politics is downstream from culture. As long as our general morality finds nothing objectionable in mothers killing their unborn children, abortion will be a problem.

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Weeks after Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amid a plagiarism scandal, the university’s teaching hospital is set to retract or correct dozens of papers authored by four of their top researchers, following claims of data falsification.

The ‘peer-review’ process appears to be defective.

UPDATE: Dana-Farberications at Harvard University

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The Biden administration’s bid to ban menthol cigarettes will open a lucrative black-market trade, bringing in millions of dollars for terrorist organizations, including Iran-backed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, according to a Republican senator.

Since May 2022, the Biden administration has been championing a proposal that will eliminate menthol-flavored cigarettes from American stores. Around 40 percent of adult smokers prefer mentholated cigarettes, and they are particularly popular with black Americans, according to the American Lung Association.

With the menthol market still booming, the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to enact an outright ban will likely create a massive black market for Mexican cartels and a host of terror groups known to work alongside them, such as al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, according to Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who sent a letter on Monday to multiple federal agencies seeking information on how they plan to combat the potential for terrorism financing.

It’s always astonished me the number of people who think that merely passing a law against some practice will be effective in stopping the practice. I should have thought that the train-wreck of Prohibition would have cured anybody with an IQ above room temperature of that notion.

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There is debate among scholars as to the extent of the quiet quitting phenomenon, but there is increasing evidence that white Americans are increasingly quiet quitting America’s leading institutions. And the possible implications of that for American society are profound.

This phenomenon is a consequence of the trends I write about in my forthcoming book, The Unprotected Class, about the rise of anti-white racism in American culture and how both formal and informal anti-white discrimination have become a factor in almost every area of American public life.

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So why is the United States still struggling to manage something that every other country seems to be able to do and that American engineers used to be able to pull off with slide rules? The Apollo computer used memory made of wire ropes woven by women in the garment industry.

Back then we picked the best and the brightest who had the “right stuff”. Now the right stuff consists of checking DEI boxes.

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The mother of a 20-year-old autistic woman who was raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant MS-13 gang member in 2022 is suing the federal government for playing “Russian roulette with our lives.”

Kayla Hamilton was raped and strangled to death by the 17-year-old El Salvadorian, who she was living with in a trailer which the suspect, according to Aberdeen, Maryland police. Authorities arrested him in January 2023 based on DNA evidence from the crime scene. He was charged with first-degree murder, as well as rape and robbery, and is currently being held without bail ahead of his June 28 trial.

I’m curious as to the basis for this suit — ordinarily one cannot sue the government unless there is a specific statute that allows it.

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A surgeon who used Google Glass in the operating room is excited by the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, with the mixed-reality headset potentially a great tool for documentation during surgeries.

ZMan is engagingly dyspeptic today.

DeSantis also suffered from the fact that we live in a whirlwind of media bombardment with an increasingly stupid voting base. Part of the latter problem is demographics, but a big part is the internet. People lack the ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes so they make judgements on memes and hot takes. A boring guy who looks like he is passing a stone when tries to tell a joke is never going to go over well with a voting base that thinks Sean Hannity is brilliant.

The Other McCain.

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania was in an uproar after the Biden administration announced it was “planning to permanently remove a statue of William Penn from Philadelphia’s Welcome Park to provide a ‘more inclusive experience for visitors.’” In only a matter of days, however, the administration reversed the decision — Pennsylvania is a swing state, and it’s an election year — but only now are we starting to get some explanation of what led up to this incident.

CBS News.

Southern California-based fast-food chain In-N-Out said in a statement Sunday that it will shutter its Oakland restaurant in the spring “due to ongoing issues with crime.”

The restaurant, located at 8300 Oakport Street off Interstate 880 near Oakland International Airport, will close Sunday, March 24, according to a statement from In-N-Out chief operating officer Denny Warnick.

According to Warnick, the location has been a profitable one for the company, which is headquartered in Irvine.

“…This location remains a busy and profitable one for the company, but our top priority must be the safety and wellbeing of our Customers and Associates – we cannot ask them to visit or work in an unsafe environment,” Warnick said in the statement.

UPDATE: In-N-Out’s First Ever Store Closing

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Six months after we reported that a “Bipartisan Bill Aims To Block Chinese Purchase Of US Farmland”, more are starting to pay attention yet as even Bloomberg notes that America “is seeing more and more of its most fertile land snapped up by China and other foreign buyers” the big problem remains: it’s difficult to know just how much farmland China has bought due to problem with how the US tracks such data.

Here’s what we do know: according to Department of Agriculture data foreign ownership and investment in US farmland, pastures and forests jumped to about 40 million acres in 2021, up 40% from 2016; but an analysis conducted by the US Government Accountability Office — a non-partisan watchdog that reports to Congress — found mistakes in the data, including the largest land holding linked with China being counted twice. Other challenges include the USDA’s reliance on foreigners self-reporting their activity.

As a result, foreign ownership of US cropland is drawing attention from Washington as concern rises about possible threats to food supply chains and other national security risks. And, as we reported last summer, lawmakers have called for a crackdown on sales of farmland to China and other nations.

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A demonstration in Berlin against the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) was co-opted by Hamas supporters and repurposed as a protest in support of “Palestine”. For the anti-fascists who launched the original demonstration, it was kind of like clicking a link to a website that’s been hacked, and being redirected to a nasty porn site or phishing scam. “This is not what I wanted!”

What’s interesting about all this is the up-front way the culture-enrichers justified their action, saying in effect, “You wanted cultural enrichment, so here we are. Now you have to do things OUR way.”

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Last year, the Fourth Circuit Court ruled that Mr. ‘Kesha’ (actual name unknown) Williams, a male inmate in the Virginia prison system who demanded to be housed with women, had his rights to be a woman protected as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

According to the Fourth, the only reason men like Williams were not protected by the ADA was a “desire to harm a politically unpopular group” by the senators who drew up the bill. And so any man who believed he was really a woman could claim to be disabled and sue under the ADA.

The Supreme Court refused the case despite a compellingly reasoned protest from Justice Alito.

Now the Biden administration is demanding that a Georgia prison castrate one of its prison inmates because the ADA provides a right to castration for men who think they’re women.

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The ongoing battles between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Mexican army have ostensibly made Mexico’s border towns war zones, as Newsmax’s border correspondent Jaeson Jones has reported for months.

The criminal organizations that are well-funded to help get migrants to the U.S. border in crossings like Lukeville, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas, are funding the criminal organizations that battle any law-and-order efforts on behalf of the Mexican army, according to reports.

The cartels are using AK-47s and AR-15s to fight border authorities, causing gunfights that even forced the international bridge to shut down for days.

Read it.

Although the world is becoming increasingly distracted with this year’s elections, there are several events that should not slip under the radar. This month marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of a man who left an indelible imprint upon the modern world and, in fact, all of human history. January 21st, is the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Comrade Lenin.

Despite a century having passed since he died, his legacy is still very much up for debate. But those discussions are not closed to the former Soviet Union alone. Lenin impressed his name and ideas so deep into our modern political consciousness that it is only fair to acknowledge that the world would be entirely different had he not existed. It seems likely that history would have been far better without him; but, as is often the case in human history, it could also have been much worse.

To give the devil his due, Lenin was and remains a hero to many, portrayed as the great revolutionary who, with little but his indefatigable will, inspired his fellow countrymen to overthrow the Czarist order, one of the most oppressive and arbitrary rules in modern history. And, indeed, Lenin was a remarkable individual, possessing a ferocious intellect and political cunning. Like the other great men of the early 20th century who maximised the capacity of the new means of communication, Lenin was all-consuming in his oratory: captivating, eloquent, and forceful. Better still for his age, he possessed the much rarer gift of collecting esoteric ideas and condensing them into comprehensible doctrines capable of being understood and adopted by the working man.

Lenin was Hitler without the insanity.

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The explosive allegations that could possibly sink Fulton County’s RICO case against Donald Trump, et al. – that she is having an ongoing affair with Nathan Wade, the Special Prosecutor she appointed to persecute Trump – have now been corroborated.

On January 8, attorneys for defendant Michael Roman (who faces various charges for challenging the 2020 election) filed this motion, alleging (in part) that Willis and Wade must be disqualified from the case due to ethical violations and prosecutorial abuses due to their affair.

Read it.

Of course they do. It’s all they know.

The New York Times Magazine carries an interview with Andreas Malm, the author of the 2021 book “How To Blow Up a Pipeline.”

And the FBI is spending all it’s time on ‘right-wing terrorists’?

Read it. And watch the video.

While wearing a Trump wig….

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In total, e-bikes caused 267 fires, causing 18 deaths and 150 injuries in the city, the New York Fire Department (FDNY) told Fox News, which notes that the figures represent the highest levels of each statistic – with deaths jumping 200% and fires increasing 21% over last year.

“As we rely more and more on micromobility vehicles to earn a living in our daily lives, we increase the risk of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries. And as mentioned, we had over 100 deaths in this city alone on these batteries,” said Mayor Eric Adams (D) during an e-bike safety event last year.

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In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins, joins a number of eminent critics of the identitarian movement that has come to dominate both American academia and, increasingly, our political and social life. He differs from most such critics in two respects. First, while he is a professed “philosophical” liberal, who believes in the existence of universally valid “values” that can provide an objective basis for criticizing and remedying “historical oppression and persistent injustice,” he is also a “political” liberal who advocates social-welfare policies that aim to elevate poor people’s condition and combat racism. This outlook until recently would have put Mounk in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. (Mounk reports having derived his welfare-state liberalism from his grandparents, ex-Central European Communists who after witnessing the death of family members in the Holocaust, then coming “to recognize the cruelty of Soviet communism,” turned to “a reformist creed of social democracy that attempted to humanize capitalism” with “a strong welfare state.”)

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Pollster Scott Rasmussen conducted two separate surveys, each covering 1,000 “Members of the Elites.” The results are remarkable, not to say shocking. But the starting point is, who was defined as “elite” for purposes of these surveys?

The Elites are defined as those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Approximately 1% of the total U.S. population meets these criteria.

Ten thousand people per square mile represents a high-density urban environment. But in that context, $150,000 a year is no princely salary. Nationwide, it takes far more–around $650,000 annually–to be in the top 1% in income. A person who lives in a big city and earns $150,000 is not, in any financial sense, elite.

So the key element in Rasmussen’s formula is having a postgraduate degree. Basically, what we are surveying here is people with graduate degrees who live in cities, the large majority of whom don’t make a great deal of money. Many in that group are probably women, although Rasmussen says the survey results were “lightly weighted” by gender, age and race. Rasmussen also defined a subcategory of “Ivy League elites,” consisting of graduates of one of the eight Ivy League schools, plus Northwestern, Duke, Stanford and the University of Chicago.

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Political leaders and the media normally play on our heart strings by showcasing the suffering of the Puir Wee Bairns of the Third World. It’s always about the kids — that way, anyone who opposes the proposed policy (whatever it might be) is a heartless wretch, an amalgam of Ebenezer Scrooge and Adolf Hitler.

When it comes to the “refugees” pouring into Europe, however, there’s a problem: almost none of them are puir wee bairns. The vast majority of them are military-age men. Some of them pretend to be “unaccompanied minors” to game the asylum system, but almost all of those swarthy heavy-bearded fellows turn out to be full-grown men.

Now it seems the Powers That Be have hit upon a solution to the puir wee bairn problem: any woman who is a victim of domestic violence qualifies for asylum protection in the EU. Which means virtually 100% of the female population south of the Mediterranean or east of Aqaba. And most of those puir battered wives have plenty of wee bairns to bring in with them when they arrive. Then later their husbands can join them under family reunification policies!

What better system could be devised?

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Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and cheerleader for endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror, warns us that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election NATO will be wrecked, our allies around the world will suffer “potential disaster,” and “above all” Ukraine will be left to the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Given Frum’s track record of advice about wars, one wonders why anyone would take his advice.

Frum takes credit for Bush’s phrase the “axis of evil” to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Frum’s advice about war should be labeled the “axis of error.”

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The European Union is at a crossroads. The EU, in its current form under the Lisbon Treaty (2009), is a union of states, even if it periodically tries to overstep its own mandate. EU members that understand the importance of sovereignty, such as Denmark and Poland, can and do behave as sovereigns. This usually provokes a struggle, but it is possible. That, however, may change.

The European Parliament recently approved an amendment to the EU treaties that would be the next step in abolishing the member states’ veto in the EU Council and increase the powers of supranational institutions. Such a reform is a decades-old federalist dream. It is no coincidence that Guy Verhofstadt, one of the fiercest federalists, is pushing for it. The idea has a long history. At the beginning of the century, the EU proposed a constitution that was rejected by referenda in the original member states—France and the Netherlands. Later, in 2010, Herman van Rompuy openly said that “nation states are dead” and that borders were obsolete. Everyone heard him. Throughout the last decade, the sentiment of centralisation has been fading in European societies, while it has been expanding among the Brussels elite.

The current proposals are the most concrete manifestation yet of this anti-democratic trend. They are far from accepted. A vote in the Council is looming. However, there is considerable support. Even greater than the support is the threat this reform poses to freedom and democracy in Europe.

New York Magazine.

After almost 70 years, Sports Illustrated — the storied magazine that has published some of the best sports journalism of the past two centuries — appears to be over, at least as anyone knew it.

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The US Navy, like most other navies, is suffering from a shortage of new personnel, causing a problem with providing ships with enough sailors. It is increasingly common for warships to be stuck in port because there is no crew available. This is an international problem; more navies are finding that without conscription it’s difficult to obtain enough men willing to spend weeks or months at sea. After the Cold War ended in 1991, a growing number of nations dropped conscription. Serving on warships became a less acceptable activity for young men. Even fewer women were willing to serve on a ship.

Power Line.

Salvadoran national Jose Guadalupe Menjivar-Alas, a four-time deportee, was recently taken into custody in Colorado “after a mother and her son died in a drunken driving collision.” In 2022, a non-citizen and alleged MS-13 gang member was charged with the murder of 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton.

In late December 2018, false-documented illegal Gustavo Perez Arriaga, also known as Paulo Virgen Mendoza, murdered Newman, California, police officer Ronil “Ron” Singh, a legal immigrant from Fiji who came to the United States to work in law enforcement. A group of seven illegals aided the murderer’s flight.

In 2015, Mexican national Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, a repeat felon deported five times, gunned down Kate Steinle on Pier 14 in San Francisco. In 2014 in Sacramento, previously deported Mexican Luis Bracamontes killed police officers Danny Oliver and Michael Davis, proclaiming in court that he wanted to “kill more cops soon.” These horrible cases all fall short of the worst.

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Capping a legal battle that had raged for over a decade, a federal judge in late December handed the Osage Nation a major victory by ordering wind farm developers to dismantle dozens of turbines they had erected on tribal land in northeastern Oklahoma.

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The jilted wife of DA Fani Willis’ alleged lover and outside counsel Nathan Wade dropped receipts in a Friday court filing, revealing that Wade purchased plane tickets in Willis’ name, with alleged travel to places such as Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean, according to the Daily Caller.

Vice.

The drone, advertised as being for survey mapping, is described in documents as a “suicide UAV used on the battlefield.” The supplier said it was destined for Ukraine.

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A hospital system in Denver said the migrant crisis the city faces could drive it into financial collapse as it struggles to make ends meet, with over $100 million in unpaid-for care.

“While I have tremendous compassion for what’s going on, it’s heartbreaking, it’s going to break Denver Health,” the safety net hospital’s CEO, Donna Lynne, told a committee of the city council last week, according to the Denver Post. In the past year, 8,000 illegal immigrants have come to the hospital for 20,000 visits, the cost of which goes into the millions and has not been reimbursed by the state and federal governments.

The strain from treating the migrants has contributed to $136 million in care the hospital provided last year for which it has not received compensation.

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I don’t know if it has a legal bearing on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s mammoth prosecution of President Trump and others, but the lady seems to have had a romantic relationship with the attorney whom she appointed a special prosecutor to lead the prosecution,. His name is Nathan Wade and it is alleged that Willis’s relationship with him compromised the fairness of the prosecution. Among the items collected in The Week, National Review editors summarize the pertinent facts.

David Brooks.

Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

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When five-and-six-year-old schoolchildren were stabbed on a Dublin street on 23 November 2023—allegedly by an Algerian immigrant—the resulting riots made headlines around the world. Those riots, however, were the result of tensions over immigration that had been building under the surface for years. In a recent survey, 75 percent of Irish people stated that they believe that the country has let in too many immigrants.

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In a shocking twist, five police officers are being forced to pay a fine to a Syrian migrant who was convicted for severely injuring one of them during riots related to a Quran burning during Easter of 2022.

The officers will have to pay out a total of 12,650 Swedish crowns (€1,122) from their own pockets to the 45-year-old convicted Syrian who has been sentenced to two years and seven months for his role in the riots.

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The panic is palpable. Democrat controlled cities across the nation are experiencing something they might never have experienced before: Consequences for their terrible criminal prosecution policies. And, they don’t like. Not one bit.

Democrats have argued for the past couple years that crime rates are actually falling in the US compared to previous decades, but this does not seem to be represented on the streets as retailers in numerous metro areas are closing up shop after many years of operations due to increasing theft. If crime rates are falling, why are so many businesses leaving blue areas?

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While violent criminals in Seattle have no compunction about carrying weapons wherever they go, Washington Democrats want to strip law abiding citizens of the ability to match force in self-defense in various public places.

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The Department of Justice report on the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Tx was released today. It is about a 600-page report. I’m just starting to read the report, but I will say that the law enforcement response was an epic failure.

Words matter in training and in my opinion the words ‘Hunter Cells’ should be used to reinforce the concept that in an active shooter situation the first officer(s) that arrive at the scene are not perimeter builders and should not wait for a supervisor or incident commander to start hunting for the shooter. The only reactive part of searching for an active shooter is the dispatch call. The proactive action is searching for and neutralizing the shooter.

I will try to write a series of posts involving the DOJ report.

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Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View celebrated by making a mockery of Dr. King’s legacy. In addition to spreading the usual lies about Republicans trying to erase black people from history, white co-host Sara Haines proclaimed that it was “important” for white kids like her own to be made to “feel bad” in history class, particularly about slavery. She demanded this while no one living today was involved in the slavery of the past.

Setting the stage for Haines’s insane demand, staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin spewed her usual anti-American falsehood about how the country was founded on slavery. “What happens is when you’ve had privilege for so long, equality feels a lot like oppression,” she chided her critics.

Hostin herself had a very warped perspective on what oppression actually was. Despite being a multimillionaire who brags about not needing to shop for groceries in years, Hostin insists she’s “oppressed” and demands her reparations.

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“The terrorists, the barbarians, it’s too little to say for them, they beheaded him and took the head to Gaza,” David Tahar, whose son, Adir, was killed during the terror attacks, told an Israeli news channel. “I did everything I could. It wasn’t easy. In the end, I got a body without a head. I insisted very much with the army to see the body. They tried to explain to me that I should not see it.”

Against the urging of authorities, Tahar opened the casket when he was alone, seeing the “unrecognizable,” headless body of his son, whom he identified through dog tags and a DNA test. He added that terrorists who killed his son launched a missile and three grenades at him and abused the corpse. Tahar also said that he saw on a CT scan that his son’s body was full of shrapnel.

After he buried his son, Tahar embarked on a months-long search for the head, asking “everyone I could” for answers. In his investigation, he also found a video that showed his son’s body without the head during the attacks.