Jenna backs down.

My Jenna posts.

… aborts his own business.

The retrial is about to be scheduled! Our guy! We’ve long followed the worst Medicare-Medicaid criminal/most insanely pious Orthodox Jew (In prison, he prayed nine hours a day, “spending so much time praying on his knees that his legs were swollen and purple.”) in the country’s history, through conviction, Trump pardon, and now retrial. And, as world-historical hypocrisy mavens, we are loving every minute. The only spectacle as amusing is the Caged Wisdom sequence in the comedy Arrested Development, which is in fact largely indistinguishable from the ongoing Philip Esformes sequence.

In 2016, prosecutors charged Esformes in what they called the largest-ever scheme targeting Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor. Esformes was accused of bribing medical professionals to admit patients to his network of assisted-living facilities and nursing homes for services that were never provided or were unnecessary.

During the two-month trial, prosecutors asserted that Esformes personally received more than $37 million in the scheme. They told the jury he used his proceeds to finance a lavish lifestyle and pay $300,000 in bribes to the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania basketball team to recruit his son…

In April 2019, a jury convicted Esformes on 20 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice…

Esformes worries constantly about a new trial and the threat of incarceration…

Poor baby! I tell you it’s doing nothing for the guy’s mental health that he might, even after Trump pardoned him, serve his prison term for stealing billions of dollars from the American health system and degrading the lives of millions of poor old people. What’s the world coming to when one of the most disgusting crooks America ever produced actually has to serve jail time? Put Esformes in my search engine for even more lurid criminal details!

Gratified as UD is to see others finally pay attention to the Insane Integralists, and esp. their Harvard law prof spokesperson, Adrian Vermeule — cuz see UD’s been caterwauling about Vermeule for a number of years — she is less delighted to see looooong essays take serious historical, theological, and philosophical issue with him and his All Catholic All The Time movement.

Vermeule and his buds basically represent a Dungeons and Dragons circle jerk with Xian elements. To quote their rival World Takeover By Jesus sect, they are … SPOOKYTUS…….

Which sort of behavior among adults who hold respectable jobs is astonishing, and funny, and I write about it on this blog on that basis. Taking the lads with any real seriousness just makes them tug the slug more energetically.

But! I’ll go ahead and quote from a couple of recent articles anyway, in case you need reminding what this is all about.

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What the integralists call the social reign of Christ will be achieved by integrating the temporal power (the state) with the spiritual power (the Catholic Church). The military, the economy, the arts, and religious life will be directed toward human flourishing as defined by one severe reading of Catholic tradition. Which doesn’t mean bishops would command armies or set tax rates — civil authorities in an integralist regime would retain broad spheres of competence within which to forward the ends prescribed by the Catholic Church, but the Church would define those ends…

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[I]n the … words of an American integralist, “the state should recognize Catholicism as true and unite with the Church as body to her soul.”

[T]hey are another group in our society that judges governments and regimes and political orders by how good they are for them. This selfishness, which is a common feature of identity, is as tiresome in its religious versions as it is in its secular ones; it is a … form of contempt…

[The bizarre] Vermeule is talking about the American government. Who does he expect to persuade with this sectarian rapture?

… This is, well, nuts. Vermeule has no reason to fear the jackboot of Nancy Pelosi in the middle of the night. But his extreme view of his position in contemporary America enables him to cast himself grandiosely. He is the lonely knight of the faith who has taken up the Cross to do battle with the Jeffersonian infidels.

… When rationalists seem to be acting imperialistically, they can be challenged rationally, on their own grounds, and a rational argument for humility or restraint can be made; but no argument can be made with anybody who dissociates reason from truth, who repudiates “intrinsic grounds,” who demands of authority that it be “external.” 

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And of course it’s valuable to visit and revisit the enemies of liberalism, the revilers of freedom. But taking AV and Co. with great seriousness is like taking the CEO of MyPillow seriously. UD doesn’t deny that people of this sort ought to be monitored occasionally; but leaving them alone to stroke themselves to sleepytime is by far the best move.

I mean, the church thought it was done.

Now the law has changed and it’s time to declare bankruptcy.

There is no way now to bridge the divide between those who saw the events of Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv and other cities across Israel as an attempt by religious fanatics to defy the High Court ruling and force gender-separation on a liberal city, and those who saw there radical secularists preventing Jews from holding a sacred event.

Yes, absurdly enough for such a small country, people are talking about the separation of populations.

UD is heart and soul with the Tel Avivians, but she wonders how many will want to keep fighting the fight. Large numbers of rational, self-respecting people are leaving Israel, and who can blame them.

‘Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Decide to Sue New York

Over Having to Teach English, Science‘

‘Bacon: I wasn’t sure about the Jesus Christ parts of the sermon… I was struggling with whether I believe this….

So if I could find a church, and this may already exist, where the Sunday school is very low on the beliefs of Jesus and very high on the community part, that’s what I’m looking for.

[I’d like a church] focused less on Jesus rising from the dead and more about being compassionate, caring people…

Martin: Do you think though, to even loosely wear the identity of a cultural Christian, don’t you need the resurrection part?’

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America is secularizing at an astonishing rate, and this NPR interview with a young man raised in the Black charismatic church tells you part of the reason why — and it’s a very simple reason: Increasingly, the very content of the Christian faith strikes a lot of people as untrue.

With even Laura Ingraham calling bullshit on the fundamental truth of his being, John Eastman has gone total Beyond the Fringe, huddling on mountaintops with his mad leader, awaiting The Fraud’s earth-shattering revelation.

… but there’s SOOOO much more, as this terrific essay from last year notes.

LOL. Jodi Dean describes the aristocratic Catholic governing authority trying to worm its way into our democratic hearts.

Public morals legislation, the public observation of Christian religious practices, and a family policy aimed toward incentivizing marriage and increasing family size (as opposed to, say, promoting reproductive justice and publicly funded childcare) are hardly the stuff of a multiracial, multiethnic working-class party in a secular society that recognizes the existence of women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Duh. If you want to know what life under a Cathophate would look like, revisit Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and take a gander at Lady Marchmain – that megaCatholic upper-cruster. She’ll be president, and her son Bridey VP, in the Cathophate to Come, and together their putrescent moral superiority will reduce us all to sniveling drunks, like poor Sebastian.

[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.

Sounds yummy! Go, Prof Vermeule!

… militia. I don’t think this Israeli women’s political movement is going to go after the vile and increasingly powerful ultraorthodox cult in that country with guns; but if you ask UD whether the prospect of armed female avengers against primitive theocrats is pleasant or unpleasant, she’d have to go with pleasant.

See also the millions of Iranian women whose fuck the hijab militancy grows with each grotesque effort on the part of the government to frighten them into wearing the modesty cap.

… says BOO first in rural Washington State:

The Columbia County Rural Library District could be dissolved by voters after a community member filed a petition to close the library amid a censorship fight over LGBTQ+ books aimed at teens.

Better dead than read, baby. You won’t want to miss America’s inaugural community bonfire, where you can join hands in the big circle and cremate Shakespeare while journalists and historians mill about recording the event. No more pencils no more books no more teachers’ dirty looks children will chant in the moonlight while sparks fly upward and hitlers from the hollers whoop whoop de whoop.

… Knesset.