… paints the exterior

of her country house.

I’m talking about Israel. Here in the States they seem to be united on the total ignorance front; in Israel, where the government has found the balls to withdraw some funding from the most profoundly retarded schools (where they don’t teach anything secular above baby Hebrew and toddler math), we begin to see some ultraorthodox factions moving insidiously toward the education of their children.

Two months ago, the ultra-Orthodox newspaper HaMishpacha reported that the Belz Hassidic sect, a sect considered conservative, in a behind-the-scenes move led an effort to integrate its educational institutions into the public school system. The sect’s schools would be directly integrated into the Ministry of Education without becoming part of the ultra-Orthodox “independent education” branch.

According to the plan, which has caused an uproar within the ultra-Orthodox community, Belz institutions would agree to include secular subjects in their curricula. In exchange, they would receive full funding. This is a change from the current situation where they are defined as “exempt institutions,” which means that they are exempt from government curricula, but receive only partial funding. 

… [U]ltra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, which is composed of the Hassidic Agudat Yisrael faction (which includes Belz) and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah faction, may even split up.

A Missouri psychotic named Greitens

Has watched as his Senate race tightens

He beats up his son

He threatens with guns

And Republican voters are frightened

An observer is stunned at evidence that profoundly influential studies of depression and Alzheimer’s may have been shown to be bogus.

But he’s wrong about the “producing no results.” The serotonin thing has resulted in tens of millions of Americans being put on powerful, very hard to withdraw from, meds – meds which probably are not responsible for whatever alleviation of their condition these people may be experiencing.

Hawley Concerned That Being a Coward

Is Overshadowing His Work as a Fascist

… and every day will be … Sunday? Monday? Funday? … No! GUNday.

“[G]oing berserk with guns has become an American way of life.“

And it’s only lunchtime. Stay tuned.

Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve learned a lot about it, and DeLillo’s world view, just from reading this blog, which after all has a whole category devoted to DeLillo. The Noah Baumbach production opens August 31 at the Venice Film Festival.

A Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo is an entirely urban animal, yet he knowledgeably sets his novel in a small midwestern “village” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment); a writer who has never had children, he sensitively places at the heart of the book the character and fate of many children in a blended family (their parents are much-divorced). As with many of my posts on the postmodern way of death, the novel first establishes the enviably, pleasantly, eventlessly “immune” life of affluent Americans, and then throws a lethal environmental catastrophe (“the airborne toxic event”) right in their faces. And lungs.

So DeLillo locates the Gladney family (glad; bland) in the cute village of Blacksmith, with its preserved nineteenth century main street and vernacular library and town hall and churches…

From its sweet pre-industrial name to its charming brick storefronts, Blacksmith could convince you you really are living a pre-modern life, before advanced technology, massive shopping malls, and endless ubiquitous streaming media; but, as White Noise makes hilariously clear, it’s all a simulacrum, a Truman-show facade behind which lies, like it or not, the late twentieth century.

When the disaster hits, Gladney’s first response is total denial:

“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”

The filmmakers chose Wellington, Ohio for their Blacksmith – a heartland town whose preserved main street has won national awards.

The cast?

A vote for Gov Gregory Abbott

Endangers your vibrator rabbit

Surrender your dildo

Your misery will grow

Vote Beto! and keep to your habit

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

Really – the race is as tight as a Kegel exercise. Now’s the time to give Beto money.

No kidding. We wuz robbed Trump has transexualized into Ada Doom, the batty granny in Cold Comfort Farm, who obsessively says: I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I saw something nasty in the election returns.

This blog therefore now officially drops the moniker we have long given Trump, inspired by what Nicolae Ceaușescu insisted he be called — The Genius of the Carpathians — and adopts a new one: Ada Doom.

Government lawyers also intend to ask the judge to remove Christine Jorgensen, Kemal Atatürk, Carly Simon, Eric Satie, and Damien Thorn from the list of people Trump is suing.

You probably don’t think it’s worth your while to read, in depth, the self-defense of the rioters, but, for pure amusement, this is a good read.

… that this nation’s first case of polio in many years originated in an ultraorthodox Jewish sect. The Times of Israel summarizes:

Young man who recently got married is suffering from paralysis; was not vaccinated; is a resident of Rockland County, which has a history of low vaccine compliance

The story is getting wide coverage. What it represents is the shame of a nation. A modern, enlightened country like the US should see no polio at all, since any outbreak is the result of absolutely basic disregard of personal and civic health norms.

Imagine: A highly contagious disease like that lurking, and a community’s indifference to basic science and the well-being of its children allows people to go unvaccinated. It’s of a piece with these same communities refusing to educate their children to national standards, breaking tax laws, and breaking non-discrimination laws. Not to mention refusing vaccines for other easily avoided scourges.

The new polio case comes amid fierce backlash against vaccination in some Orthodox communities fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in 2018 and 2019 that was centered in the area’s Haredi Orthodox population.

The New York Times:

[This] community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data.

These communities, which voted at a higher percentage for Trump than any other community in America, and which sent busloads of community members to, er, various January 6 events in Washington (the insurrection was one of the very few places on earth where you could watch ultraorthodox Jews and neo-Nazis cavorting together), will fight national authorities tooth and nail if any government agency actually tries to make them behave. We have already witnessed, in the streets of New York, how shockingly violent they can be.

Indeed these are the Trumpian shock troops, communities of people who recognize that Trump’s violent nihilism is their own. If government has any defensive purpose at all, it is to respond to the threat profoundly non-compliant sects like this one represent.

Klobuchar wonders how the violence at the Capitol would have been handled if we’d had a president “who didn’t flaunt the laws of the United States.”

As Vocabulary.com notes, “Flaunt is to show off, but flout is to ignore the rules.”

She’s forgiven because it’s way easy to confuse these two very similar words; and also because she’d make a damn good presidential candidate and I don’t want to discourage her.

A policeman brutally beaten by the insurrectionists shares his thoughts on Josh “He’s A Runner” Hawley.

Sing it:

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
soon there’ll be no Josh
courage ain’t been born
that can make him stay
Hawley get away while you can

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
with police escort
courage ain’t been born that
can make him stay
come his Proud Boys mob
come the coup
he’s a runner

There’ll come the runnin’
He’ll know he’s got to
don’t ask him not to or why
Oh why oh why did you
run off
and leave Oath Keepers cryin’
now they’re in jail
and you’re not