A New York Times writer begins by speaking the harsh truth (see above), and then suddenly davens over backwards to absolve New York’s ultraorthodox community of decades of public health irresponsibility.

Quoting only one person as an authority on the subject of vaccine hesitancy – a member of the ultraorthodox community – she would have us believe that this particular group of Jews is justified, by its tragic history, in its appalling indifference to any state authority (this approach also lets them off the hook for endemic welfare cheating and refusal to educate their children to a state standard). The writer does not ask why groups of Jews around the world with similar tragic histories seem able to discriminate between a Nazi state and a democratic state. She does not consider that the crucial problem may be that this group obeys only its authoritarian rabbis and has contempt for profane entities outside of its sacred realm.

“Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” [Nesha] Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.” Indeed Israel’s ultraorthodox also seem captive to the same outside forces, since, as Samuel Heilman points out, their community is as just as “perfect… an incubator for epidemics” as New York’s.

Trace the problem back, in both cases, to a refusal to educate their children in basics like the germ theory of disease; but don’t forget primitive powerful rabbis, in some cases, who tell their followers not to bother vaccinating. The notorious tendency of some ultraorthodox communities to incubate epidemic is rooted in the form religion takes among them – in particular, blind obedience to a rabbi, and a shocking lack of basic cultural literacy that makes people credulous in regard to conspiracy theories, and easily manipulated, by outsiders as well as insiders.

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has formally launched his campaign to reclaim the presidency with a ferocious broadside against his rival, Jair Bolsonaro, who he claimed was “possessed by the devil”.

Catholic Integralist Vermeule has taken a leave of absence from Harvard to run Lula’s campaign. Should be interesting.

You don’t have to agree with Kim Holmes’s overbroad denunciation of the left to appreciate his well-observed attack on the motley crew of right and left American Robespierres who know ever so much better than we how to live, and who intend to shove that way of life right down our throats.

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People who believe in individual liberty as a founding national value need to know their enemies.

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UD’s favorite from the motley Holmes assembles:

Michael Baxter, for example, a DePaul University professor writing in America: The Jesuit Review in 2013, argued that [John Courtney] Murray’s “Catholic version of American exceptionalism blinded him to the danger of Catholics being absorbed into U.S. political culture.” As a result, “Murray got the story of American Catholics wrong. The United States is not unique among modern states.” The implication is the American order is fundamentally flawed. Baxter even goes so far as to hope that “providence will bless us with a revolution” to change this order.

All Power to the Providence, Baby!

… And how odd, thinks she as she settles in to blog at the only wifi spot up in these here hills, that they held off on the country version of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue until your blogeuse, her Baez baggage fully intact at her advanced age, wandered in.

This park, where rustic meets ruination (everything’s in a state of disrepair, with the burnt-out hulk of a row of cottages moving the eye from disrepair to disintegration), generates strange auras like this all the time – I mean the Baby Blue moment; but also many other cosmic convergences, spots of time when some hillbilly Proust rigs up tightly-packed deep-meaning tableaus just for UD.

Or is it simply a lot of age and experience in me, folded into many Augusts one after another at this strange place?

Doesn’t hurt that the big frame of reference every second, in this fern forest/huge open-sky park, is down-home cozy Mother Earth and, at the very same time, jest past the itty bitty atmosphere, the crushing unfathomable universe. A mix embodied the other night in a lecture (downstairs, in the Massanutten Room) given by a space expert who heehawed and guffawed through the tragic gigantism of a dying cosmos. It’s the same thing out on Big Meadows, where people gather very late to watch the stars begin to fall, and it’s a gentle folk ritual with fellowship and tiny peals of music. The massive Sturgeon moon is one hell of a harsh mistress, but we’re after the golden photographable version.

What else are we supposed to do? Even the Christianity inspired by the morbid world expresses itself, ’round these parts, in happy I’m Saved ditties (they dominate the truegrass programming). Looking around her at this social space, UD flashed, yesterday, onto an image of a young monk at Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey (it’s not too far from here), who suddenly, at Vespers (Les UDs were there to do a retreat) hurled himself flat to the floor in front of the crucifix! She was shocked! Just lay flat and unmoving, his white robes flowing around his body, for what seemed forever. Now you’re talkin’.

You knew they would. Best thing to do this morning: Read his dear friend Hitch on “the absolute right of free expression and free inquiry… [and] the eternal attempt to veto by the dogmatic and fanatical the curious, the inquisitive, and the experimental.”

And while you’re at it: Don’t forget the role played by “the pathetic euphemisms about religious sensitivity that are put forward by those who know better.”

“Based on feedback from counterparts in other major cities with similar legislation, [Indiana’s passage of a radical anti-abortion bill] will have a negative impact on tourism... Exactly how significant remains to be seen. We know there were a handful of conventions already closely watching the Indiana Statehouse over the last few weeks, including Gen Con, who wraps up its annual gathering tomorrow (Sunday),” said Senior Vice President for Visit Indy Chris Gahl.

A subcommittee of the Indiana legislature is already at work trying to counteract the effect of new anti-abortion legislation on convention business. One idea being floated is to keep Gen Con’s computer game annual convention in the state by offering them, gratis, new game ideas/rights.

“The most promising one at the moment,” said Rep. Slade Bryant, “revolves around a heroine named Zygotha, who must protect her zygote from godless zombies. Pursued and menaced relentlessly by anti-government-mandate forces, Zygotha undergoes manifold challenges as she makes her way to the promised land of Mississippi.”

… and kisses the modern world goodbye. Eli Lilly and Cummins are the first major employers in the state to announce that if they’d WANTED to move to Mississippi, they would have done so. They’re initiating the withdrawal method.

Other corporations located in the state will follow.

Happily, there will be new jobs opening up for the unemployed Hoosiers they’re leaving behind — in knitting needle, coat hanger, crochet hook, and arsenic factories.

… take a bow! Look what the refusal of many of you to vaccinate your children has brought back.

… we gotta start talking stoooopid “exceptions.” Gag me.

It’s all the fault of that ten year old vixen who made that guy keep raping her. If she’d just quietly hemorrhaged giving birth as God intended, no one would have been the wiser.

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I mean, did I say “That baby deserves a right to life whether it is conceived in incest or rape or there are concerns otherwise for the mom.” ?

HAHA I WAS JUST KIDDING. I MEAN OKAY LET’S UH… LET’S … LET THE MOM LIVE!! HOW’S THAT? YOU HAPPY?

What an impressive achievement for the Jewish homeland.

As an Islamic revolution rages outside,

an old man sits on his balcony fantasizing

about slashing the bodies of infidels.

No kidding. File this post with the overwhelming pro-abortion rights referendum that just took place in red state Kansas (see post just below this one). Strong majorities of Israelis don’t want any ultra-Orthodox representation in their government.

… which Macmillan Dictionary elaborates upon here; UD proposes that we extend this rich, alliterative phrase’s provenance to the actual air. That is, she suggests that we begin to designate the many ultraorthodox men who refuse to sit next to women on commercial aircraft flying fucks (details here), and that we get the word out as broadly as possible that under no circumstances should you ever give in to flying fucks who think qua woman you stink. Do not change your seat.

Consider a recent case:

[A] flight attendant approached [a woman flying from Israel to New York] and asked her to change her seat.

As the previous Director of IRAC and current Executive Director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), there is no one more prepared for such a situation than [Rabbi Noa Sattath], and yet it was a difficult and embarrassing experience for her all the same. She turned to the flight attendant and asked her, point-blank: “Are you asking me to move because of my gender?”

When the flight attendant said yes, Noa responded that the request was both offensive and against the law. The flight attendant apologized, then pointed to the man assigned the seat beside Noa and said that he could not sit next to her. The flight attendant left, and other passengers started discussing the situation. A few minutes later the flight attendant returned, apologized, and once again asked Noa to move. Noa knew her rights, and responded: “No. The request is against the law. Don’t ask again”.

At that point, 40 minutes before takeoff, Noa found herself surrounded by passengers trying to convince her to give up her seat, saying things to her like: “You know, it’s nothing against you personally;” and trying to explain halacha, Jewish law. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how prepared you think you are for this kind of scenario: it is upsetting and humiliating, and a lot of pressure can be placed on women to be silent and acquiesce to this discrimination. 

The flight attendant must have found another solution, since the man did not end up sitting next to Noa.

One doesn’t expect primitifs to be reasonable; the obscene part of the story lies entirely with the other passengers, who in this disgracefully common situation often behave like this. They often gang up on the woman and say inane things that further humiliate her and they tell her she has to move. They try to make her believe she is the fuck in this situation, whereas the fuck is, with crystal clarity, the appalling woman-reviler.

The flying fucks are out there and they don’t care that what they’re doing is against the law. They are ineducable; your job is not to educate them. Your job is to sit tight and sue the airlines.

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“We are Jews and do not want to sit next to a woman.”

I’m talking about Israel. Here in the States they seem to be united on the total ignorance front; in Israel, where the government has found the balls to withdraw some funding from the most profoundly retarded schools (where they don’t teach anything secular above baby Hebrew and toddler math), we begin to see some ultraorthodox factions moving insidiously toward the education of their children.

Two months ago, the ultra-Orthodox newspaper HaMishpacha reported that the Belz Hassidic sect, a sect considered conservative, in a behind-the-scenes move led an effort to integrate its educational institutions into the public school system. The sect’s schools would be directly integrated into the Ministry of Education without becoming part of the ultra-Orthodox “independent education” branch.

According to the plan, which has caused an uproar within the ultra-Orthodox community, Belz institutions would agree to include secular subjects in their curricula. In exchange, they would receive full funding. This is a change from the current situation where they are defined as “exempt institutions,” which means that they are exempt from government curricula, but receive only partial funding. 

… [U]ltra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, which is composed of the Hassidic Agudat Yisrael faction (which includes Belz) and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah faction, may even split up.

… 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.