… rot.

The latest Trump indictment shows that the unprecedented has become routine. Before March, a former American president had never been indicted. Trump has now been indicted three times in about four months.

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who resigned in 2002, said at the time that her actions were “a gesture of hate.” A spokesman for Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who was removed from public duties in 2013, called her actions “just another example of anti-Catholicism.”

[O’Connor] became most associated with efforts to combat abuse within the Catholic Church, decades before the scale of the [sexual abuse] problem within American religious organizations — from the Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to the Hasidic dynasties of New York — became common knowledge.

… One of the church’s most high-profile and influential priests in the United States, Theodore E. McCarrick, was expelled from the church in 2019 and is facing sexual assault charges in two states, the first and only American cardinal to be criminally charged in connection with sex abuse.

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McCarrick didn’t unload on O’Connor. He’s in the article to remind you just how bad it was, and how right O’Connor was.

UD has somewhat sputteringly tried, over the years of this blog, to summarize the sicko fantasies of Adrian Vermeule. She’s always on the lookout for calmer, clearer, accounts. Levitz’s is good.

Polish and Hungarian campaigners recognise in Netanyahu’s drive to turn Israel into an illiberal democracy the transformation wreaked in their own countries. Activists have travelled between Warsaw, Budapest and Jerusalem trading lessons, advice and even solidarity videos. “Tell your people that this must not happen because you might end up like Poland,” urged the country’s former president Lech Wałęsa in a message to Israelis. Meanwhile, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper uses the slogan “Democracy can die in daylight too”, a nod to the Washington Post’s Trump-era motto: “Democracy dies in darkness.” 

…  If all the strength and numbers Israel’s pro-democracy movement has mustered are not enough, what exactly will it take? Can it really be that a nation is powerless to stop a leader bent on destroying his country to save himself? That thought is almost too bleak to contemplate. Which is why everyone who cares about democracy, including those who are distant from Israel, should desperately want those protesters to succeed. We need them to win.

Indeed Randy Reza is a state official in charge of maintaining Islamic values in Iran. And while he’s humiliating, intimidating, and jailing thousands of women for not wearing their piety cap, he’s getting it on with his boyfriend which is SOOOOO non-Islamic ….

But nothing will happen to Reza. He’s a man, after all.

Given that Israel lacks a formal constitution — its idealistic 1948 Declaration of Independence and a series of easily amended “basic laws” are no substitute — and that the same coalition controls the government and the parliament, [we are seeing] a near-Putinization of what has until now been a liberal democracy for 75 years. Netanyahu would effectively control all three branches of government.

This reflects a vulgar view of democracy as amounting to a tyranny of the majority, wildly out of sync with the American system of checks and balances on top of guarantees for each citizen secured by the Bill of Rights.

… Israel is by now on the threshold of dictatorship. Yet we are optimistic, because the massive resistance movement that has arisen in Israel, with hundreds of grass-roots organizations working together and more being created by the day, shows that President Herzog was actually right. It shows that after years of indifference and fence-sitting, the liberal-democratic camp understands that it needs to fight for its freedom and the future of Israel as a liberal democracy, in a determined manner and for the longer term.

A question we’ve asked for lo these many years on this blog.

‘[Bruno] Cua planned his attack weeks in advance, brought weapons to the Capitol, tried to terrorize congressional staffers and was repeatedly aggressive toward police, prosecutors said… “Cua played a unique and prominent role on January 6, opening the Senate Chamber to the rioters, escalating confrontations, and leading other rioters into and through the Capitol.”

… Cua and his parents drove from their home in Milton, Georgia, to Washington D.C…

Cua was armed with pepper spray and a metal baton — weapons given to him by his father — when rioters breached police lines on the west side of the Capitol, according to prosecutors. After climbing scaffolding, Cua entered the building through the Upper West Terrace doors and and walked down a hallway toward the Senate.

“As Cua walked down the hallway, he tried to open every single office door he passed by pulling on doorknobs, pounding on the doors with his fist, and kicking the doors,” prosecutors wrote.

They said Cua intended to intimidate staffers who were behind the doors as he yelled, “Hey! Where are the swamp rats hiding?”

Cua went to the third floor, where he shoved a Capitol police officer who was trying to lock doors to the Senate gallery. After the officer retreated, Cua entered the gallery, shouting “This is our house! This is our country!” Jumping onto the Senate floor, he sat in the chair for then-Vice President Mike Pence, leaned back and propped his feet up on a desk.

Then he opened a door, allowing dozens of other rioters onto the Senate floor. Before leaving, Cua rifled through desks belonging to Senators Charles Grassley, John Thune and Dianne Feinstein.’

All that, and only eighteen years old. Off you go to prison, lad! Maw and Paw must be so proud.

Dr. Matan Bar Yishai, a family doctor from the Maccabi healthcare service who has decided to relocate to New Zealand, told the Walla news site: “I am very sorry to everyone for the decision I made. I really love the country and my patients, but in the end, it is a family decision.”

Look. Give the people driving out Israel’s doctors, and provoking impressive numbers of Israeli pilots to stop flying, what they want. The people about to take over Israel didn’t give a shit about whatever “covid” was and refused vaccination and thereby killed a bunch of their people. Germ theory of disease? Our rabbi calls bs on it. The old ways are the best ways! He alone (to use the words of one of the heroes of the world’s ultraorthodox) can save us. What we need and what Israel needs is prayer, which is why our people don’t fight to defend the country, but only pray to defend the country, the way we prayed to keep all those children and old people from dying of covid…

Not that the haredim recognize the country “Israel,” since the messiah isn’t here yet or something. Many make a point of ignoring the national moments of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, pointedly cavorting about while Israelis stand in mourning. These people do not want vaccines, doctors, or even a country. They don’t want an economy of workers. So let them have what they want. Large numbers of people with money and skills are leaving Israel; investors are leaving Israel. The economy’s tanking. The ultraorthodox are giddy with excitement. They have always gloried in poverty and ignorance, and now all the people bothering them about teaching basic literacy to their children or getting jobs instead of rioting are finally going to shut up. Gottze dank!

An Iranian chess player who moved to Spain in January after she competed without a hijab and had an arrest warrant issued against her at home has been granted Spanish citizenship, Spain said on Wednesday.

 LEWIS tipped both O’CONNOR and WAUGH and encouraged them to trade based on material, non-public information.  In one instance, LEWIS gave O’CONNOR and WAUGH loans, each worth $500,000, so they could buy a company’s stock before the public release of favorable clinical results.  In connection with that loan, O’CONNOR texted a friend to buy the stock, told the friend the “Boss is helping us out and told us to get ASAP,” and assured the friend that “All conversations on app is encrypted so all good.  No one can ever see.” 

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Wow. You know you’ve made it when your bail is set at $300 million.

Witty protest signs abounded. “Bibi, haven’t the Jews suffered enough?”

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[One protester commented:] “It may not be a good idea to turn the Israeli army’s entire logistical command against you.”

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When fighter pilots rose to prominence among the opponents to Netanyahu’s plans, his minister of communications, Shlomo Karhi, suggested the pilots — who are lionized figures in Israeli society — “can go to hell.”

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Within half an hour of the bill passing, 64-0 amid an opposition boycott, hundreds of pilots posted pictures of themselves, many in tears, sending their unit commanders letters ending their decades of service. “We signed a contract to fight for the realm,” they wrote. “We will not fight for a king.” The Israel Defense Forces later revealed that more than half of the air force personnel that signed the original petition to Netanyahu, including pilots, had followed through and informed their units they would no longer report to reserve duty.

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I keep thinking of a phrase Harold Meyerson used to describe the people about to take over Israel: “theocratic-primitivist.” Yeah, theocratic; but the other thing is even more important. More devastating. I’ve written for years about the ultraorthodox in Israel and America, and it’s definitely their primitivism, rather than any particular form of spiritual adherence, that shocks. Several forms of theocracy exist in the world, after all; but the extreme archaism, the bitter super-regression of this massive cult, is the really distinctive and frightening thing. Pre-law, pre-science, pre-education, pre-reason, pre-individualism, pre-nation, pre-state, pre-equality, pre-humanity. Like their primitive precursors, the new owners of Israel grant humanity only to their own tribe, and consider violence – along with non-violent forms of criminal behavior – against extra-tribal forces justified under a wide array of circumstances.

They are a form of death. A death-cult. A burial society burying human life itself. They will certainly bury Israel.

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The reasonableness bill cannot be divorced from the entire package of legislation, which, taken together, will end Israeli democracy as we know it. 

… In a country that devotes more and more resources to maintain the occupation and the settlements; in a country with no separation of religion and state, where marriages are subject to religious law and allowed only for heterosexual couples; and in a country that allocates tremendous resources to religious institutions, where the ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the military and their participation in the labor market is extremely low, insisting that the very textural fabric of Israeli society is both Jewish and democratic is becoming less and less convincing. The battle in the streets is not just about the constitutional overhaul. It is whether Israel can have a future as a liberal democracy.

Well now she has, it seems, suffered an Amy Winehouse death. It was probably suicide.

Her last tweet describes her as inconsolable since the suicide of her son: “Been living as undead night creature… Lost in the bardo without him.”

Like Winehouse, her art was the art of the fully exposed nerve, the gift of the inability to be anything other than fully out there as damaged and confused beyond repair.

 “I’m not a pop star. I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then.”