Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) excoriated an oil company’s executive during a congressional hearing Tuesday after he suggested she did not understand a tax break under discussion. Speaking to Mark Murphy, president of Strata Production company, the chair of House Natural Resources Oversight Committee said, “How much of those intangible drilling costs do you get to deduct right away from your taxes?” Murphy responded, “We get to deduct all of those just like any other business. There seems to be a misconception out there that you’re operating from that somehow the oil and gas industry benefits from some special sort of tax structure. We don’t.”

To which Porter replied, “You do benefit from special rules. There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have. You get to deduct 70 percent of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream, so please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.”

Ok, so she lied about French schoolteacher Samuel Paty having blasphemed; but her father’s murderous campaign against Paty succeeded in exciting a local terrorist to behead him at the school, in front of students.

How could her account of Paty’s actions have been so wrong?

Well, for starters, she wasn’t there. She had been suspended for truancy.

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

And now the lives of two professors in Grenoble are in danger; a campus campaign against them might well stir up that city’s beheaders.

When the frats kill a particularly young one, I post this variant of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was .495 booze.

… is that this sort of social reality tends to make it easier to identify true burqa evil-doers. Like the Montreal father who told his four girls that if they ever took their burqas off he’d kill them. Just for good measure, he beat them all the time anyway. The teacher of one of the girls saw that things weren’t right, and reported the father to the authorities.

He has been found guilty of assault; the daughters, who were in court, are no longer under his authority.

**********

UD thanks David, a reader, for the link to ACTUALITÉ.

[In] the 45 years since it was first officially celebrated by the UN, [International Women’s Day] feels like it marks regress rather than progress when it comes to the African context…

Let’s talk child marriage …, another great “accomplishment” for women across Africa. Let’s look at the case of Nigerian senator Ahmad Sani Yerima, who married [as his fourth wife] a 13-year-old girl from Egypt in 2010 when he was 49 years of age, defending his actions based on his religion.

Yerima told the BBC at the time that the Muslim faith permitted this union, and that he would “not respect any law that contradicts it, and whoever wants to sanction me for that is free to do that.”

…national ban on the wearing of burqas/niqabs.

We should know the results of the Swiss national referendum on banning face coverings at some point today. Critics are of course right that, although the language of the proposal says nothing about burqas and niqabs, it is primarily aimed at those garments.

Constant readers know that UD supports burqa bans; she has gone into excruciating detail, over many years, about why she does. Although Switzerland doesn’t need a big majority for the referendum to pass, UD hopes that the result is strong enough to continue making the point to men who won’t let their wives and daughters leave the house unswaddled, and to women who for whatever reason believe they cannot “face” the world (all men are rapists so I must be invisible to protect myself; and it pleases God, are the two most popular motives, as attested to by burqa-wearers), that democratic societies firmly reject their world view.

Mark Baum’s discovery of ratings agency fraud – a small but important part of the comprehensive fraud that was America’s mortgage business fourteen years ago – is one of many great scenes from the film The Big Short. But the dirty for-profit ed business (this blog has spent years covering it – click on the categories at the bottom of this post) goes ratings fraud one step further: It issues glowing accreditations/ratings for entities that don’t even exist.

Group that approved South Dakota

College without students rebuked,

May lose access to federal money

goes the headline; and it’s like that old saying: A School Without Students is Like a Day Without Federal Money… Except that with the love and support of the Trump presidency, this agency is still in business.

I mean, the Biden Ed Dept seems to have voted to shut it down, but there are appeals aplenty available to the accreditor, and meanwhile its bright golden approval insignia continues to emblazon the web pages of sixty other fly by nights.

In its defense, this outfit protested that just because Reagan National University lacked not only students but instructional materials, the place (a closed office in a strip mall) was highly approvable because any school can lack the administrative staff to show a visitor a textbook or a student.

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

Interestingly, there are also some non-profit universities whose student populations are dwindling to nothing. Chicago State University, a perennial object of fascination on this blog, “has lost nearly 60 percent of its enrollment since 2010, plummeting from 7,354 students to 2,964.” Assuming its basic approach of staggering financial scandal, constant leadership turnover, and a quality of instruction you’d expect from a school where no one in her right mind would teach, remains stable, CSU can expect to be pretty much where Reagan National is in a few years.

Haredi children are kept segregated from the rest of society; over a quarter suffer from food insecurity, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. [Haredim] hold that this lifestyle is the fulfillment of God’s commandments.

I personally find that when there’s a confrontation between everything I love – scientific inquiry, reason, cosmopolitanism, secularism, the emancipation of women … and everything I hate – stone-age fascism – it’s a no-brainer.

I felt exhilaration on the eleventh of September. I feel slightly ashamed to say that, in the view of the fact that so many people lost their lives that day, but when the day was over and I’d been through the gamut of rage and disgust and nausea … when I went into it with myself, I was pleased to find I was exuberant: Okay. Right. I’ll never get bored fighting against these people, and their defeat will be absolute. It will be complete.

… the insurrection. Federico Klein goes all-out for Trumpism.

Michael Luo, in the New Yorker, quotes from Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, thereby entering the timely … no, urgent question of why so many American evangelicals believe so much socially destructive bullshit. As Luo notes, “Recently, some pastors and other evangelical leaders have begun to express alarm at how unmoored some members of their congregations have become.”

This lack of mooring is no innocuous weirdness: “During the Trump era, it became clear that the wasting of the evangelical mind could even have dire consequences [for] American democracy.” As in, the terrorist assault on the Capitol was way evangelical Christian.

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

Once again UD will point out that a cult is a cult is a cult: Luo’s description of the evangelicals is point by point a description of ultraorthodox Jewish cults – you need only switch a few words:

Fundamentalists also believed that they needed to separate themselves from an increasingly secular society. All of this had a dampening effect on Christian thinking about the world: there was little need to pay attention to history, global affairs, and science, because the present epoch would soon pass, ushering in Jesus’s return; saving souls was all that mattered. “Evangelicals pushed analysis away from the visible present to the invisible future,” Noll writes. “Under these influences, evangelicals almost totally replaced respect for creation with a contemplation of redemption.”

It’s utterly haredim (a contingent of ultraorthodox Jews was also, by the way, Cap-trashing): The vulnerability to any conspiratorial swill; the separation from any world outside themselves; the ignorance of history, global affairs, science; the hopped-up slopping about in end times. And of course the propensity toward violence.

Solution? Hey, “the cost of education for haredi boys is covered by the [Israeli] state, in spite of the fact that they study no core state curriculum after age 13. No math. No science. No English.” The system of ultraorthodox yeshivas here in the States is an exact replica, folks. The closed world of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism threatens democratic culture very directly, yes? But as long as the state takes no interest in the education of these lost souls (fear: they’re violent; cynicism: they’re powerful voting blocs) we remain at their mercy.

Go here for my previous work.

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

MARCH 4: CAPITOL SHUT DOWN: QANON DRIFTS

FARTHER FROM THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

Speaking recently to a reporter about Donald Trump’s controversial pronouncements, the leader of The Proud Boys stated plainly: “Nobody here is crazy,” adding that the “most important thing in the world is the return of President Donald Trump. Without him there is no point to anything… Trump is coming,” he declared, without a trace of irony. “Trump will come on March 4 and we will make America great again.”

This reporter’s conversation with the Proud Boys leader meandered, at one point touching on murdered policemen at the Capitol. He nearly exploded with anger. “It wasn’t us,” he insisted. “It was Antifa. They did all of this to make us look bad.”

Sadly, Americans have become accustomed to scenes of violent Trumpist protests, including full-on abuse and assaults on law enforcement officers.

Corona has amplified everything and everything is elevated to crisis levels. Civil disobedience is not just a disturbance but becomes a “super-spreader event” where mass numbers congregate, accelerating contagion and leading to extreme health consequences.

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

Original, unedited article here.

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

As Gertrude Stein (edited) wrote, A cult is a cult is a cult.

Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood has been banished from a private lawyer’s club in Atlanta after calling for former Vice President Mike Pence to face a firing squad.