I know it’s not supposed to make you laugh, but it makes it sound as though you turn to it only when the utilities fail.

SHORT OF ELECTRICITY, FOOD, AND WATER, VENEZUELANS TURN TO RELIGION

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

Americans? Not so much.

An excellent article about al-Hol camp raises the right questions.

The reporter’s walk through the camp reveals, in all its fullness, the surreality, depravity, and indescribable stupidity of its inmates.

But it also gets something fundamental wrong: The children are of course innocents, and governments are slowly identifying their child nationals and, if they can, taking them out of the camp. But “their women and children”? The women were also the enemy, fully paid-up, active ISIS members; and if descriptions of some of them in the camp are accurate, they are still very much caliphate combatants.

Be on the faculty of Brigham Young University.

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Who can say why countries are reluctant to have them back?

And it ROCKS!

Another thoughtful argument for trying them over there.

In a recent France 24 documentary on ISIS foreign women in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria, a camp director said that “when they [foreign ISIS women] gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again.’”

The Unsinkable Molly BOOM.

Come out, come out, wherever you are: The only Islamic high school in Amsterdam needs your support! Municipal subsidies have been withdrawn because… well… We had to threaten the inspector in order to make him leave… And then despite our scaring the shit out of the inspector, the authorities still managed to find out about our … visitors… and our … practices… and our foreign contacts… and our guest lecturers. And all. Send money!

 [George Pell] is well known … for protecting church finances from large payouts to abuse victims… He could frequently be found raising money for conservative causes in Australia, publicly condemning homosexuality and stepping into policy debates as well, opposing, for example, legislation to allow adoption by gay parents.

At the same time, he was trailed by accusations of sexual abuse reaching back to the 1960s, when he was a seminarian. His denials always won out, until two years ago, when he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face a variety of charges.

Rabbi Susan Silverman told me she was pushed to the ground and ended up banging her head on the Jerusalem stone. An ultra-Orthodox teenage girl went to kick her in the head, Rabbi Silverman said, and was only stopped when the rabbi’s 24-year-old daughter screamed at her…

[One of the violent ultra-Orthodox young girls in the crowd said that] it hurts them to see Reform Jews practicing Judaism in a way they are sure, they tell me, God does not like. That they love God so much that they deny their own desires — like singing out loud in public — to show Him their devotion. That they turned out that morning because their rabbis told them to.

Once Israel allows the girls not merely to kick but to chop off the infidels’ heads (in a way, they are sure, God likes), the country will have made itself a second home for all of the displaced ISIS ladies, who seem to share this haredi girl’s sadomasochistic authoritarian world view. Problem of where to put the displaced soldiers of the lord solved.

What? Different religions? Don’t make me laugh. Read any interview with any ISette. They know jackshit about Islam. They’ll feel right at home.

The New York Times brings to mind that famous headline, as its editorial board finally addresses, with anger, the refusal of many of New York’s ultraorthodox to educate or to vaccinate their children.

As New York City has finally begun to exercise oversight over ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that have graduated students without a basic education, some of those Jewish schools have defied city health department scrutiny and helped to feed a measles outbreak. Forty children have contracted measles in recent months, all of the cases linked to a single Brooklyn yeshiva that ignored an order from city health officials to prevent children who hadn’t been vaccinated from attending classes.

And yet a community with staggering rates of law-breaking, indifference to public welfare, and plain old pathology continues to lobby aggressively – and basically successfully – for less and less oversight by the government. Remember Christopher Hitchens on Jerry Falwell and others: You can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Here getting yourself called Rabbi allows the most extraordinary offenses against health, education, and welfare.

For decades, the communities have largely been allowed to evade government oversight, thanks to politicians who have enjoyed their support as one of the state’s most powerful voting blocs. The price of that support has been largely paid by Orthodox children.

You MUST know by now that UD/SOS loves people who write like Charles P. Pierce. Pierce, in a brief Esquire piece, lets rip his pleasure at having discovered that the Very Reverend Kenneth Starr Esq., Baylor University’s highest-ranking academic officer (until that campus rape thing) is one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. One of the guys who helped Epstein – a notorious sex offender – get a singularly light sentence.

As a headline from another source puts it:

Moralist Ken Starr Explains His Help For Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein

Ecoute: Those of us who love the full and frank exposure of full and rank hypocrisy love this story. It was written for us…. Continues to be written, cuz the tale of the high-profile men (including one of this blog’s favorites, FGM defenderAlan Dershowitz) accused of sharing Epstein’s underage sex slaves is finally – after years of flaccidity – up and at ’em again on the front page.

Not to mention the tweets.

What a sweet way to put it.

Where’s enslaving and dismembering infidels?

As a member in good standing of ISIS Hoda Muthana quite likely had a personal Yazidi slave. Wherever she ends up, she’s unlikely to know the pleasures of owning another human being again. Though she might try applying for citizenship in one of these countries.