Well, they’re on the warpath. No Pasarán!! they cry; the enemy shall not pass through our sacred gates! So-called Jews who make a PEEP about our way of life (we’re looking at you, Jonathan Tobin) are traitors and will be dealt with as such (remember Jacob Kornbluh!)

A haredi prof at a Brooklyn law school really gets it said:

When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, [Aaron] Twerski replied, “We make the trade-offs, not the state.”

Haredim to New York:

DROP DEAD

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

Nu, so what next?

Nothing. Some violent all-male demonstrations in NYC and upstate. They’ll never be pushed to the wall, so if they were smart they’d shut their traps and do nothing. But who ever said they were smart? They’ve been yeshiva-retarded. They will scream and smash and let out their sexual frustration all over town, and then, on the absurdly slim chance they are, in ten years or so, called to account, they will settle down to cheating on the standardized exam.

You thought Varsity Blues was something. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

OTOH we know nothing will happen as a result of the regents finally saying officially that zillions of schools in NYC and upstate NY – with zillions of students, their numbers growing insanely quickly, and most of them run by schoolboards rife with retarders – must be subject to serious investigation/review, and schools who keep retarding will be shut down/lose accreditation/lose subsidies… We shall do such things!

Look at Israel, babe. Look at England. England’s been failing forever to do something about schools that treat female students like slaves and teach islamofascism. Israel’s situation is hilarious. A corrupt ex-prime minister, desperate to stay out of jail, has just offered the following deal to the retarders in his country: Be part of my coalition and I promise never to interfere in any way with your child-retardation process. Full, fulsome government funding will be maintained for all of your efforts. Puts Andrew Yang to shame.

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

Because everyone knows nothing will happen, and because almost no one – from their parents to NY State officials – cares about what goes on in Jewish retardation locations, talk is cheap. Suddenly you’ve got the ex-editor of Commentary, of all people, sweating rhetorical bullets over the dire social implications if America’s big, visible, Jewish community — which is soon to be demographically dominated by the retarders — starts looking like a bunch of skid row bums. Not a good look. Nothing to do to avert it, but lemme get myself on the record saying it’s not a good look.

Jonathan Tobin begins with paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate:

Evil secular rags like the NYT hate Jews and we are right to regard anything they write with extreme skepticism.

NY public schools are shitty too.

‘[P]oliticians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19.’ Hey Tobin short memory: Google Orthodox Spreader Events, lad. (‘[M]ost [haredim] continue to live in constant poverty and go to the doctor without being able to understand their own diagnosis. The price they pay, as we have seen during COVID-19, as well as the recent polio upsurge and anti-vax sentiments … is high and will remain so unless major changes come.’)

After many we’re the victims! paragraphs, Tobin finally, gingerly, timorously, delicately, reticently, dips a toe in.

You don’t have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state.

I like that “may.” It may be widespread. Ya think? I don’t think. I think a long-term reading of the NYT reveals just the opposite – an effort to write about religious Jews

(And hey Tobin doesn’t really mean religious Jews, does he? Reform Judaism, in which I was raised, is religious, but of course ultraorthodox Jews think Reform Judaism is an utterly profane obscene joke. In Israel, ultras spit at/shout GOYISH WHORE at eight year old Orthodox girls whose skirts are shorter than they should, ultra-istically, be. I think Tobin needs to specify what he has in mind by the phrase religious Jews. Me, I think a baseline definition of a religious Jew is a person who takes the ethical as well as spiritual tradition of Judaism seriously, which would, religiously, put the endemically corrupt ultraorthodox movement somewhere quite far below the Reform and Conservative movements.)

with the same neutrality/objectivity the paper’s journalists write about everything else. But what the hell is objectivity if you’re a yeshiva-educated ultra? The schools have surgically removed, as a cancer, anything that comes out of the empirical, enlightenment, traditions. This is what makes ultras such perfect Trumpians – it’s all conspiracies, rage, our side’s righteous lies, our side’s unique possession of the transcendent truth. (Bonus point here: One of the many reasons nothing’s going to happen to the ultra-orthodox retardation locations is that politicians are literally frightened of this group, whose … parlous… emotional/intellectual state combined with unquestioning mass obedience/action means … riots. Politicians don’t like riots, and believe me there will be riots if anything seriously disruptive is done to ultra life. Remember the mass attack on Jacob Kornbluh. That’s just the beginning. America’s ultras are way behind Israel’s, who riot pretty much continually; but mess with them and they’ll be torching cars.)

And then a little more delicacy cuz we don’t want to hurt any feelings here: APPEAR TO BE the lowest in the state. Another conspiracy? Have the Jew-haters in the NY State testing bureaucracy fucked with the results? Good to be skeptical about things like this.

Tobin sympathetically explains the ultra POV:

They believe that the issue here isn’t so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state … to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society. 

Two points here:

1. If you want to opt out of society, you don’t get to take society’s hard-earned tax dollars. You’ve opted out of that.
2. You might want to opt out of society, but society can’t opt out of you. You live among us, you vote in our elections (why?), and – wait for it – we have laws. We have laws against beating kids up and defrauding the welfare system and assaulting children sexually. I know you do everything you can to hush up your bad behavior, but society features people – police, journalists, social workers – who act as society’s conscience and try to make sure that children aren’t being abused, our taxpayers aren’t being ripped off, etc. etc. The big glossy NYT article last Sunday draws many more eyes to your – anti-society? – than were ever on it before. Time to duck. “This is something dark. This is the willful perpetuation of social pathology at the hands of Jewish leaders.” “As Hilly Rubin, a resident of the heavily Chassidic neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., told The New York Times: ‘They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much.'”

Here, Tobin. Feast your eyes.

Tobin eventually says the right, obvious, sane things about ultraorthodox yeshivas, but it’s so hedged about with paranoia and knee-jerk anti-leftism (As many commenters on the NYT article note, it’s nuts to make this a left/right thing. Ultras don’t know shit about politics OUT THERE, in That Distant Evil Society. They go where the ultra-friendliest winds blow.) that it’s worthless.

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

UD in front of the Israeli Embassy,

Washington DC, 2013. Photo: Jewish

Daily Forward.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro of Queens led the group of rabbis protesting [in Albany] Monday. 

“There is a viable, working community,” he said. “The fact that they’re failing math is not indicative of a problem.”

… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:

One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.

The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:

The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas… 

[Yang]  criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.

 … Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…

Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.

So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?

… turned up as I raked away dead summer stalks in my pollinator garden. It’s ten inches long.

I’m not surprised to find it. Late afternoon into evening, I often hear owls hooting in the high trees – and we’ve got scads of rabbits and other treats for them.

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

Update: Okay, a reader tells me it’s too big to be from a screech owl. Back to Google Images. Maybe a hawk?

… Russia becomes more desperate

and dangerous. A frightening time.

An emotional time.

[His current legal disasters] reveal a corruption of character, triggered by a succession of moral compromises over the years undertaken to maintain the power and money that he’d grown accustomed to after Sept. 11... His political power has evaporated, and his riches have been almost exhausted — he’s been selling personalized video greetings for $325, and he dressed as a feathered jack-in-the-box for the Fox show “The Masked Singer” this spring.

I dunno. I mean, yes, for Giuliani the hoariest cautionary tale ever (Radix malorum est cupiditas) pertains; but UD has long felt that for Giuliani, Trump, Madoff, and other famous New York maniacs, some city-specific mental illness is also at play, as if the ultimate urban fever that is NYC’s speed, greed, hallucinatory arrogance, Kafkaesque removal from common grounded life — propels these people so far from anything real that they actually become clinically nuts. I think that in his novel Cosmopolis DeLillo was trying to get at this… Just as, from his title on, Tom Wolfe tried the same thing years earlier in Bonfire of the Vanities... Something about the ultimate urban cauldron that sets a soul on fire…

If you don’t educate your children this time, I SHALL DO SUCH THINGS.

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

World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.

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

Yeah I know you think a big glossy Sun NYT exposé will make ALL the difference. You doodoo.

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

A reminder from the comment thread:

These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.

Another one:

As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.

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

Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.

The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.

No one cares. Nothing will change.

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

Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.

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

I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.

Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:

I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.

Why does this take guts?

Damned if I know.

Manifold are the ways universities fuck with statistics so they can get higher US News rankings, and it’s just Columbia’s bad luck that it hired its own petard… I mean, someone at the school actually hired the math prof who figured out Columbia had to be cheating AND PUBLICIZED THE FACT ON HIS FACULTY WEBSITE. Now, months later, the school admits yeah we did that thing and we promise to stop.

WWWWuh oh. WWWWWWWWuh ooooooohhhhh. You is runnin headlong into theology, lady, as in God TOLD you He’s not a sadist but what you gonna do about the fact that God told your male Republican colleagues damn straight He IS a sadist?

This is South Carolina, the Jesus-Told-Me State. It’s like – you played your game of Telephone with the Lord, and He totally told you NOT to destroy mothers and children and babies with a no-exceptions state abortion law; but all them guys played their game of Telephone with the Lord and the Lord told them hell go ahead and force people to give birth even though it might kill them.

Static on the line? Who’s hearing it wrong?

Miscommunication – you said it. Might just make a body wonder ifn basing legislation on who’s hearing Jesus correctly might not be a good idea.

… as soon as the publisher tweaks this and that detail so the same legal team that’s doing a bang-up job for Dominion Voting doesn’t start sniffing around…

Actually a few copies of Dinesh D’Souza’s pre-tweaked 2,000 Ghouls did get to bookstores! Go here to enjoy NPR‘s close reading. Turns out the greatest scandal in the nation’s history was all about two thousand members of the American Communist Party who drilled down into a system of tunnels under Interstate 10 and established a bunker from which they sent out Soros-financed “ghouls” who snuck in, under cover of night, to ballot-storage centers in key states. Once they established entry, they keyed in the security codes (provided by Facebook), took out all the Trump votes and replaced them with Biden. The whole operation, once in the buildings, apparently took seconds.

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

PS: Let the Bozo Beware!

Just after the 2020 election, a major Republican donor named Fred Eshelman gave True the Vote $2.5 million to assist in efforts to investigate allegations of election fraud. Just weeks later, Eshelman sued True the Vote in federal court, and accused the group of failing to pursue legal action in time to affect the election, and failing to communicate about what it was doing with those millions. Eshelman demanded that True The Vote return the donation. True The Vote denied any wrongdoing and refused to return the money. Eshelman’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

It’s such a small crime, and the jails are already full, and hell just let em go. The results have been spectacular if you’re a fan of neighborhoods with no stores in them, and the president and trustees at Oberlin, faced with their own neighborhood shoplifting problem, wasted no time expressing the same contempt for archaic law-abiders/merchandise retainers as their model, one-time SF DA Chesa Boudin.

An archaic local bakery, on discovering an Oberlin student shoplifting, viciously accused him of the crime, and then, when he denied it, proved its truth by approaching him and opening his jacket, in which two stolen wine bottles were hidden.

The crude, reactionary nature of the bakery’s response to the theft of its merchandise outraged Oberlin, which, under the organization of one of its deans, so relentlessly harassed the business – tagged as racist – that it practically collapsed.

The business sued Oberlin and won big – a way-angry jury awarded the bakery 44 million in damages, which a judge reduced to 36 mill. Oberlin proceeded to fail to pay, sending the suit to higher courts and failing upwards, and now Ah fuck it ok we’ll pay. Though where in our measly ONE BILLION DOLLAR endowment we’ll find it I don’t know…

Background here.

… meteor shower, and she finds herself, à ce moment-là, at Pier 450, right on the Chesapeake Bay – a place pretty far from any settlements, and, if you stay here, you have private use of their pier all night long.

The first thing I saw, ambling down the pier and glancing at the clear water, was… a turtle? A dark reptilian head popped up to check me out, and I bent down to greet it, but lookee here: It trailed three feet of tail and turned out to be a northern water snake.

There’s a sculpture garden nearby.

And on Solomon’s Island, also nearby, I found a somewhat shabby Corbusierian house with enviable water views. I toyed with suggesting to Mr UD (who isn’t with me) that we try to buy it.

Yesterday I read Joseph Brodsky’s poem, A Part of Speech, which brilliantly and movingly evokes the unresonant character of what used to be his home.

… A nowhere winter evening with wine…

… [A] star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven,

and no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft,

plus the emptiness where once we loved…

… As for the stars, they are always on.

That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike

sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon

here: well after hours, blinking.

The sky looks better when they are off.

Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker.

Provided you haven’t got to move

from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker.

As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face

half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is

no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze

can be rested on none of these.

… [O]ne sleeps more soundly in a wooden town,

since you dream these days only of things that happened…

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

But here, at the very bottom of mine own Maryland, a small state still insufficiently explored by ol’ UD , lie multiple scenes so resonant as to nudge up against surreal. The dark disapproving forest sculpture, the gray unmoving gulls at pier’s end, the massively overcast and also blue and also white bay sky. These will nudge me into dreams not only of things that happened.

Trump 2024 Campaign Manager?