We’ll boil our women to death yet.

… when you have finally, at a very advanced age, been hauled into a courtroom for decades of deeply evil activity, the thing to do to finish out your incarceration-free run is to plead dire physical debility. Judge, I’m an old man! Jail would kill me! Have mercy.

The ploy frequently works. You’re surprised? UD has blogged about people – not even very old people in some cases – whose lawyers successfully convince authorities that whoops their client was just about to curtail his atrocities himself cuz of the following twelve life-threatening diseases that have suddenly engulfed him. Here’s a note, your honor, from a real live doctor I know, attesting to every one of them, and then some.

In the case of Rabbi Eliezer Berland, flight was his initial – and remarkably picaresque (if you have a free afternoon, you might enjoy following his multi-national, violent, on-the-lam itinerary) – response to some earlier charges against him (he likes to rape people). Now he’s back in court, charged with

defrauding his sick and elderly followers out of millions of shekels with miracle cures, including the administering of [Mentos] to cancer patients…

[H]undreds of people filed a police complaint against him for selling prayers and “wonder drugs” to desperate members of his community, and for promising families of handicapped individuals that their loved ones would be able to walk and families of convicted felons that their loved ones would be freed from prison.

His lawyer’s poignant account of a man diseased and in no condition to go to prison drew the following response from the judge:

Give him a Mentos.

… coronavirus restrictions in a lawsuit against the state’s governor. This pious town, always in the news for endemic welfare theft, anti-vax militancy, failure to educate its children, and now of course failure to observe virus containment laws, has just had it. It’s just had enough of government meddling in its wonderful way of life. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court!

Lakewood: Proud to be One of New Jersey’s Coronavirus Hotspots!

… La Kid, of her covoid existence.

Israel’s criminally negligent health minister sits down for a chat. Excerpts.

I have a kosher, ‘stupid’ phone – not a smartphone. I have no TV at home and no internet connection. I don’t think that’s a problem. On the contrary – I’m not distracted by the smartphone so I have more time to handle urgent things... I’m proud of the fact that I’m technologically disconnected.

… Q: [M]aybe you decided to leave [your position] because of the growing criticism leveled at you.

I can’t comment on all the lies in the media. Like the story about IKEA being allowed to reopen stores, which some claimed I approved because the owner is a Gerrer Hasid so he’s a Gerrer donor. It’s nonsense. I’ve had no dealing with him and he’s not a Gerrer Hasid. Besides, how would I know if he’s a Gerrer Hasid? It had nothing to do with me.

Q: So why were they allowed to open stores so early in the lockdown exit process?

The Finance Ministry pressured the Health Ministry – but not me personally. I knew nothing about it and no one asked me. No one even talked to me about it.

Q: How is it possible that the health minister knows nothing about it?

The media has to decide, once and for all, if they want me to listen to the professional advisers [in the ministry]. When I don’t – they [the media] criticize me. If I do – they also criticize me. Enough! I knew nothing about the IKEA opening yet some newspapers made it their headline. Why? To mud-sling. If I weren’t Haredi no one would care.

Q: So the criticism is because you’re Haredi?

Without a doubt. The moment I became popular – I was named one of the most popular ministers in the government – they began coming after me.

… What about the criticism that in the press conferences with Netanyahu and Health Ministry Director Moshe Bar Siman-Tov the reporters could barely hear you, that you were stuttering and quoting the Torah instead of talking about the virus?

There are anti-Semites who saw me with a shtreimel [ultraorthodox hat] and that’s what bothered them... Some reporters are anti-Semites. They can’t stand to see a Haredi minister succeed... Everywhere I go, people respect me and wish me well. It’s only the media that does the opposite.

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

… [The health minister] maintains he still doesn’t know exactly how he [himself] became infected with the coronavirus.

“I assume it was at the office or in one of the meetings we held with various officials, but the reports that I violated directives for prayer services are false. I can’t really comment any further because there’s an ongoing lawsuit on the matter,” he said.

95% of haredi math teachers [in Israel] did not receive a math education.

Don’t worry – I’m sure it’s much better here in the States. 90%?

Anyway. Really not to worry. Math beyond fingers and toes isn’t taught in haredi schools. So they don’t need any teachers.

… lets his imagination run wild, and imagines an ultra-altered ultra-orthodoxy. Shouldn’t the fact of their decimating themselves via a vicious virus they – whoops! – didn’t hear about because they think the rest of the world stinks and they never listen to it… shouldn’t that lurid fact prompt some serious thought about their suicidal folkways?

[Perhaps they might reconsider their monolithic] tendency to trust elderly rabbis on questions regarding which they have no clue…

This is a time when there is no external enemy, social trend or abusive regime harassing the community. The Charedi way of life is the enemy.

… The ultra-Orthodox are used to getting odd looks and to having a negative image. But they’re not used to their customs being the enemy. Who is that enemy? The rabbi that irresponsibly dismissed the orders of state officials. The tzadik who insisted on having a minyan of 10 at the synagogue. The funny guy who belittled strange laws of distant government men in suits.

… [M]aybe when the plague is over, Charedi society will no longer be the same. Maybe the Coronavirus will be like the fall of the Charedi Berlin wall. In other words, the plague is a good reminder that the world can turn on a dime. Charedim live in the world, they are part of the world. Change is not beyond them.

But this ain’t the way they think. The enemy is the evil godless haredim, whose viral suffering is god’s punishment for their evil godless ways. God will stop punishing them when they double down.

Ultra-Orthodox people [unlike non-ultra-orthodox Jews] do know Jewish law and therefore when they transgress religious laws it is seen as an intentional act for which divine punishment is much more severe. “The ultra-Orthodox who sin do not do so unintentionally and therefore [God’s] attribute of justice harms the ultra-Orthodox much more,” reasoned [the highest-ranking ultraorthodox rabbi in Israel].

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

The voice of the ultra-orthodox:

It’s scary, but it’s true:

So do what the Good Book tells you to!

… she has to admit that the class lawsuits now emerging from parents who understand what everyone with half a brain understands – online classes are distinctly inferior to in-person – have merit.

Of course, if you’ve been reading her Click-Thru U category for the last decade or so, you know that UD has been railing against the lazy cynical trend toward onlining more and more college (and high school) classes. It’s cheap, so universities tend to like it; you can cheat, so students tend to like it (once football schools got hold of the whole online course model, they went nuts); and you can do it from your Mexican palapa or even parcel most of the labor out to various faceless nameless drudges, so professors tend to like it…

But when many of the people (students; some teachers) involved in an expensive university course are basically phoning it in… or when (however hard participants are trying) the highly prized physical presence and social interaction of enthusiastic, charismatic experts is absolutely gone, parents tend to notice.

Everyone knows the peculiar pressurized circumstances of current nationwide online education; even granting that, however, one can ask whether a discount should apply.

… but it has a pop-pop-popping arts scene, and get a load of their city council conferences!

All day long, amazing moments in UD‘s woods.

Early this morning, raking some paths, I watched the red fox with the enormous tail glide by behind the honeysuckle bushes.

This afternoon, I discovered bear corn under some old logs. Here it is.

This evening, back at the top of the property to finish clearing paths, I watched a pileated woodpecker go at one of our dead upright trees. It took its time, letting me stand ten feet away gawking while its powerful beak easily tossed off large chunks of bark. The moment was much like this, except this woodpecker works on deepening a hole, while my woodpecker (what a big bird!) moved from one area of sheared trunk to another, gulping bugs as it went.

Oh, and then I found a large deer antler – not an unusual event around here. I tossed it to the dog, who added her teeth marks to the many already on it.

***********

Update: Who knew the woodpecker’s tree was called a “snag”? The New York Times pats UD on the back for keeping lots of dead trees around.

Yes, Sudan has just criminalized female genital mutilation. But Egypt criminalized it in 2008, and declitification continues there (and in many other places) with real gusto. UD is afraid it’s just too satisfying to castrate, disfigure, and torture us.

Breaking what rules? They’re following rules – the only rules that matter to them.

‘Rules’ like you need to vaccinate your kids, you need to educate your kids, you can’t steal from the welfare state, and you have to quarantine are … nothing.

[Illegal ultraorthodox] gatherings have led to disaster. Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights (the three major Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn) have experienced horrific death tolls. Other Hasidic Jews and I have heard of weddings and other mass gatherings followed shortly by a rash of infections and deaths.

This is a systemic problem that won’t go away just by pointing out that other areas of New York have had moments of people gathering, or that they are a minority within the community (both of which are true, but have little relevance in a discussion about communal dynamics).

Many leaders were slow to act, and even when they did, it has been clear that they were unwilling or unable to stand up to the extremists in their communities who refuse to listen.

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

You can keep throwing it all at the wall – antisemitism, it’s just a few extremists, how ’bout those spring breakers doing it too, we have to gather outside cuz our apartments are stifling, we didn’t get the memo cuz we’re too pure for any form of communication with the outside world, our rabbi said fuck that, if I don’t keep going to the ritual bath my husband won’t fuck me and we can’t get me pregnant, etc. etc. Go ahead and throw it all at the wall. You’re still killing yourselves and others and deserve all the condemnation coming your way.

… amplify, amplify again.

But it isn’t only romantic suicide, lad; it’s romantic homicide.

Throughout yet another opinion piece urging us to admire the haredim and castigate ourselves because we’ll never be the Jews they are, the writer stresses only the self-harm the haredim generate by breaking virus containment laws. It killed many of them. Yes, and continues to do so.

And, because they’ve carried the virus to the rest of us, it is killing many of us.

See?

The writer doesn’t see. His argument seems to be that because the haredim believe divine promises to the point of communal decimation, they deserve a kind of backhanded admiration, rather in the way one has to admire the fervor of Mad Mike, even if his belief that his steam-powered rocket would make him famous rather than dead was flawed.