Alex Jones that is, whose vileness has finally bumped up against a court of law. He has been successfully sued for defamation by the parents of the slaughtered children whom he dismissed as actors in a government plot.

How to assess a money penalty for the pain this monstrous man has inflicted on the Sandy Hook families?

Whatever the juries decide, UD hopes it ruins him.

… at Barrel Oak Winery with her buddy Natasha.

The heart of the heart of it, the height of the height of the season, and today is Market Day, so absolutely everyone is walking down and up Rokeby Avenue as UD rakes bright wet leaves. The feel is pre-industrial — a studied pre-industrialism, I guess – with almost-carless village streets and trains that trundle through town with a mild choo. Everyone’s exhilarated and madly social with the weather so pure. Clear air, sunlight, and enough wind to set going masses of leaves that catch onto our container plants. My neighbors are stirred to life… They gather in the street in front of UD‘s house, waving at her as she rakes, and their groups enlarge with dog walkers and carriers of fresh tomatoes, and everyone is as extroverted as they’re ever going to be, because the earth in this hyper-keen aspect excites them and makes them want to make sure everyone else is on board. Amazing day. Look at that dogwood. Can you believe this day?

Gabe, a young chef, interrupts my raking to walk my paths with me in search of mushrooms. I tell him I’ve seen scads, but have been pulverizing them with my rake. Don’t. Pick them up. Put them in a paper bag, and drop them at my house. He reels off all the types and I say I’m so ignorant I have to assume everything’s poisonous. He says he has a friend who will give me good money if I have some exotic ones.

I spy new neighbors moving in across the street and trot over to welcome them and congratulate them on inheriting Caroline’s wildly flourishing garden. I tell them to knock on my door with questions, problems, etc. They are warm and happy and unoffended when I tell them two minutes after introductions that I’ve already forgotten both of their names. They repeat their names, and all I remember is Rebecca.

A little later, one of my neighbors, who just turned seventy and looks forty, wants to talk. We stand in my driveway. I lean on my rake. This birthday really has me thinking. I’m in pretty good shape. Let’s say I have another fifteen twenty years. How do I want to spend it? How do I want to make it count? He’s a reflective, sensitive man, and as I look at his youthful face I think Garrett Park is a place where you can instantly enter into way non-trivial conversations in your driveway. Dig in, says UD. You’re already doing the right things – your long every-other-day hikes, your reading, thinking, traveling [he’s planning to walk the Camino de Santiago]… Your family and your friends… Just keep doing what you’re doing, no? Yes of course but there’s the restlessness all thoughtful people feel, a sort of second-guessing about what we might be overlooking… Or just a sort of emotional overflow and you don’t know what to do with it… See Adam Phillips, “On Being Too Much For Ourselves.” Or – especially on a day like today – Saul Bellow, in Paris, in the spring:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I wouldn’t mind, says UD to her neighbor, living long enough to be tired and achy enough not to be entirely shocked and appalled when I realize I’m about to die. He says: My mother was like that. A day before her ninetieth birthday she just said I’ve had enough and died.

The stinkiest form of excreta

Is Ohio’s fair son, Mark Pukita.

When asked for his views

He replies “Fuck the Jews.”

Has the brain of a sub. trilobita.

In her wonderfully diplomatic way, Yale student Sude Yenilmez notes how moral relativism and political correctness drive indifference – even among the best and the brightest – to the suffering of millions of women all over the world.

Can she really be saying that her fellow students think global forced veiling is unimportant?

Well, yes. That is exactly what she’s saying.

The latest look in Karachi.

The ultraorthodox lads are in there swinging. But score one for the godless harlots.

MK Yulia Malinovsky’s amendment to increase fines for ripping up images of women on the streets of Israel seems to have riled another MK, who passionately defended the vandals. He also took offense at Malinovsky’s description of ultraorthodox motive and behavior:

“What interests them is to build a Taliban state. First of all, they vandalize and exclude women from the public sphere… Whoever does this is degrading himself, hurts women and equality for women. Then it slides into segregation between men and women. … The extremist organization that took over Afghanistan banned women from riding bicycles. It forbade displaying figures of women in the public space. They decide what a woman should look like and at what length her sleeves should be… “

Rather than owning his fanaticism, her opponent shrieked and sputtered… though since the amendment passed, I guess it didn’t work. Let’s see what he said.

“She said Taliban and you did not respond? A Knesset member is standing here calling us the Taliban, and that’s okay? There is a party in the Knesset whose sole purpose is not to allow the ultra-Orthodox to live here… What a disgrace that such an antisemite comes up [to speak] here! Taliban?! This is an antisemitic party. You’re antisemitic. Disgrace. Are we Taliban?”

I wonder why no one responded.

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

UD is inclined to look on the bright side of this particular interaction. Malinovsky’s opponent acknowledged her existence in the chamber. He did not rip her face off. Good boy. Getting there.

Be still my heart.

And again.

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

Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about? . . . People [hiding] even when no one is looking for them?

Jack Gladney, the hero of Don DeLillo’s great novel, White Noise, asks himself this as he searches out a university colleague who always makes it extremely difficult to find her. The novel is full of characters “avoiding situations,” as one of them puts it.

“I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely.”

People in Gladney’s town, Blacksmith, drape themselves in oversized sweatsuits and create state of the art all-inclusive houses so they rarely have to go out. Their massive cars have darkly tinted windows. There’s a shared undifferentiated paranoia which drives people in on themselves. Some of his neighbors belong to tiny hidden cults.

In other words, the hijab and burqa were just waiting for us. Hiding’s what you do when it’s like this out there. UD‘s surprised it took this long for an entrepreneur to see the possibilities.

Eat my dust!

“I would expect that [there will] be increased measures to make sure concertgoers can have a great time, but do so without getting killed.”

Oxford is loath to look closely

At the money it took from Max Mosely.

“Why should we eschew?

Oh – that business with Jews.

All rumor and poppycock, mostly.”

“[A] majority of Canadians [want the niqab banned.]

[O]ne survey has as much as eighty per cent of the population [in favor]…

[Stephen Harper’s] statement that the niqab is ‘not how we do things here’ is not wholly fatuous. Liberal societies are not neutral arrangements of civic services supplied to all. They aren’t just public-service condominiums that pick up trash and direct traffic. They have values. Indeed, their ability to supply those services—their prosperity, the reason everyone wants to come to liberal societies and not to theocracies—is because of those values.

Liberal societies have rules. Those rules, and the values they embody, have been a long and torturous time evolving. One of those values is the value of the agency and autonomy of the individual and, with it, the value—incredibly hard won, over a very long time—of woman’s emancipation, and so with it the belief that you cannot, either literally or symbolically, mask individuals. Women’s right to full autonomy is not optional in our society, and those who regard it as optional are not those who can expect to participate in it as citizens. If you wish to join our group, which will give you maximum freedom for every kind of self-expression and religious practice, you have to respect that the open engagement of one citizen with another—and, in turn, one face with another—is a core value that lets all the other values you enjoy flourish. The face may only be a symbol of our confidence in openness, but our symbols are the things to which we confide our values. As Barbara Kay, a distinguished Canadian journalist with whom I agree on few other issues, writes eloquently, ‘The only societies that mandate the niqab as a social norm are those in which women are considered sexual chattel with virtually no rights. Willed indifference to the niqab is more than tolerance; it is an endorsement of gender-rights relativism in our national home—equality for our women, inferior status for theirs.'”

As in Europe (see my various posts below about the ill-fated, taxpayer-funded love the hijab campaign), so perhaps in not too long a time in America, we must prepare for training in the proper attitude toward women who cover themselves and their children.

Actually, America seems to be tolerating burqas (we’re one of fewer and fewer countries where they haven’t been outlawed) and hijabs quite well – incidents of intolerance/violence appear to be rare. We don’t have laws that permit some employers under some circumstances to keep their employees from wearing a hijab; we don’t have laws that ban hijabs in the public sector. You’ll see such laws in parts of Europe and Canada. Stories about European schools banning the hijab are rampant. Several Muslim countries have significant legal restrictions on burqas, niqabs, and hijabs.

Our need for training derives from two false perceptions:

1. Covered women are oppressed.
2. Covered women need “white saviors” to liberate them from their veils/oppression.

Hafsa Lodi explains that “Women who follow traditional guidelines of hijab keep their bodies and hair covered while in the presence of men who aren’t close kin, usually from the age of puberty.”

Is a pubescent girl a woman? The average age of puberty for girls is eleven. Is an eleven year old a woman? Some girls begin puberty at eight. Is an eight year old a woman? Do I feel comfortable concluding that parents who put their eight year old in face and body coverings are oppressive? You bet I do.

Lodi writes: “As a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair, I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for young women who have the courage to commit to wearing the hijab. It takes guts and an impressively strong conviction of faith to cover your hair in a [looks-based] society.” Here is a person who admires the courage of ten-year-olds who wear the hijab because their parents mandate it. I think we must also conclude that she respects and admires parents who can look at their ten year old child (not their boy, of course; their girl) and swathe her, morning, noon, and night in clothes that tightly cover her head and body. Respects and admires parents who “deprive [their daughter] of her childhood.” We are to take moral instruction from this person.

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

Do I think it’s twisted that some people think girls from eight to twelve years old (though to be sure plenty of parents put their five and six year old girls under hijabs) are such sexual threats to men that they have to be covered? Do I think that the understanding of herself such a child will adopt over time is twisted? Yes, and yes. Do I think that this form of upbringing is in any way preparing this girl for life in a liberal democracy? No.

I await my reeducation.

UD’s always shocked to find career criminals in high – sometimes the highest! – positions in American universities. Of course Greek universities, for instance, are overrun with administrator/larcenists; but us guys? L’il us?

Donna Heinel will plead guilty; she has put her bribecile in Long Beach on the market, as her real estate agent explains:

Putting the scandal and its legal ramifications aside, this lovely little Long Beach three-story villa is sure to make quite the splash of its own …