I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on Heather Mac Donald and City Journal's ongoing debate with, er, the rest of the world on the existence of racial profiling. There are several such articles posted on their website (www.city-journal.org). Like Mac Donald's fellow scribe Theodore Dalrymple (the only reason why I bother with that rag) I'm irrationally fond of George Orwell's cheap jibe that some things are so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them. My views on the issue are based on my own eyewitness experience, so I could be wrong about all this and activists may well be engaging in the unsavory practice of, er, mau-mauing the fact checkers, but I seriously doubt it. (The fact that you can still make a meal out of likening welfare activists to the Mau-Mau may explain why...)