You probably don’t think it’s worth your while to read, in depth, the self-defense of the rioters, but, for pure amusement, this is a good read.

… that this nation’s first case of polio in many years originated in an ultraorthodox Jewish sect. The Times of Israel summarizes:

Young man who recently got married is suffering from paralysis; was not vaccinated; is a resident of Rockland County, which has a history of low vaccine compliance

The story is getting wide coverage. What it represents is the shame of a nation. A modern, enlightened country like the US should see no polio at all, since any outbreak is the result of absolutely basic disregard of personal and civic health norms.

Imagine: A highly contagious disease like that lurking, and a community’s indifference to basic science and the well-being of its children allows people to go unvaccinated. It’s of a piece with these same communities refusing to educate their children to national standards, breaking tax laws, and breaking non-discrimination laws. Not to mention refusing vaccines for other easily avoided scourges.

The new polio case comes amid fierce backlash against vaccination in some Orthodox communities fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in 2018 and 2019 that was centered in the area’s Haredi Orthodox population.

The New York Times:

[This] community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data.

These communities, which voted at a higher percentage for Trump than any other community in America, and which sent busloads of community members to, er, various January 6 events in Washington (the insurrection was one of the very few places on earth where you could watch ultraorthodox Jews and neo-Nazis cavorting together), will fight national authorities tooth and nail if any government agency actually tries to make them behave. We have already witnessed, in the streets of New York, how shockingly violent they can be.

Indeed these are the Trumpian shock troops, communities of people who recognize that Trump’s violent nihilism is their own. If government has any defensive purpose at all, it is to respond to the threat profoundly non-compliant sects like this one represent.

Klobuchar wonders how the violence at the Capitol would have been handled if we’d had a president “who didn’t flaunt the laws of the United States.”

As Vocabulary.com notes, “Flaunt is to show off, but flout is to ignore the rules.”

She’s forgiven because it’s way easy to confuse these two very similar words; and also because she’d make a damn good presidential candidate and I don’t want to discourage her.

A policeman brutally beaten by the insurrectionists shares his thoughts on Josh “He’s A Runner” Hawley.

Sing it:

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
soon there’ll be no Josh
courage ain’t been born
that can make him stay
Hawley get away while you can

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
with police escort
courage ain’t been born that
can make him stay
come his Proud Boys mob
come the coup
he’s a runner

There’ll come the runnin’
He’ll know he’s got to
don’t ask him not to or why
Oh why oh why did you
run off
and leave Oath Keepers cryin’
now they’re in jail
and you’re not

In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.

Well hello Hawley! Yes, hello Hawley!

It’s so nice to see you break out in a run.

You’re looking swell, Hawley. Run like hell, Hawley.

Harmless tourists in the Capitol are so much fun.

You feel the room swayin’

While the mob’s sayin’

“After Pence we hang the others one by one.”

So pump your fist, fella

You’re a Proud Boys Nelson Mandela

Hawley you’ve showed your courage once again!

“The room erupted in laughter,” said a reporter in the January 6 hearings room tonight. She was describing the hilarious juxtaposition of Missouri’s Josh Hawley first pumping his macho fist and riling up the crowd of insurrectionists; and then immediately after, with the Capitol overrun, racing like a wittle wabbit to get away from the people he’d made violent.

… it.

Serotonin! For depression!

Looks as though it may not work.

Makes you feel like such a jerk.

What a nasty-ass placebo.

********************************

Have you tried to stop the pill?

God, that really made you ill.

Now you’re stuck:

With less serotonin!

… Via the Los Angeles Times review of Bad City, a book about disgusting events at pretty much always-disgusting University of Southern California. My coverage of these particular grotesqueries can be found here. Put University Southern California in my search engine for years of scandal and corruption.

[T]wo major scandals at USC involv[ed] two doctors employed by the university: the medical school dean, Carmen Puliafito, and a gynecologist who worked at USC‘s student health center. Both doctors took advantage of young women to satisfy their prurient desires. Eventually, the book becomes a pointed critique of USC’s culture of secrecy and its shameful efforts to protect its public image. The university’s supporting role in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal serves as a kind of coda to a dark tale of privilege, amorality and coverups...

In one especially outrageous scene, [Dean] Puliafito brings a pair of addicts into his office at the Keck School of Medicine, where they don the doctor’s USC lab coat and an inflatable Trojan hat after smoking heroin...

Todd’s Indiana’s Attorney General, and I bet he thinks Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s real purty too, but that don’t seem to be keeping her from suing him for defamation. Why?

Well, since Ohio is a feudal fiefdom, where a pregnant ten year old rape victim can’t get an abortion, the child had to go to Indiana, where Bernard performed the procedure and in so doing got Todd so riled up he spewed all kinds of lies about her on national media and now she needs round the clock security.

Turns out broadcasting life-destroying lies about people is defamation, and Bernard will almost certainly successfully sue Rokita on these grounds.

***********************

What a comedown for Todd Rokita. Once that ten year old hemorrhaged to death trying to give birth in Ohio, he’d for sure have been given Ohio’s Distinguished Service Medal. Now all he has to look forward to is a whopping legal settlement.

*************************

Contribute to Dr. Bernard’s legal/security fund here.

What a welcome headline! And when you put it together with what looks like a really serious rebellion against mandatory woman-covering in Iran, the future of the secular public realm, and of equality between the sexes, seems a bit brighter.

We shouldn’t forget, along these lines, the myriad burqa bans around the globe.

The article from whose headline I quote above duly notes the now-notorious irony:

Merely criticising the hijab in Western democracies has also become almost synonymous with “Islamophobia” or attacks on minority rights.

But in Muslim-majority societies it is still regarded as part of a legitimate campaign for the liberation of women from stifling tradition.

“Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and fifty million on the boat they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred thousand square foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half billion dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.”

First Black Rifle Coffee, and now AR-15.

Although Black Rifle is as it were holding its position, UD fears that – under the influence of unfortunate events – we are seeing the end of an era.

But there’s a little good news on the horizon: The most popular name for baby boys in Fairbanks Borough Alaska is currently Barrett REC 7, and among girls it’s AAC Honey Badger.

The brilliant lawyer who came to the defense of a conspiracy of doctors slicing off the genitalia of many eight year old girls in Michigan cannot understand why people don’t like him.

I don’t get it either. The stories he can tell around the dinner table!

So they like do it under cover of night and lie to the little girls that they’re going for a trip to an amusement park or whatever haha. And then the doctor ties her down because you know she’s gonna bolt when she figures out… Hey why aren’t you guys laughing?