On February 5, when AIPAC’s “Combating BDS” bill passed the Senate, 22 Democrats voted against it. That is a decent number, but the real sign that AIPAC’s power is on the wane is that every Democratic senator who is a candidate for president (except Amy Klobuchar) voted No. They voted No because they are seeking to win support from the Democratic grassroots, which, naturally enough, skews younger and younger, more and more progressive, and less and less white, leading naturally enough to more sympathy for Palestinians and less for Netanyahu’s Israel. That wouldn’t have happened before 2016, when Bernie Sanders embraced Palestinians and their cause as part of his coalition and not only did not lose support because of it but gained it. By 2020, it will be close to impossible for any Democrat to claim the progressive mantle while aligning with AIPAC.

That was this time last year. Now everyone’s all Lawdy Me! because Sanders (and Warren) won’t attend AIPAC’s 2020 convention. He’s been very consistent that AIPAC represents and underwrites a reactionary form of Zionism. His is a plausible and principled position. AIPAC can huff and puff, but there’s no real news story here. In fact, it’s quite old news, as AIPAC well knows.

A renegade group of Israel’s haredi women is complaining about breast cancer!

We care deeply about women’s health. The Health Ministry showed that breast cancer mortality is highest among Haredi women, and we tried to understand why. We saw that there were no public service announcements about the need for constant checkups. Women get tested too late. In our society, they don’t even call it breast cancer, but ‘the female affliction.’ … They use a hazy term because they are considered unchaste words. Haredi women have a unique lifestyle: They marry early, they get pregnant young and have many children, which has health effects, good and bad, but no one talks about this issue or allocates funds to address it. In 2014, we convened the Knesset committee for women’s equality to discuss the issue of ultra-Orthodox women’s health, and the Haredi lawmakers were a no-show, even though it concerned their mothers and their grandmothers.

What next? Political representation?

Our problems are the result of living in a democratic state without getting our democratic rights. The state must intervene… The law should be changed so that every party will have to include a certain number of women on its Knesset list… We were at the Knesset the day that Shas and United Torah Judaism submitted their lists. The election committee got two lists of 120 men, and no one batted an eye. What if some party said that they’re anti-Ethiopian? It’s undemocratic. I won’t agree to have my right of representation taken away. Right now, there’s no one representing 51 percent of the Haredi population… At the first stage, they should say: ‘You want a male-only list? No problem, but you’ll get only 50 percent of your election budget.’

And there’s that old chestnut: We do all the work, our husbands are fucking layabouts, and we are silent, invisible, and disenfranchised.

The ultra-Orthodox economy is on our shoulders, but our voices aren’t heard – not in the media, not in politics, not in the religious council or the local council. In other societies, your economic status gives you a certain social status as well, but not in a society whose values revolve around Torah study.

UD is beginning to worry about the viability of ultraorthodox Judaism. If it cannot continue to make its women glory in poverty, overwork, and social contempt, its future is in doubt.

They’re burning up the thesaurus over at Deutsche Welle, yet one feels they still have miles to go before they sleep.

… takes the one UD calls the bug-eyed paranoid to the Washington Monument.

... Darwin Award.

… Committee.

A reminder, from a New York Times review of Alice Birch’s “clear-eyed and comfortless” new play, of the value of art that goes against the grain.

… Die Fledermaus at Northwestern University. His favorite song: the Watch Duet.

Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, currently enjoying his three minutes of fame onaccounta this concentration camp witticism, offers Alan Dershowitz serious competition in the Most Fucked Up Harvard Law Professor contest.

Since converting to Catholicism, Vermeule is now an advocate of integralism, a Roman Catholic political doctrine which calls for the abolition of the division between church and state, in order that the resulting state – which integralists deny would be a theocracy – can promote a religiously-determined “Highest Good” in place of the personal autonomy of a liberal democracy. Their ideal is to create this new confessional Catholic regime through “strategic raillement,” or transformation from within institutions and bureaucracies, rather than by winning elections. The groundwork for a full integralist regime would then be in place when liberal democracy dies. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens.” To achieve this end, Vermeule advocates giving confirmed Catholics priority in immigration, allowing them to “jump immediately to the head of the queue.” Vermeule describes this as being essential to “the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.”

Gloriosky.

Fraudsters have something in common – the brass balls that come from the conviction that other people are so stupid one will always be able to get away with the fraud. Whether you’re Madoff calmly contemplating the 65 billion dollars you’ve stolen, or whether (at the other end of the fraud spectrum) you’re Sharonda Avery, commandingly handing down a diagnosis of autism to every single child brought to your pretend doctor’s office, the thing you’ve got, the unique, echt trait, is an arrogant, once more unto the breach, have at it, caution to the wind, only go around once, ah fuck it gall. That, plus endless delight in considering the many splendor’d ways in which you’ve ruined the lives of hundreds of families.

Prosecutors said Avery’s ruse started to unravel when a school psychologist in Spotsylvania started to become suspicious because Avery kept diagnosing children as autistic.

Of course the fraudsters are absolutely correct in their determination of the stupidity of the world. Madoff’s scheme was obvious to anyone with an ounce of grey matter, and some of those people shouted the truth to the treetops for over a decade.

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

Stafford [Virginia] prosecutors said when state officials notified the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office [of Avery’s scheme], they did not take action.

Right – I meant to add give a shit nothingness to the stupidity. Rural Virginia and all. Who cares. Most everyone around here’s a fraud of one sort or other. Big deal.

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UD thanks her sister.

The postmodern American death (details here), and the ultimate postmodern headline.

Once again the ultraorthodox come through. Now that Robin Williams is dead, UD finds herself increasingly dependent on the ultras for her deepest, most life-affirming laughter.

Speaking at at the launch of the United Torah Judaism election campaign last March in the well-known Lederman Synagogue in Bnei Brak, Rabbi Aviezer Filtz, a prominent figure in UTJ and head of the religious seminary Yeshivat Toshia in the southern village of Tifrah, delivered a fiery speech on the importance of separate-gender seating on public buses.

“Start to organize, to ride separately,” he urged his listeners, then explained that the principle was so fundamental that even the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust obeyed this policy.

“Even the Nazis, may their names be erased, understood that there has to be separate housing for women and men, but here [in Israel] it’s forbidden!”

It’s the folks at NPR this time, tut-tutting over Indonesia’s refusal to take back female and as well male ISIS people. The women were not, we are told, “seasoned fighters.” Why? By definition, I guess. Women can’t be seasoned fighters. They just can’t. They’re too frail to be fighters, much less seasoned. Sing it, Leila!

An interviewee assures NPR that ISIS women were merely “jihadi chattel married off to the next militant after their husband was killed,” so don’t worry about bringing them back to live among you! They’re just like Donald Trump and Elizabeth Taylor: serial marriers… Harmless, comic figures, really…

This blog’s focus on universities means that it has mainly looked at the way admitting violent whack-jobs to your school because they whack people on football fields can have unfortunate consequences. The situation is really grotesque in public junior high and high schools, where a toxic brew of incompetence, indifference, and ideology seats hardened criminals next to schoolchildren in classrooms. We’ve already seen it in my coverage of a local high school’s gang rapes on the football team; now there’s another local school – Clarksburg – where we’ve got a twofer: A fifteen year old tyke brings a handgun to school (that part’s like so fucking what… they’re in every other locker.), shows it off to his gang in the school bathroom, and a member of the gang steals it. LOL.

So … let’s see…

Despite having an “extensive criminal history,” one of the five suspects in Monday’s handgun robbery at Clarksburg High School was allowed to remain enrolled, raising questions about the school system’s top-down disciplinary policy.

According to court documents obtained by ABC7, Tyson Brown, 16, of Clarksburg, is well known by law enforcement, with prior criminal charges including armed robbery, robbery, and second-degree assault.

• March 11, 2019: Police arrested Brown for possession of stolen property linked to an armed robbery in Germantown.
• September 2019: Police implicated Brown in a series of “pizza robberies.”
• September 5, 2019: Police served a search warrant on Brown’s Clarksburg home, confiscating a Glock pistol magazine from his bedroom.
• January 2, 2020: Grand jury indicted Brown as an adult on six criminal counts including armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and two counts of participation in a criminal gang. The case, filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court, is scheduled for a three-day trial in late April.

This case also gives us an opportunity to get up close and personal with the guy who instigated the Damascus rape:

[T]he ringleader in the Damascus High School rape case was expelled from Clarksburg High School during the 2017-2018 academic year after he targeted and robbed an LGBTQ student.

The 6-foot-1, 240-pound ringleader managed to enroll at Damascus the following school year, where he joined the storied football program. Initially placed on the varsity squad, the ringleader was quickly demoted to the JV team for bad behavior, court testimony in the criminal case would later reveal.

According to a civil lawsuit filed last week, during his less than three months at Damascus, the ringleader “physically assaulted” a special needs student. He also “intentionally physically struck” a female educator, injuring her. The lawsuit argues that repeated slaps on the wrist kept the troubled 15-year-old athlete among good, hardworking students, in turn, allowing him to perpetuate the Halloween Day 2018, locker room rapes.

Oooh, a lawsuit!

Your education taxes at work.

Awhile ago, I said on this blog that I wasn’t going to cover the big-ass burqa story going on in India, because so much of it is in fact motivated by bigotry; but I’ll make an exception for this exceptionally stupid statement by an Indian politician. As one of many amused Twitter responders puts it:

If Burqa … is “essential” for Islam, then how can it also be by choice for Muslim women?