Lawyers for Remington Arms, the now-bankrupt gun-maker being sued by nine families of those killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., have subpoenaed the academic, attendance and disciplinary records for five slain students.

And in the case of Roger Cohen’s anemic New York Times profile of Anne Hidalgo, I have to conclude it’s sheer snobbery. Plus bait and switch.

Hidalgo represents the currently pathetic to the point of invisibility French Socialist party. Their candidate eked out six percent in the last presidential election, and, even so, Cohen wants us to entertain the possibility that Hidalgo – a possible candidate only – will do far, far, …. far……………. ffffaarrrrr better.

Yet why, since Hidalgo’s chances hover at around … six percent, should we entertain that possibility? Because, like your Visa card, she’s everything that you – New York Times reader – want her to be. You want the first woman president of France to exist, and “HERE COMES ANNE HIDALGO,” announces Cohen’s headline. Subhead: She’s “CHARISMATIC.”

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Okay, so I’m on board for this! I, UD, will settle in and read this entire article because I am a snob (I love to speak French!), and like many snobs have a strong interest in many things French. So let’s go!

I was easy to bait, wasn’t I? I mean, given its nullity, its total lack of reason to exist, it occurs to me as I read that the Cohen piece has rather the same status as a lushly illustrated essay in the Sunday NYT Magazine about how to make onion soup. Yet I keep reading.

And as I read, Cohen’s bait – charismatic! maybe she can do it! – gradually shifts to switch. ‘The once-proud “gauche” is in tatters.’ Oh.

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But wait!

Ms. Hidalgo has clout and international recognition. Michael Bloomberg is a friend.

Oh, okay, I’m back up on the horse! And what a spectacular electability advisor Bloomberg would be.

‘[A]s Philippe Labro, an author and political observer, remarked, “France today is squarely on the right.” Terrorism, insecurity, fear and perceptions of unrestrained immigration pushed the country there. The left has had no clear answer, not Ms. Hidalgo, not anyone.’

Cohen’s list is curious, suggesting as it does that things like, I don’t know… how to run the economy have nothing to do with the right’s current strength. No, it’s all reactionary stuff: insecurity, fear.

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Is it a story worthy of the New York Times that a relatively obscure woman, with zero chance of making it into the second round of an election she might not even enter, recently enjoyed an enthusiastic reception at a gathering of French socialists?

Nope. But it’s a story worthy of UD, New York Times reader. Bait; switch; pander.

Cher is “wondering when [the] Texas Senate will start mandating burqas,” and UD is thrilled.

Between the Taliban and the Texas Senate, these are heady days for burqa haters like your blogueuse. Anti-burqa brigades have hit the Afghan streets, their bravery absolutely stunning. People are talking about the burqa, actually looking at and thinking about the burqa, not doing that thing where they look away and shrug and talk about diversity and piety. The women of Afghanistan are again making the absolutely plain absolutely plain: The deepest bottom of the deepest barrel for women anywhere on the globe is the nihilating burqa; and women in Europe and the United States who wear it proudly – and, even more revoltingly, make their young daughters wear them – ought to be ashamed.

Back in 2008, UD was quoted in Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen (he’s no longer associated with the organization) on the corruption of medical schools by pharma lobbyists. Pleasant, so many years later, to discover that.

The weapons Americans buy to protect their loved ones are the weapons that end up being accidentally discharged into a loved one’s leg or chest or head. The weapons Americans buy to protect their young children are years later used for self-harm by their troubled teenagers. Or they are stolen from their car by criminals and used in robberies and murders. Or they are grabbed in rage and pointed at an ex-partner.

… Above all else, guns are used for suicide. In any given year, twice as many Americans die by suicide as by homicide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults, behind only accidents. The good news is that suicide is highly preventable. Most suicide attempts are impulsive, an act of depression or panic. If a person survives an attempt, he or she will almost certainly survive the suicidal impulse altogether. A gun in the house massively raises the likelihood that a suicide attempt will end in death.

… Guns everywhere engender violence everywhere.

… The gun you trust against your fears is itself the thing you should fear. The gun is a lie.

UD‘s great-uncle, Nathan Rapoport, settled in Ocean City in 1912 and built some of its first boardwalk businesses. UD‘s father graduated from Ocean City High School. She follows the sad fortunes of that resort closely.

Like notorious Myrtle Beach, OC has over decades allowed large stretches of itself to sink into squalor, with resulting high crime rates, guns, drugs, fights, and even riots. Both of these locations might have done something to discourage their takeover by sleazy motels, cheap bars, ugly and dangerous city thoroughfares, and many other marks of civic degeneracy. But there was money in degeneracy.

Until there wasn’t. Non-degenerate locals and visitors are leaving.

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Now an established low-life magnet, OC is trying, late in the game, to de-magnetize. It banished, for instance, the annual vile H20i gathering of assholes with loud cars; but scofflaws don’t exactly care whether you banish them, and year after year thousands keep coming, turning OC, for a week in September, into a wasteland of smoking squealing crashing hulks circled by drunks recording the fun on their phones. After each year’s debacle the town revisits and revises its laws in hopeless, increasingly police-state, measures.

This month’s tweak, described in my headline, involves real surveillance state stuff, with, what, drones? satellites? tracking the movements and collecting the identities of the asshole brigade.

On the streets and even highways leading from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City, wall to wall police will engage in constant arrests, and, with those crowds no doubt pushing back, we can expect lovely results. Rumble strips will be everywhere. City officials have been having nice chats with the proprietors of the dumps that house the crowds and nicely explaining to them that if they keep housing overflows of people the town will put them out of business. Cars will be impounded, and, in an interesting twist, owners can no longer just come and claim them but must hire companies to drive them out – at no doubt great expense.

Oh – and next year:

In 2022, Ocean City hopes to hold a three-day concert during the weekend of H2Oi. Additionally, the town wants to host a sporting event that weekend.

“For the last 10 years when the pop-up rally was here, we’ve kind of been on the defense,” [the OC mayor] said. “I think we all feel it’s time to go on the offense and set our own destiny.”

Try to imagine what it’s like to live in Ocean City. You get to witness a yearly actual reversion-to-barbarism event. And you get to look forward to next year’s raid, which will add huge numbers of pissed off (what’s with all the police and those car assholes?) sports and country music fans. Where do I sign up.

Child abusers from a British religious community should not be reported to the police, one of its leaders has argued.

Paltiel Schwarcz, a leading rabbinical authority among ultra-Orthodox Jews, said informing statutory authorities in the UK of a suspected Jewish child sex offender was generally “a severe sin”….[I]t is forbidden to report child sexual abuse to “gentile” authorities, [argued Schwarcz, a Jewish religious court judge]...

[He argued that it] was not permitted to report an abuser to police if the victim was a girl aged 12 or older or a boy aged 13 or older.

UD‘s house and garden are major mantis-attractors. This one – a Chinese Mantis – is as we speak on one of our screened windows.

Look at the way it’s looking at me.

I love what it’s doing with its brown/green color scheme. The eyes are amazing.

… in my frog.

… when first we practice to deceive ourselves about ignorant religious cults among us.

Look what Israel, of all places, has achieved: So many civically useless children that

Some 50% of Israeli children from the country’s fastest-growing sectors are getting a third-world education that will not be able to support a first-world economy, without which there will be no first-world health, welfare and defense systems, according to a new report published by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research.“The absence of a first-world ability to defend itself in the world’s most violent region will jeopardize the State of Israel’s very existence,” Prof. Dan Ben-David, who authored the 2021 report, told The Jerusalem Post. “This is an existential threat.”

For decades, Israeli governments have let the burgeoning ultraorthodox opt out even of the basic – required! – national curriculum. And behold the Kafkaesque result: A massive brain drain, because smart people don’t want to live in a country being taken over by stupid people; and a remaining, enormous, absolutely hopeless population. Worse than hopeless, because many of these people revile Zionism and would never think of taking up arms to defend it. Well done!

I’m not good at remembering very old days, but I do recall a picnic lunch at the country house of Brigid Balfour, a scientific colleague of my father’s in London and, yes, related to the Balfour of the Declaration. She was also related to Gladstone! It was a sunny day, and we ate out on the grass, on a very big blanket.

… all six Rapps camped through Europe in a VW camper van.

We’ve finally gotten around to updating our ancient glass slides to the twenty-first century, so here are a few images from that time. Thanks go to my sister for getting this done.

Six years ago, I filed a complaint with the New York City Department of Education (DOE) alongside 51 others because there are dozens of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Yeshivas in our city that do not provide their students with an adequate secular education, as required by law.

As a result of the complaint, the city announced an investigation on July 28, 2015. Yet now more than six years later, despite findings from the investigation that backed up our complaint, no concrete actions have been taken. The lack of action by the city means that approximately 40,000 students today continue to experience educational neglect.

Harvard’s new chaplain di tutti chaplains, elected unanimously, is an atheist. This gesture acknowledges the super-rapid rise, in America, of the category Nones — non-church-goers, many of whom retain spiritual leanings. Some Nones are atheists, or close to it; others look like mild versions of deists. All seem to have abandoned organized religion, though all seem subject to the same existential anxiety and ontological questioning typically shared by traditional followers of God. We’re talking about a quarter of the US population – on a par with evangelicals, and with Catholics – and a segment that’s growing really, really fast.

Why is this happening? In reading about it, UD has encountered many theories, starting with the general point that increasing secularization is baked into most modern, successful countries. Even so, the US has until quite recently exhibited strikingly higher rates of belief in God and of church attendance than places like Norway, France, and England. What has changed?

Nonreligiosity is on the rise far beyond the confines of Harvard; it is the fastest growing religious preference in the country, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 20 percent of the country identifies as atheist, agnostic or nonreligious — called the “nones” — including four in 10 millennials.

The reasons that more young Americans are disaffiliating in the world’s most religious developed country are varied. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith attributes the trend partly to the growing alliance between the Republican Party and the Christian right, a decline of trust in institutions, growing skepticism of religion in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a shift away from traditional family structures that centered on churchgoing.

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The trend, [Robert] Putnam says, is borne out of rebellion of sorts.

“It begins to jump at around 1990,” he says. “These were the kids who were coming of age in the America of the culture wars, in the America in which religion publicly became associated with a particular brand of politics, and so I think the single most important reason for the rise of the nones is that combination of the younger people moving to the left on social issues and the most visible religious leaders moving to the right on that same issue.”

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Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially young liberal ones, away from religion. The uncritical embrace of President Donald Trump by conservative evangelical leaders has accelerated this trend. And the Roman Catholic Church has lost adherents because of its own crises. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that an overwhelming majority US adults were aware of recent reports of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and most of them believed that the abuses were “ongoing problems that are still happening.” Accordingly, many US Catholics said that they have scaled back attendance at mass in response to these reports.

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Note what’s not cited: The intellectual stardom of the New Atheists. You might expect this to appear as a reason, but UD didn’t expect it to. It’s rare to reject organized religion merely because of arguments people make against it. Lots of people have pointed out that Dawkins and Hitchens recycle the same anti-religion arguments people have made for centuries. It seems more likely, as the above comments suggest, that you leave organized religion because of the actual beliefs and behaviors it seems to generate in your time, in the world around you. Ol’ UD, for instance, thinks this photograph alone probably accounts for two million or so newbie Nones.

For a closer look at some of those beliefs and behaviors, read rural Texan writer Natalie Jackson:

“When my classmates were hospitalized with COVID-19, there were repeated calls for prayers and proclamations that God would provide healing. When they died, those prayer requests became comments that ‘God called [them] home.’

The belief that God controls everything that happens in the world is a core tenet of evangelicalism — 84 percent of white evangelicals agreed with this statement in PRRI polling from 2011, while far fewer nonwhite, non-evangelical Christians shared this belief. The same poll also showed that white evangelicals were more likely than any other Christian group to believe that God would punish nations for the sins of some of its citizens and that natural disasters were a sign from God. What’s more, other research from the Journal of Psychology and Theology has found that some evangelical Christians rationalize illnesses like cancer as God’s will. 

This is why I remember friends and acquaintances in Leon County when I think about how religious beliefs influence one’s attitude toward COVID-19 and vaccination. PRRI’s March survey found that 28 percent of white evangelical Republicans agreed that ‘God always rewards those who have faith with good health and will protect them from being infected with COVID-19,’ compared with 23 percent of Republicans who were not white evangelicals. And that belief correlates more closely with vaccination views among white evangelical Republicans — 44 percent of those who said God would protect them from the virus also said they would refuse to get vaccinated. That number drops to 32 percent among Republicans who are not white evangelicals.

Complicating matters further, the pandemic also fits neatly into ‘end times’ thinking — the belief that the end of the world and God’s ultimate judgment is coming soon. In fact, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Republicans (64 percent) from our March survey agreed that the chaos in the country today meant the end times’ were near. Faced, then, with the belief that death and the end of the world are a fulfillment of God’s will, it becomes difficult to convince these believers that vaccines are necessary. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelical Republicans who said they refused to get vaccinated agreed that the end times were near.

Moreover, given how many white evangelicals identify as Republican or lean Republican — about 4 in 5 per our June survey — disentangling evangelicals’ religious and political beliefs is nearly impossible. Consider how many white evangelical leaders like former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. downplayed the severity of the pandemic in line with Trump. Falwell was hardly the only evangelical leader to do this either. If anything, the pattern of white evangelical resistance to vaccination has reached the point where some white evangelical leaders who might otherwise urge vaccination hesitate to do so because of the political climate.”

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And Falwell Jr’s a twofer: Told people fuck-all about what pandemic; and turned out to be a flaming moral degenerate.

Hitch used to say that until people stop being afraid of death, religion will always be a winner. Point taken. But it’s just as true that as long as religions spawn large numbers of dumb and dumber fanatics (dangerous fanatics is for another post), secularity’s got a fighting chance. Ask Adelle Goldenberg.

Adelle Goldenberg, 22, grew up in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, where she recalls being told that she could not attend college. In preschool, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer was simple: a bride. It was the only thing she could envision for a girl like herself. When she turned 19, she applied to Harvard in secret and fled the community.

Once at Harvard, she was wary of assuming any religious label, but she still yearned to find people wrestling with issues deeper than academic achievement. She started attending meetings of the humanist group and discovered in Mr. Epstein a form of mentorship that felt almost like having a secular rabbi, she said.

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One more thing, if I may: Read Jackson again, and add to her characterization of rural evangelical Texans the fact that every one of their houses is dripping with guns. It’s hard for UD to avoid the conclusion that these people are death-lovers — passive nihilists who can’t wait for it all to be over in any one of the many ways their… arsenals (see notorious rates of suicide vs. homicide with household guns) of faith provide. And then eternal bliss.

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UPDATE: You have to admire the fervency of the evangelicals.

An evangelical pastor and senior VP for a non-profit called National Religious Broadcasters was fired on Friday for promoting COVID vaccines on MSNBC’s Morning Joe… National Religious Broadcasters, a 1,100-member organization of Christian communicators, told [Daniel] Darling his statements violated their policy of remaining neutral about COVID vaccines, Religion News Service reports. He was told he could sign a statement admitting he had been insubordinate, and admit that his pro-vaccine statements were wrong, or be fired. He chose the latter.

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Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several [evangelical] colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.

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We’ve reached snake-handler levels of stupidity here.