Hitchens told France, long ago, how your country gets to a place where its teachers of free speech are beheaded in school courtyards, in front of crowds of children.

What happens to children who watch a man film their headless civics teacher, in order to delight Islamists and terrify secular France with it?

In time, the French Rate My Teacher app will feature, alongside “hotness,” a beheaded body emoji.

This much we know: It is always too late to take seriously the statements that religious fundamentalists make. They tell you until they’re blue in the face that they will kill people who act on their belief in the freedom of speech. Y’all just think they’re joshing.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for years,” Iannis Roder, a historian and teacher, told French radio. “I hope this is a turning point in recognising the reality of what happens on the ground.”

I fear it’s too late for any turning point.

Some nibble a bit on a Reuben

Some slyly puff-puff on a Cuban

But if you assume

You can hide that from Zoom

You’ll end up like Jeffrey Toobin

… back in the ‘sixties, gets (UD confers upon him) the Ignaz Semmelweis Award. Harassed and ridiculed to the point of madness (he died in an asylum) for telling idiots who didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease to wash their hands before delivering babies, Semmelweis stands for all humane, rational human beings who spend their entire lives up against arrogant, vindictive, and even violent degenerates.

Although our most idiotic and disastrous president ever has now called the world’s most distinguished infectious disease expert an idiot and a disaster, Fauci will remain in his covid-fighting task force position as long as he can – the health of the nation being more important than ongoing scrapes with a verbally violent psychotic. At any moment this paranoid could make his move and replace Fauci with … no one, since there’s no covid problem? Or with, say, Jon Voight… but Fauci, like Semmelweis, will continue to fight the good fight as long as he can.

… was even more gobsmacking than the first. Thursday night fogged up around the edges, so Cherry Springs’ vast dome, while fully dark on top, was fluted with white along the rim. The satellites and meteors and thick constellations – and of course Mars – gradually, gradually emerged, leaving the hundred or so people on the pitch-black expanse gazing with big eyes and closed lips. Blankets and alpaca coats and white wine kept us warm.

Saturday night was absolutely clear. No moon. Only stars, dripping from every edge of vision and piercing the heart at the zenith. Cloudily the Milky Way set itself as backdrop. Now there were hundreds and hundreds of people on the mountaintop, wearing their red beam headlamps and murmuring to one another about the heavens. My sister wore a coyote skin coat and kept her hands dug into its deep pockets; I wore a tight tshirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, a thin black winter coat, and my alpaca over the coat. Also a thick scarf and a wool hat that said Corning Museum of Glass.

As the hours passed and the stars whirled, we broke off pieces of baguette and cheese and drank more white wine. Somewhere a child announced she spied an alien and everyone laughed. Marijuana smoke floated about and I thought I’m at Woodstock for the Stars. Yes, because it was a celebration, in a muted raptured way; we were gathered, dark-adapted, for galactic observance, with all the spirit and fear in the moment.

The incident was one of a number of attacks on journalists in Israel and the United States, as they reported on the high virus transmission rates in ultra-Orthodox areas and the mass gatherings that may be helping fuel that rise.

Actually, after this latest one there was yet another one, reported only a few hours ago. Ultraorthodox men – and women – in Israel and the United States are beating up anyone they perceive to be a threat to their illegal gatherings.

Virtually all cults, as you know, eventually devolve into violence. (“LOCK HER UP LOCK HIM UP LOCK EVERYBODY UP”) Ultraorthodox Jewry is textbook cult.

This is what heresy is ’round those parts.

Ultra-Orthodox ‘Hidden Heretics’ Believe in Science, Reject COVID Rebels

Barbarism:

1. absence of culture and civilization.”the collapse of civilization and the return to barbarism”

2. extreme cruelty or brutality.”she called the execution an act of barbarism”

Who the fuck is France letting in to its country? Why?

Covid, says Michelle Goldberg, seems to be making the difference.

‘Vermeule is confident that his fellow Americans will eventually learn to love theocracy:

Subjects [writes Vermeule] will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.’

The New York Times relentlessly covers the black-suited gangs roaming the streets of the city, the paper never letting us forget the grotesquerie of a covid-ignoring cult that considers educating and vaccinating its children “sensitive issues.” Go for it, NYT.

From UD‘s hotel room, the sweet town of Corning New York awakens. She was an hour away from here last night, on the dark sky field at Cherry Springs State Park, gazing up at the starriest overhead she had ever seen. Just lying there in a glittering bowl of universe.

No cell phone service, so she couldn’t refer to her screen to identify constellations. She could only bathe in the stippled light. She loved the murmur of other pilgrims assembled around her as they adjusted their cameras and telescopes and shared their excitement with one another at the full unfolding of what’s always there. As for the stars, writes Joseph Brodsky, they are always on, and even though she just witnessed the massive violence of the universe bearing down always on the earth, UD will never be able to square all of that with the little sunlit town in her window, the calm of its yellow leaves and schoolbuses and steepled hills.

Somewhat hidden behind her forest, but gleaming gamely, were the paired new moon and Venus — Venus brilliantly bright, and the moon elegantly thin on the horizon. A remarkably clear night for Garrett Park, which, if you’re standing in our forest, feels rural (especially with all those lonesome train whistles), but is in fact urban (part of Bethesda; close to DC).

UD is on her way, today, to Cherry Springs State Park, where she’s hoping to get some clear weather and much much more remarkable skies.

“[The New York haredi community has] always framed every failure as the government coming after them. And what’s happening now is that these people grew up with this messaging, and so they’re now acting [violently] on it,” [a] community member told The Daily Beast. “Whether it was leadership by the measles crisis, by education reform, [controversial circumcision ritual] metzitzah b’peh… they framed it as ‘we’re hated.’”

All of these examples are moments when the government attempted to restrict the Haredi community, and when their leaders spread the message that the problem wasn’t communal. For instance, the problem was not anti-vaxx sentiments leading to the measles crisis. The problem wasn’t poverty caused by the lack of secular education in the community. The problem wasn’t the dangers of the practice of sucking the blood from a baby’s circumcision…

[Harder to square the immense amount of public assistance the government gives these communities with their being hated. I guess the being hated comes into play when the government decides to go after endemic haredi welfare fraud. They hate us so much, they won’t even let us steal.]

However implausible it may seem that the second coming of Hitler is somehow embodied in the combination of politicians like de Blasio and Cuomo, Haredi leaders have built up an enemy that must be fought—and fought hard.

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

Sounds like the Serbs, with Milošević leading them. We are the world’s ultimate victims; violence is our only option.