What a wonderful thing to say. What a wonderful way to put it.

So UD’s home state (really home: born in Hopkins Hospital, spent summers at crab feasts on the Bay, grew up in Bethesda) has just been named the Happiest State in America by Wallet Hub.

Okay, no.  Hawaii is the happiest – duh – but Maryland came in second.  Second!  Let us ask why.  Let us count the ways.

1.  Am I blue?  Am I blue?   A glance at the full happy list tells you that Democratic states are far happier than Republican, and it doesn’t get any bluer than Maryland, My Maryland.  Even our Republican governor is a Democrat.  He calls the Republican running to succeed him a ‘QAnon whack job.’

2.  Money does buy happiness.  We’re always ranked in the top ten wealthiest states, with a huge amount of government and high tech and corporate stuff wedged into our tiny domain.  My little town’s budget – I live in a place called Garrett Park – can only be called an embarrassment of riches.  And unlike our saddest states – Louisiana, Mississippi – we don’t worry that everyone’s going to steal everything.

3.  “Community and Environment” is one of three major categories on which the study focuses.  My park-like town is small and my state is small.  I know my neighbors. Most of us volunteer for stuff and are charitable with our money.   I know my representatives.  I’ve met Senator Chris Van Hollen twice – at a small dinner, where we talked at length, and then in Vermont, at a mutual friend’s birthday party, where we talked even more.  Van Hollen arranged it so my old friend Terry’s father – who captured Tojo! – got the military recognition he deserved.  One of my neighbors hosted a meet and greet for Jamie Raskin – then her American University colleague – and I got to know the guy.  Raskin’s January 6 Committee eloquence made me … happy.

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It ain’t rocket science.  The very saddest states – look at the list – tend to be corrupt, and they feature isolated people who hate the government.  The very happiest contain lucky so and so’s like me: Beneficiaries of accessible, rational, pretty uncorrupt government; strong communities which tend to use their wealth generously; and beloved, well-tended, natural as well as civic settings.

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And don’t forget to combine isolation with guns all over the house!

A Utah Student has been Charged with

Making Terrorism Threats

Over a Football Game

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‘According to the charging documents, the student studied engineering and had knowledge of the university’s nuclear reactor.

The University of Utah is among more than two dozen U.S. universities with nuclear engineering programs that use reactors for faculty and student research.

The university said in a statement on Thursday that the reactor was secured and campus law enforcement had protocols in place to ensure no breaches are made.’

A plagiarist guilty of massive amounts of plagiarism turns out to be guilty of even more. What makes Paul McCrory super-plus appetizing is that it’s all been in the service of keeping concussed athletes on the field.

Our Christian Nationalists, Cathophate-Planners, and assorted hierocrats need to start thinking about how hard they’re willing to crack down – once they take over the country – on what’s emerging as a more and more secular American population.

Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule and his Xian Morality Brigade fully expect that, when we spiritually parched people taste the blessings of the strict – but loving – Xian state, we will be blissed out, flooded with gratitude, and utterly obedient:

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

I’m thinking their Mullah-Doubles over in Iran must have felt just as confident when they decreed deadly divine dicta for everyone (but specially for breasty hairy femmes); yet a glance at the current situation in that glorious theocracy tells you you got trouble right here in Isfahan City.

See, when a small group of woman-reviling fanatics who think they have a pipeline to God take over a government and start imposing their twisted morality on everybody, things might not turn out all that well. Iran’s on fire, sparked by the Morality Police’s inevitable murder of a young woman whose body swaddling was insufficiently tight to excite the squad. Bad girl and now we will beat you and kill you wow did that feel good.

Not sure how much longer the fun can last. The orgasmic release of harlot-homicide may be less and less available to the pious men of Iran as the country’s population torches the cities.

Nesrine Malik’s description of many Middle Eastern countries applies as well to America’s haredi enclaves, where a fiercely cultivated mental and civic retardation has reduced ultraorthodoxy to an increasingly peculiar, increasingly belligerent, cult.

Because, by definition, many ultraorthodox people don’t know how to argue, UD will charitably refrain from linking to their efforts to defend themselves against the now-notorious New York Times article; she will say, however, that the origins of this group’s virtually one hundred percent full-throated support of that noted polemicist Donald Trump now become clearer to her. As do the origins of their outsize presence at the January 6 rally and even at the insurrection. No one should be surprised that violence is the last refuge of the illiterate. It’s the only voice they have, I guess.

One – only one – Iranian politician gets it. When the state deputizes squads of insane misogynists/religious fanatics to wander all over Tehran harassing women who don’t look quite as much like death warmed over as they would like, you’re asking for trouble.

I mean, I’m sure these loons have been beating/jailing inadequately hijabed women there for some time; but since no one’s up and died, it hasn’t been that big a deal, right?

But it was only a matter of time before the nutso woman-hatred Iran has let loose on its streets (and after all, as Mona Eltahawy points out, violent woman-hatred was already baked in long before the loons assumed power) was going to kill someone; and since Iran already has millions of women who profoundly resent mandatory swaddling, the shit has now hit the fan with the killing of a young woman in custody.

Wonder if it’ll spread to Afghanistan.

It certainly seems to be spreading – quickly – through Iran.

… as the season changes and empty spots appear. Saw one in Pier 450‘s bayside garden and decided I wanted one too.

… when Antwerp’s haredi community, faced with the same educational mandate New York’s haredim are facing, did something altogether amazing — something NY’s haredim might want to take a look at.

[The Belgian haredi community] asked the court to fine the government $6,780 per child for every day the [mandates] are in place.

Good golly Miss Molly! THE STATE HAS TO PAY US, PER DAY, THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, PER CHILD, AS LONG AS IT INSISTS ON OUR EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN.

The suit was ” strongly denied … by the court,” for some reason… But maybe the strategy could work here! Maybe demand more of a per child per diem? 10,000’s a nice round number. Something to start bargaining with.

… hangs from its threads inches from my sliding door. Out of focus. Best I could do.

Systematic. Intended. Wowza.

‘Hasidic girls’ schools sometimes refuse to release transcripts to their graduates who need them for secular colleges.’

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To find a precedent for this grotesque behavior, you have to go back to ancient China, where women’s feet were deformed through binding, so that they would be more easily exploitable in work settings, or competitive in marriage.

In general, though, the phenomenon of a community intentionally disabling its own young people in order to force them to stay within the tight bounds – if you will – of the community is so perverted that it’s very hard to find any precedent at all.

We’ve covered quite a few university professors on this blog who faked Native identity to get jobs and other goodies. Canada’s highly publicized search for lots and lots and lots of Indigenous faculty attracted a ton of fakers, and some of them got hired, and some of them have been outed as bogus, and schools are now having to decide how to deal with the situation, which is farcical and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Here’s the latest. She just resigned.

And here’s more detail than you want.

Words o’ wisdom?

Just the obvious. Don’t set up a big fat incentive target if you don’t want people shooting at it. Be insanely skeptical. Do background checks, silly.

 “It’s important to understand how young these parents are when they enroll their first child in school,” [a member of the ultraorthodox community] said.

Typically, hassidic couples have an arranged marriage around age 18, [Rayne] Lunger explained. “Then the expectation is to have kids right away. So at age 21, the expectation is that they’ll send the kids to the school that’s part of the hassidic group they belong to. … You have no connections outside of your own community, and no support,” Lunger continued… Lunger was born and raised in New Square, an all-hassidic, or ultra-Orthodox, village in Rockland County, New York, ranked as the state’s poorest municipality.

The Nothing Song first captures, in Yiddish, the Nothing Modern/Nothing Permitted character of ultraorthodox life:

Montik, gornisht
Dinstik, gornisht
Midvokh un Donershtik gornisht
Fraytik, far a noveneh
Gornisht pikveleh
Shabes nach a mool gornisht

It then, in English, moves on to the yeshiva curriculum:

Reading, nothing
Writing, nothing
Even arithmetic, nothing
Geography, philosophy, history, nothing
Social anthropology, a lot of nothing