Uh-huh.

Soldiers of the Israel Defense Force’s Home Front Command were physically and verbally attacked by ultra-Orthodox Jews while they were assisting in searching for dead and wounded in the deadly crush during Lag B’Omer celebrations at Mount Meron, the IDF said late Saturday.

“We entered the gravesite to search for injured people and suddenly a commotion began that there are female soldiers in uniforms who are touching the wounded,” a soldier told Army Radio earlier.

“They started to kick and spit on us. The female soldiers were kicked, spit on, and punched from every direction,” the radio station quoted the soldier saying. Hebrew media reports said five female soldiers were targeted.

Police ended up seizing black tar heroin, powder cocaine, a digital scale, packaging materials, money, a .9-mm handgun and a loaded extended 30-round magazine.

On the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD.

Faithful readers will recall that the Rapoports, UD‘s father’s family, have been in business in Ocean City since 1910.

“Haredi politicians and their political allies” put immense pressure on civil authorities to do what everyone except the benighted haredim knew was madness: Pack hundreds of thousands of excited people, late at night, inside a space intended to hold a few thousand. Israel’s “worst-ever peacetime disaster” has laid bare the fact of Israel’s ongoing decline into a hapless third-world theocracy.

With this year’s event taking place in the shadow of COVID-19 — having been canceled last year because of the pandemic — consultations involving the Health Ministry, police and other officials concluded that no more than 9,000 people should be allowed to attend. [One hundred thousand attended.] Agreement to this effect was never brought to the government for approval, however, because of infighting among ministers on other matters… Meron mountainside has essentially become a kind of extra-territorial zone, over which the government has for years failed to fully impose its authority.

There’s definitely humongous huffing and puffing this morning about the scores of state officials under investigation blah blah but of course the people suicidally massing all over the place barely acknowledge – and certainly detest – the state, and certainly intend to ignore all of its reports, directives, laws… Whatever bizarre and distasteful secular emanations waft toward them, Israel’s whirling dervishes intend to keep whirling exactly the way they always have.

I mean, does it seem strange to you that in all the finger pointing no one is even considering pointing a finger at the people responsible – the rabbinical leadership of this haredi sect? That’s because it’s hopeless – Israel has allowed itself to generate huge populations of hostile irrational reactionary cultists; it has, in fact, allowed them to establish significant stretches of Israel as their own “extra-territorial zone.” Israel is becoming a failed state.

Yet more proof that Israel has no control – chooses to take no control – over its wildly destructive ultraorthodox. Tonight they massed in celebration at a notorious “death trap,” and dozens of them died. Some among them must have known they were dangerously crowded; some must also have heard tell of a pandemic. Neither of these things stopped them; nor did state authorities stop them. Authorities merely warned them. “Authorities had authorised 10,000 people to attend the gathering at the tomb, but festival organisers estimated that 100,000 people were at the site.” Additional buses approached as the disaster occurred, bringing tens of thousands more. “The pilgrimage was held this year despite warnings from Israeli health officials that it could lead to coronavirus cases — a danger heightened by the fact that some parts of ultra-Orthodox communities have been hesitant to get vaccinated.”

[O]verall responsibility for the site has long been contested between religious authorities and state authorities, handicapping efforts to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place to cope with crowds at a site second only to the Western Wall in terms of its popularity. Israel’s state comptroller had specified in 2008 that Mount Meron “is not appropriately prepared for mass events,” Channel 12 news noted on Friday. A 2016 police report also warned of looming disaster.

The benighted throng hurled itself into its overstuffed ecstasies and asphyxiated. Children died. Absolutely these people brought children to massive chaotic late night bedlam; and hey – kids are small and they get crushed first.

“Rabbi Shimon [the object of the celebration] used to say that he could absolve the world … If he didn’t manage to cancel this edict on the very day of his exaltation, then we need to do real soul-searching.” Thus saideth one of the surviving ecstatics, and ain’t it a pity that the mindless rigidity of his cult means no soul-searching and certainly no practical changes in their staging of their ecstasies will occur; and certainly the cynical political leadership of Israel will do – as they did tonight – little more than evacuate the dead.

The model here is clearly the hajj. Theocracies tend to bleed their way through these spectacles.

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A rescue worker: “We have to wake up, it’s shocking how many people were allowed to enter.” And who allowed them?

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[In the sect of ultraorthodoxy present at the stampede], cohesion is as tight as super glue. In contrast, the outside world – especially anything affiliated with Zionism – is described as dark and evil. [Yeah, you read dat right.] [The sect members] do not view themselves as individuals... “No one would ever think of involving outsiders in internal issues of the community, let alone representatives of the Zionist entity, which is perceived as an apostate body inimical to the sect’s belief system.”

Afghanistan remains one of the worst countries in the world for women, after only Yemen and Syria, according to an index kept by Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

It’s definitely been better for women with American troops there, but it was still hideous, and it’s about to become heinous.

… publicity.

And explain to me why the sorority had no idea these two declared bankruptcy in 2016. They started stealing right after that – obviously a way to fix the bankruptcy problem. But why didn’t the sorority know? A three-second Google search produced the bankruptcy record.

There he is again after all these years, a big ol blowhard just like Pa, and it stirred such memories for UD! When, back in 2008, Duke University threw AG off the golf team cuz he’s no good at the game, he sued. He sued Duke for damages plus a promise that he could use Duke’s golf facilities whenever he wanted for the rest of his life, damn you.

In the lawsuit, he acknowledged that he may have misbehaved in February when he tossed an apple in a teammate’s face, flipped his putter a few feet, threw and broke a club and gunned his engine in a parking lot.

A bunch of other players went to the trouble of writing Andrew an email saying they preferred he not return to the team.

With this promising background, the suit was hilariously thrown out by a judge who alluded to Caddyshack among other popular entertainments.

Sing it.

Early one morning, half past four
FBI come knocking at my door
Ukraine run all ’round my brain

First come Igor, then come Lev
Diggin up dirt on the streets of Kiev
Ukraine run all ’round my brain

Donnie, Donnie, save me quick!

This Ukraine ’bout to make me sick

Ukraine run all ’round my brain

… is a ruse as old as the establishment of charter schools in this country. You set them up, everyone applauds, and then you systematically loot them while the schools manage the best they can while wondering where the federal money went.

Someone’s always being caught and going to jail for this particular scheme, high-flier David Scott Glasrud being a recent case. Glasrud started stealing as soon as he established his first school, and no one stopped him until fifteen years and millions of dollars later.

At least Glasrud spent his ill-gotten gains on educational materials – a Maserati, a Porsche, a mansion, and gambling in Las Vegas.

Now there’s young, far more high-flying, Seth Andrew, a real best and brightest type with degrees from the Bronx High School of Science, Brown University, and Harvard’s school of education. Why did he steal from his charter schools? His wife is a rich high-profile media figure. He has plenty of money.

Or does he? It’s possible that in his world (see Bonfire of the Vanities) a family worth of only, say, five million plus is appalling, humiliating, fully unable to purchase the sort of Manhattan condo (plus Hamptons getaway?) you need to live your best life now.

Not that the $200,000 he allegedly stole is more than a drop in the bucket in Andrew’s world; but UD’s thinking he just needed a leeetle extra to get the mortgage he was after, so he pulled that particular teat. Silly way to ruin your life.

Not sure what we’re supposed to do with would hurt the feelings.

As for incompatibility with the law, tell that to the 32 (at latest count) countries – possibly including Sri Lanka, which is in the news today – with full or partial burqa bans – and on this list you will find several Muslim nations. That’s a hell of a lot of scofflaws, and I trust Ahmed Shaheed plans to haul the lot of them in front of the international courts, but meanwhile can I say once again the obvious, which is that burqa bans are all the rage all over the world for a perfectly good set of reasons? Reasons endlessly elaborated ‘pon on this blog?

Young seemed to have set the standard impossibly high, but state senator Lora Reinbold has been in there slugging away for some time, and has now attracted national attention.

‘Alaska lawmaker blasted airline for ‘mask tyranny.’ Now she’s banned from the only flights to the capital.‘

That’s the Washington Post headline; plenty more like that all over the place. The germ theory of disease hasn’t reached Alaska yet, and Reinhold sees no reason to pretend that it has. She’s picked so many fights with Alaska Airlines personnel (the cops got called to one of them) over their silly pointless masking rules that the airline has banned her; and, well, Alaska… Not all that easy to get around. Only one airline available to her. So now she’s Nanook of the North, trudging, over many years, fingers frostbit as she clings to ice floes, to get to the capitol – but she’s also banned from most parts of the capitol building! – and now she emerges as a national heroine, a pioneering inspiration among her fellow anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-science, anti-evolution Americans. Just wait until Alaska secedes from the United States! The tyranny of empiricism will finally come to an end.

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UD thanks JKW for correcting her: Young is in the House, not the Senate.

Its member states just put a theocratic nightmare – where women who don’t swaddle themselves end up in jail – on its women’s rights commission. Which four EU and Western democracies voted for a place with mandated hijab laws to oversee the rights of the world’s women? The list is here. UD‘s gonna go with the most woke and guess the following four:

Australia

Canada

UK

USA

Big Sky Country’s proud of its Number One in America suicide ranking, and no federal gun control is getting in the way of that.

Ain’t got no shrinks out here, either!

Nothing stands in the way of our over-65s who’ve had enough booze and loneliness shooting themselves in the head.

YEEHAW!!

So the biographer of bad boy P. Roth is himself a bad boy! How far down does this go? Is the book’s editor a bad boy? Typesetter?

Meh. Aside from mucho giggles at age sixteen when my parents brought Portnoy into the house, UD, who taught Roth’s short stories for years, hasn’t benefited all that much from plenty of Roth reading. She fails to detect any literary style in the guy, for starters… Actually, wait, I have another vivid and very positive Roth memory. It’s pouring down rain one Chicago afternoon, and I’m waiting in his car for my boyfriend to pick up something at the Newberry Library. I’m listening to a tape he has playing of Philip Roth reading from one of his works – and it’s absolutely hilarious. Roth’s delivery is hilarious. I’m laughing like a madwoman; and when my boyfriend comes back to the car I make him wait to drive off until I’ve heard the whole thing.

But anyway my problem with Roth never had to do with his characters’ malsain morality; it involved a sense that while the short stories were sharp and moody and wise, the novels were… the novel was not his form. Even Portnoy feels too long; and even his short novels (Everyman, for instance) dully drag. Propped up in their early days by libido, his later novels just lie there.

All of this, I suppose, reflects Roth’s classic bad-boy declension through life (cad-icity; flaccidity; acidity), which left him all bittered up with nowhere to go. Maybe he chose another bad boy to write his bio because he figured a guy like that could summon the ghost of the cocksman. Didn’t work.