Mercer’s rich benefactor, namesake of its Lin Wood Courtroom, has been told that in order to retain his law license he must “undergo a mental health exam.”

Wood, who is the Second Coming of Christ, fails to understand how some measly licensing entity dare approach Him, much less threaten his livelihood. His own family’s in on the persecution too… Everyone’s hanging him out to be crucified…

Last month, Wood shocked even his allies by suggesting former Vice President Mike Pence could face a “firing squad” for certifying the election results. Wood has allegedly referred to himself as the son of God and the second coming of Christ, and suggested Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is a murderous pedophile.

At least Mercer University continues to emblazon His Holy Name on its walls! All praise that saving remnant, yea even faithful to the end of days!

[S]ecular critics fail to acknowledge the changes for the better in the haredi world (albeit at a slow pace), with more of them working and joining the army, and with the birth rate per woman dropping from 12 to around eight.

********

With covid putting these socially corrosive bitter-enders right there in everyone’s face (not that non-cultic Israelis haven’t been seeing haredim for what they are for years), it’s maybe possible that …

No. Things won’t improve. In Israel, things are much too far gone. As large numbers of haredim begin to drift away from their once-authoritarian rabbis, that country will find itself with scads of unemployable uncontrollable disaffected and often quite violent people out and about on its streets.

… feast your eyes. We’ve followed the appalling haredim on this blog forever. We have zero sympathy for those, like Nathan Lopes Cardozo, who are shocked and devastated and yada yada because this wonderful pious group of Jews turn out to be – to a significant degree – a twisted cult, indifferent to their own well-being and the well-being of everyone who shares a world with them. “It’s enough with using the term ‘small group,’ because this is nonsense. These are thousands of rioters who are uninterested in Israeli laws, they look to rabbis and to no one else.” A former police chief speaks. Haredi leadership, writes Israel Hayom, is “not condemning the attacks on the cops, and thus are full participants in the [violence.]”

“[M]y whole world is falling apart; [it is] as if Judaism has become a farce,” moans Cardozo in the face of a community dying in droves from a pandemic they think doesn’t exist because they think science doesn’t exist; a community torching buses and injuring police as a state they loathe (because they don’t believe in the existence of states) attempts to make them recognize, much less obey, its laws. Cardozo didn’t notice any of this in the last twenty years or so? Didn’t notice the way they treat women, fail to educate their children, fail to contribute to Israel’s defense, fail to seek employment of any kind?

Weepy demands that the haredim suddenly transform themselves right now into rational law-abiding contributors to civilization are pathetic. More than any religion with which I’m familiar, ultra-orthodoxy displays the death-wish Christopher Hitchens believed a feature of all religions. He was wrong that this characterized all religions. But the evidence is in; he could have been writing about large portions of the haredim when he wrote:

[L]urking under it at all times in all its forms is a desire for this life to come to an end. For this poor world to be over. The yearning, the secret death wish that’s in all of it: ‘let this be gone!’

Another writer on Hitchens notes him singling out as characteristic of some religions “a contempt for all things of this world… [which amounts to] an acceptable form of nihilism.”

Even more insidiously, demands that the government of Israel stop enabling this miserable lot are hopeless. It will get much, much worse.

… but the Australian ultra-orthodox school teacher accused by multiple students of sexual abuse has finally been flown back there. She fled to Israel as soon as charges were brought against her in Australia, and Israel’s powerful ultraorthodox establishment did what it could to protect her from facing justice.

Israeli police … have recommended charges of fraud and breach of trust against former Health Minister Yaakov Litzman for suspicions he pressured ministry employees to skew Leifer’s psychiatric evaluations in her favor. [She claimed she was too mentally ill to be tried.] Litzman, a powerful ultra-Orthodox politician, denies wrongdoing.

And Litzman… ah, Litzman! Helluva health minister!

UD‘s had what to say about allowing female ISIS fighters (not all of the posts I just linked to are relevant; scroll around) to return to Europe and America. She certainly agrees that an entire life in a camp for ISIS prisoners in Syria doesn’t sound very nice, but allowing terrorists trained to kill Americans into America doesn’t sound very smart. Allowing people who held and abused slaves, who broadcast propaganda calling for the death of America, who were party to the beheading of people and the blowing up of buildings full of people all over Europe, etc., etc., to live among us is … I’d call it suicidal.

Bring them here and put them on trial? Convicting people who lived in a whirling bloody chaos, doing disgusting, undocumented things, for years and years, will be difficult, ja?

But after all she seems to be sorry for what she’s done and says she’s changed – why not believe her?

You go ahead and set up your own country where the population is willing to take risks like that.

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

It can therefore be no surprise that, in the case of one of these women, one US court after another says unh-unh. (Here’s the latest failed appeal. The authors frame it as a sad event.) Hoda Muthana grew up in Alabama, daughter of a Yemeni diplomat, but left when the clarion call of the butchery of the innocent became too loud to ignore. She was a “prominent spokeswoman” for ISIS. Now that ISIS as a territorial thing is no longer an option, she’s ready for Option Two: the USA. She brings with her a son who, one presumes, she’s raising to be as dangerous as she is.

About that son – he had a Tunisian father, which might allow him to move to Tunisia as a citizen. (The father died long ago while in the process of trying to slaughter as many evil idolators as possible.) And it’s possible that Yemen – where Muthana would feel right at home, because Yemen still has slavery – would be willing to take her. Goes without saying that the kid would be far better off in Tunisia, but separating them would be an obvious cruelty.

[Sen. Josh] Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”

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

Sing it.

Every night I hoped and prayed

My dream lover would come my way

A man to rule in Jesus’ name

To blacken freedom with his holy flame

Cuz I want

The state

That Christ

Will bring

And I found Josh Hawley

To crown our Savior’s earthly king

Someday, I don’t know how

I hope he’ll hear my plea

Someway, I don’t know how

He’ll rule both you and me

Dream lover, until then

I’ll pray to God and dream again

That’s the only thing to do

Til my Rule-by-Jesus dreams come true

Cuz I want (repeat chorus)

Although grainy, the image clearly shows a distraught president being comforted by the spirit of George Harrison.

Go deep. Use every ounce of pornographic imagination you have for this one. What are you envisioning?

You’re holding back. You’re not letting yourself go there. But think of it this way. Desecrating the Capitol is nothing, killing and injuring people is nothing, almost destroying our democracy is nothing. It’s time for Trump to desecrate the delicate, vulnerable, spiritual lives of millions of Americans.

See him grab randomly at one of the fundamentalist idiots – his equivalent in tricksterism among the bible thumpers – who still think he’s god. See him go in front of the cameras clinging to this person, introducing her as his spiritual advisor, and then crying like Jimmy Swaggart (the men look identical – Trump doesn’t even have to do the theatrics – he can release Swaggart’s tape and say it’s him).

America, I have sinned before thee. Look upon me, a broken man with only his Lord and Savior to love and redeem him. More than half of America hates me! Hates my children! Hates my grandchildren! [Wails.] Have pity on the innocents, my fellow Americans! My grandchildren are not to blame for the sins of their grandfather. Do not scar their lives with rejection and contempt. I know you hate me but Jesus loves me and it doesn’t matter what I do he will always love me!! Right here and now I will be baptized again in the healing waters! [Spiritual advisor lowers him, fully clothed, into a bathtub.] Watch me! Watch the lord transform me into a born-again, humbled, leader! I let power go to my head I fully admit it! And the lord saith pride goeth before a fall and lord I have fallen so low! [Returns, dripping, to microphone.] I hereby renounce Satan and all his ways.

… is one of many lucky people to have been sprung from jail by The Genius of the Carpathians. A lifelong thug, Esformes committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.

And here’s the best news: He’s only 52! Decades of thuggery and thievery lie ahead of him, thank God.

Thank God, for the crime-ridden Esformes family (Esformes’ crooked father established the Esformes health care fraud business) also presents itself as way way way godly.

Not that certain branches of Orthodox Judaism (the religion in this case) need any more bad publicity, what with their anti-vax, anti-mask, pro-large-gathering, pro-welfare-fraud thing; but the newly-sprung Esformes will significantly add to the enlightened, law-abiding profile of this group.

My posts about Esformes can be found here.

V. DIS!!appointed in Jesus. Would have thought BETTER of Him had our prayer on behalf of our fraud claims worked. WE HAVE PLENTY OF OTHER OPTIONS.

Not only did God immediately forgive Paul Ewell for writing that post; no less than the President of the United States enthusiastically tweeted said post. Despite these votes of confidence, Dean Ewell finds himself out on his ass because Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, and Virginia Wesleyan University Fires. It’s a university, see. Totally close-minded punitive fanatics are not really what most universities have in mind. As such.

What holds [evangelicals] together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world… The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.

“There was concern for the safety of children because it was very clear the [Jared] Kushner parents were violating public health recommendations,” one mother [at a school the Kushners were reportedly asked to leave] told the [Jewish Telegraphic Agency].

Lucky Melvin Berman Hebrew Academy! You’re up next.

(Berman is just minutes from UD‘s house.)

Donald Trump doesn’t merely want to criticize his opponents; he takes a depraved delight in inflicting pain on others, even if there’s collateral damage in the process… There’s something quite sick about it all.

A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

…

There is a wickedness in our president that long ago corrupted him. It’s corrupted his party. And it’s in the process of corrupting our country, too.

He is a crimson stain on American decency. He needs to go.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track… Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

… The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected…

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era… It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump… [Their community] is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them; [they] have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life… Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty…

The president’s ability to execute … cruelty through word and deed makes [his followers] euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.