“We are still in the fight of our lives to defend American democracy and freedom against the rampaging autocrats, kleptocrats, plutocrats and theocrats … “

Cratwise, UD’s rep, Jamie Raskin, gets it said.

Chacun à son goût, of course, but UD‘d say, crat for crat, theos are the worst.

 It’s happening in all the let ’em die states:

[W]omen’s health specialists from states where abortion is criminalized are beginning to relocate to places like Washington state, which has strong abortion rights laws.

 “[W]e are legally unable now,” explains an exiting Idaho doc, “to prevent harm to patients.”

Another: “This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”

Not safe. Which has UD thinking along the following lines: With the removal of virtually all gun laws in some of these same states, we begin to see emerging what I guess these states have always wanted: The return of frontier life. Ain’t got no docs out here. Don’t need no docs. You’re on your own.

These same states tend to be, you know, also our big anti-vax states, our big anti-science states (schools should teach creationism, not evolution), our big anti-gay and (Idaho certainly!) our big anti-Jew/anti-black states, our big secession states… Obviously these attitudes aren’t out there everywhere in all of these places, but you can just see many maternal-death-before-abortion legislatures determined to rid their states of anything at all, say, associated with the Enlightenment.

It’s really queer, if I can transfer that term from gay provenance to, uh, the provinces. Radically queer.

East River, that is. Theocratic Israel wants to send a self-proclaimed proud racist over here as consul general. Can’t wait!

If you can read all the way through this without laughing out loud, you’re a better man than I am.

… where gun ownership is mandatory, has begun to attract attention from social theorists as well as policy makers due to its sudden, exponential, growth.

The so-called ‘Flakellants’ (pronounced “flak,” not “flake”) derive their identity from the medieval Flagellants, groups of religious fanatics who marched – and march: flagellants continue to exist – through the towns and cities of Europe half naked, scourging themselves bloody with penitential whips in a public, masochistic act of self-mortification.

Contemporary “Flak”ellants – in a behavior reflecting what David French describes as “a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object” – march semi-nude in public thoroughfares while scourging themselves with guns in the shape of crucifixes.

Last week, a three thousand-strong contingent of Flakellants took to the streets of Provo (for modesty’s sake, women Flakellants wear flak jackets), their numbers increasing as local citizens spontaneously grabbed their own guns, attached heavy ropes to them, and pistol-whipped themselves.

All Flakellant marches end with at least one public suicide as an act of ultimate sacrifice/penitence; these are apparently never planned but rather the result of an overflow of spiritual/gun-bearing fervor. “Of course, it’s a sin,” one of the Provo marchers commented to a reporter covering the event, “but you can’t stop someone determined to bow to the power of the gun. For us, the pouring out of their blood in front of us is a communion as powerful as the Blood of the Lamb. We wet our fingers with this sacred outpouring and mark our foreheads and our gun crosses with it.”

The next Flakellant march (co-sponsored by the Catholic organization Rifle-Scopus Dei) will be in two days, in Salt Lake City, led by Tennessee Representative Andrew Ogles. It is expected to attract at least ten thousand participants.

[A] police officer who came to my workplace [in Tehran], which is a public place – and many women were not wearing hijab there – just asked me for a bribe and went away. So these laws have turned into an income source for the police.

… Satan carries Jesus onto a high mountain, below which are spread all the kingdoms of the world, and says, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

In the gospel myth, Christ passes the test. But how many of us mortals would? Some Republicans seem to have made it—Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers—but many did not. Consider William Barr, formerly a respected figure who reduced himself to vile toadyism and outright deceit to defend Trump from legal danger; consider Lindsey Graham, formerly, like his late friend John McCain, a figure with a reputation for independence who now crawls in Trump’s wake croaking “my precious”; consider Rudy Giuliani, once presidential timber but last seen by history as Pagliacci, hair dye dripping as he stumbled through a parody of legal argument on behalf of Trump. 

These seem to be the only two D. Trump honorary degrees that haven’t been revoked; and Trump can rest easy knowing that a school recently run by the Marquis de Jerry Falwell Junior will never do that dastardly deed, even under current circumstances.

Thank goodness he only implied it. Wouldn’t want to rush to judgment.

Jenna Ellis, election denier, 2020.

Poor Jesus. Screwed again.

… the most recent criminal gang to attract the attention of law enforcement includes a woman. True, her sentence for stealing federal funds meant for underprivileged children, and using them to buy high-end SUVs and Florida condos, will be merely time served, whereas the big boys are getting bigger, man-sized sentences. But they dealt her in, even though she’s a girl! This is where gender equality begins.

Harvard’s oddest lays out the glorious Cathophate-to-Come.

Frank Pavone went on to become one of Trump’s highest-ranked advisors on Catholic issues.

Father Pavone’s manifest erotic attraction to bodily gore, and his unique psychotic stagings of handheld human remains atop the holiest of sacred locations, would long ago have attracted the attention of urgent care mental health clinics had he not been ribboned and robed within the church…

Yet even the church, after letting far too much twisted bloodlust go, has recently defrocked him.

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Pavone has a long history of grooming and touching young women who work for him. All seem to have skeddadled before he had a chance to surgically remove their wombs and drink their uterine fluid from chalices in Jesus’ name. But now they’re speaking up.

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Since the church has defrocked him, I’m thinking the Pope will have no comment on this latest Pavone scandal. Pavone? Pavone who? Perhaps Trump wants to say a word.

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Given that Pavone isn’t any longer allowed to wear the priestly garb that gave him a serious leg up in anti-abortion show-stoppers, what to do? His response to being defrocked makes clear that lugging baby guts about from altar to altar and photographing himself panting over them remains his life’s passion. What to do?

Pavone has reportedly been in touch with several drag queens who specialize in clerical outfits, so that they can advise him in the maintenance of his look.

All nations have the right to self-determination. All nations should be aware that if you choose to establish yourself as in important/coercive ways a religious state, you’re eventually going to look like shit. Think Pakistan; or worse. Iran.

Bill’s coming due for Israel, as we’ve all noticed. The process is well underway there in the established forms: The destruction of an independent judiciary. The surrender of the state to corrupt, bigoted, violent, and reactionary fanatics. The dismantling of national education standards. The degradation/disappearance of women. And now, out goes the money.

“From my clients I’m hearing concrete instructions to mobilize money out of Israel, to Switzerland or London,” said Eran Goren, a co-founder of Fidelis Family Office, which manages the money of wealthy Israelis. “We work closely with private banking departments of big banks, and they say it’s from every direction — people are just pulling money out.”

A withering tech industry would make Israel poorer, weaker and more religious, [another observer] said. That ought to worry anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East, he added.

“Weaker states tend to be more aggressive, and a weaker Israel will be a more aggressive Israel.”

But emergent Israel wants the money to go. A rich educated nation will always erode the poverty and ignorance at the core of fundamentalist Judaism. Education evolves people away from the bellicose certainty that their sect comprises God’s unique anointed world-redeemers.

If backwards is what the Israelis want, backwards is what they get. If you take a long historical perspective on the thing, the core of Israel’s collapse was inherent in its willingness from the outset to cave to fundamentalism. And it was willing to do that because, as it affirmed in 2018:

 [T]he Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me [the author is Peter Beinart] who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship...  Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.

I wrote this two years ago, as ISIS fanatic Begum (she says she isn’t an ISIS fanatic anymore; British intelligence disagrees), stuck in a Syrian detention camp, had her request to return home at least to argue her case denied. The latest news is that — in line with UD‘s confidence she’ll never be allowed back in her home country — a court has on appeal upheld the decision to revoke her citizenship.