Und so weiter. Take your pick of today’s headlines about the THREE MILLION Ohioans who came out to vote in the middle of August in a seemingly obscure bureaucratic referendum.

BUT one that would make it more difficult to defend abortion rights, see, which seems to have fired up a whole lotta people.

[Voters] overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.

The measure’s defeat now gives abortion-rights supporters a clearer path to victory.

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Protecting abortion access is extremely popular in the United States. Efforts that would make it harder to ensure abortion rights can help voters understand how Republican politicians are trying to tilt elections to thwart majority rule.

An adorably capricious Florida school board has changed its mind: And Tango Makes Three can stay in the library … for now! As soon as another patron catches wind of the book’s panting homoeroticism, it’ll be whisked away again. So get it while you can.

… Knesset.

They could have apologized long long ago

Or filed no appeals and settled it (doh!)

They could have let up on destroying the shop

But no one and nothing could make them stop

And now the school weathers yet more horrid news

Insurance won’t pay so they’re going to sue

Yes, more crushing payout for many more years

All because Oberlin stopped up its ears

… sears your arm as you slide back the deck door. The storm’s coming up fast.

We’ve brought in cushions and we’ve stabilized chair frames and potted plants. I called an elderly friend who lives alone to make sure she knows we’ll come over there after to check on her. She didn’t know about the storm. “I’ll head down to the basement. I’ll call you if.”

5:28 PM and it’s suddenly pitch black. Really pitch black.

Like this.

An administrative court in Germany has ruled against her complaint about not being able to drive like this, but she’ll probably appeal to a higher court blah blah. ‘The judges do not think the ban violates the German Constitution, as it does not “severely restrict religious freedom.” Instead, the practice of religion is “only restricted in a narrowly limited life situation that is typically not essential for freedom of religion,” the verdict continues.’

Well but that assumes a woman not ruled by a man who will kill her if anyone gets a glimpse of her nose.

BTW: UD can’t help but notice that this woman’s hands are uncovered!

Give Wyomingites guns and they’ll kill themselves. Give them cars and …

Hell, why don’t your basic rodeo boy just kill himself by smashing his Chevy Suicido into a lightpole?

I’ll tell you why. First and most important when you use a Glock that ol gun will survive pulping your head fully intact, to be handed down to your suicidal son and his suicidal son ad infinifuckinitum. OTOH you’re definitely gonna total the truck. The truck’s goin down with you.

Secundum: It takes a whole lotta planning and a whole lotta luck to stage a successful trucko-da-fe. Maybe you’ll just go the paraplegic route. Maybe you’ll kill other people. The whole thing’s a big ol mess. At-home pulping, especially if you do it in the bathtub or shower, is neat and sweet and one hundred percent effective. State park pulping, a popular option among Wyoming’s rugged outdoorsmen, is even neater, and leaves you, as you expire, not with views of yourself careening agonizingly into a hard surface, but of calm majestic Tetons.

Thirdly: The whole public/private thing. The wreck’s gonna traumatize onlookers; and because it’s a news story it’ll make the local tv shows. Some guy popping his top at home is no news at all in Wyoming. Furthermore, beyond the extra expense your family will bear making you coffin-ready with your whole body pulverized vs. with just a little hole in your head, there’s the whole embarrassment on top of grief thing as the kinfolk deal with the community curiosity whipped up by the newspaper pix of your twisted truck/body.

The Martha’s Vineyard library wars rage on. My headline is from 2022; this year, the female genital mutilator’s best friend has again been dissed by his bookish neighbors and is again screaming about how he doesn’t care that he’s been frozen out of the island’s book fair because he’s so great and but but but he’s going to sue the library for a quadrillion dollars anyway and shut it down forever so the elderly matrons of the Vineyard will have to find someplace else to volunteer haha.

He says the maltreatment’s cuz he’s all in with Trump and all; but really if you’re looking for reasons to dissociate from an unacceptably malsain person, Dershowitz offers so much more than that, from his way-close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein to his eager legal defense of some of the scuzziest humanoids on the planet. This is a man who calls Germans who oppose male circumcision Nazis. He has weathered years of being accused of plagiarism. He has just been sanctioned. Etc. When it comes to reasons to cancel Dershowitz, take your pick.

Until recently, a large majority of Israelis tolerated the [ultra orthodox]. Sometimes they gritted their teeth, sometimes they griped, but they went on shouldering the security and economic burden of the state on behalf of the haredim. The events of the last few months, and the conduct of the government, in full partnership with the haredim, will likely change all that. Utterly blind to reality, the haredim have now gone even further by proposing a new Basic Law: “Torah Study,” which would give draft dodgers a status similar to those serving in the IDF.

… Faced with yet another step which the majority of Israelis, the burden bearers, perceive as unfair and exploitative, the tumult of recent days may pale in comparison to what is to come. True, the haredim can do whatever they want under the current government, but short of a complete dictatorship here, they will pay the full price when the next government takes power. The budgets that finance their way of life will be slashed, government support for those who don’t prepare their students for a productive life will be terminated, and rights will be denied to those who don’t serve in the army or at least in civilian national service.

Andrew Sullivan’s final, parenthetical, mention of John Eastman is the most interesting part of this paragraph. (No link.)

Giuliani’s nothing. A sloppy drunk. Powell is something, but only one thing: The reincarnated Jean Harris, described by Diana Trilling at her murder trial as having the fixed expression “of the classic belle indifference of morbid hysteria, the corners of the mouth turned up in the fixed beginning of a smile.” 

Sullivan’s right that of the weird sisters only Eastman deserves a treason trial – one, because he is neither insane nor strung out; and, two, because he and he alone both conceived and plotted the treachery.

Wow, Tenderloin has really pushed the envelope. It has figured out a way to keep out the homeless!

If you want to get ahead.

Like Donald Trump, one of these two has turned around and sued everyone in sight (for massive damages) for having had the gall to point out fraudulence.

Let’s see what Dan Ariely does. He’ll probably sue too. I mean, go for it. Double down. What the hell.

Background.

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This dude, a notorious, long-term fraudster, has finally been dumped by Florida State. Took them ages.

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The lesson from all of this (and so much more) is: BEWARE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS BEARING STUDIES. But no one ever seems to learn it.

Philippe Guibert gets it said. And why hasn’t there been much backlash?

Because many people agree with him.

Because many people on the other side, who wear/promote the hijab, routinely call it a modesty garment and – like the embattled Iranian government – routinely identify women who don’t wear it as prostitutes.

Living a quick commuter train ride from DC gives UD plenty of neck-craning opportunities. Id est if I REALLY wanted to sample the crazed security scene around Fuckface’s court appearance today I could certainly do so; and I’d certainly enjoy sketching the moment for this my blog.

But I’d rather tend my own garden. Literally. The heat has broken; I’ve just bought a bunch of bushes etc. that need planting. So today will be not voyeurism but domestic bliss.

“I can’t have my daughters living in a place like that,” [Zion] Zibly said of Israel. “They grew up in a country with Jewish democratic values and it is becoming undemocratic and [more] Jewish — not in the direction of my Jewishness, but in a manner in which they dictate to me what being Jewish is.”

Hey, he’s even named for the place. But no one with half a brain (and Zibly, now director of neurosurgery at Yale, has a whole brain) would let a daughter grow up in haredi Israel.