And that’s the only good thing to say about this predictable and pathetic chapter in Israel’s history.

It is not bigotry to suggest that Haredi leaders’ initial disregard for the orders of medical authorities, and their community’s seemingly blind adherence to those leaders, have undermined the painful efforts of everyone else to stem the spread of the virus.

Haredi insularity, Haredi disregard for health authorities during a pandemic, Haredi poverty and population density — all the factors that render them especially vulnerable to the virus, and through them everyone else — are ultimately a choice. There are no external or environmental factors forcing Haredim into their isolation and poverty, only their own cultural and religious commitments. They are therefore not only victims of their current circumstances, but also perpetrators, in the full light of day and of scientific warning.

So, nu?

So don’t hold your breath:

The crisis has sparked a deluge of speculation about the future of Haredi society. Would the rabbis’ manifest and almost wall-to-wall failure to grasp the new situation lead to new skepticism and individualism in the community? Would some question their faith? Would it drive more Haredim to secular education and the job market?

Much of this is wishful thinking on the part of critics who believe their case against the Haredi worldview has just been validated by impartial natural forces. But if that was how religion worked, then as Sigmund Freud once erroneously predicted, there would now scarcely be a religion left on Earth.

Actually, that is the way religion works – for non-cultists. You have your individual life, but you are also part of the body of a church, and you go to certain buildings once a week to worship with people who think the way you do. Ultraorthodoxy, on the other hand, is more of a bizarre hyperexclusive fraternity than a religious body.

To outsiders the term “Haredi” is usually a religious category, but one is hard-pressed to find a specific and agreed-upon theological idea that unites and distinguishes the Haredim. What they share, what defines their society as a distinct subgroup in a broader Israeli and Jewish culture, is a sociological idea.

Indeed, like any reflexively loyalist, outsider cult of no particular theological definition (and therefore no reflective morality outside of what authoritarian leaders tell them), the haredim responded stupidly and viscerally to the pandemic – as they would to anything that comes at them from the outside.

What they are is world-rejectionists; so they did their thing. They rejected the world.

The initial response of Haredi leaders wasn’t a rejection of science, but something less coherent — a stunned refusal, an instinctive rejection of the enormity of what was being asked of it.

It’s hard to think of a more condemnatory judgment of a group of people – a group of people who hold themselves ethically and spiritually superior to everyone else, who pelt with stones eight year old girls and call them whores because their skirts aren’t long enough, and everyone lets them get away with it …

And then there’s this, describing the criminal, er, stunned refusal of a powerful rabbi:

Kanievsky, who would later reverse his position and explain that he hadn’t yet heard about the pandemic when he refused to close the schools, “showed his weakness” as a leader, said [one observer]. “But [in the eyes of haredim] that weakness also reflects his holiness and grandeur, his total investment in the Torah.”

Ya follow? We love him even more because of the pious obliviousness to worldly matters that wiped out our family.

… all of the other things in which UD takes a keen interest. Certes, though, she has been virally distracted, and has had difficulty returning to normal.

But she’s getting there; and as always she thanks you for the tips and links, and will attend to them soon.

Hey, the health minister himself flouted the rules and got the virus.

Nothing’s ‘incredible’ when your country’s ruled by theocrats.

L’il Jerry’s suin’ everbody.

Sing it:

When my daddy died at seventy-three
He didn’t leave much to Ma and me
Just this old school called Liberty.
Now, I don’t like the story the New York Times did
Bout how we rounded up all the Liberty kids
So when it came out, I told my lawyers Sue.

Elites must o’ thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a’ lots of folk
So I went and sued ProPublica too.
Trespass, defamation, and hatred of the godly
I swear if you just look at me oddly
I’m gonna sue, sue, sue, sue sue.

Report: Ivanka Trump to

Pause Guitar Lessons to

Rescue Entire Economy

One of Exotic’s ex-husbands, John Finlay, gives shirtless interviews that show off his abundant tribal tattoos—including a crotch adornment that reads Privately Owned Joe Exotic—and his undeniable lack of teeth. (Only in Episode 5 does Tiger King stop to note that meth has been a prevalent factor in Exotic’s world the whole time.) The interviews become more and more invasive. Travis’s mother is asked about her son’s death while she’s seemingly intoxicated. In Episode 7, one of Exotic’s zoo employees is so incapacitated that he passes out mid-interview. Exotic’s campaign manager is interviewed early on as a fresh-faced former Walmart manager enthusiastically crafting Exotic’s libertarian platform; a year or so later, he too has lost teeth, and appears considerably more disheveled than during his clean-cut canvassing days.

Once this pandemic has run its course, Israel will begin finally to reckon – to its eternal shame – with its cynical cultivation of huge, fast-growing numbers of violent ignorant religious fanatics. It didn’t have to be this way.

Every day, I thank … my lucky stars? … that as an American Jew, I was born into an actually secular republic, where we can afford to promote religious nut cases to the highest levels of society and everyone will just laugh at them. We laugh at them because they don’t threaten us; because, as Jon Meacham and others point out in regard to the current global crisis, we really do live in Enlightenment Country here. There’s not much good ol’ UD is willing to say about our current president, but the fact that he doesn’t even pretend to give a shit about religion (UD loved watching him cringe as holy rollers put their hands all over him) does speak well for him. When the person running the coronavirus show – Anthony Fauci – tells us he’s left the Catholic church, people don’t head into the streets with pitchforks, run him through, and demand to be led only by a person of faith.

Israelis are immediately, materially, and microbially, threatened by their government-sponsored fanatics; and now, as anyone could have predicted, ultraorthodox neighborhoods are fighting among themselves – a situation of escalating anarchy for which, again, the Israeli state can take a bow.

Significant numbers of secular Israelis have been bailing on that country for some time; secular American and European Jews also have eyes in their heads. You can see, demographically, where this is going.

… intensive care.

The situation with Israel’s corona-plagued haredim has sped so far beyond plain ironic that it’s gone supersonic ironic… After decades of hostile self-ghettoization against the modern Israeli state, that country’s scientifically ignorant and belligerently anti-social sects have infected themselves with a disease that threatens them and their non-haredi neighbors existentially. Understandably, the neighbors are constructing physical barriers against these foolish scofflaw communities whose noncompliance with safety measures has brought catastrophe.

[T]he municipality of Ramat Gan put up barricades along its border with the ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak, which has recorded a sharp rise in COVID-19 infections in the last few days and was placed under a government lockdown.

So, respond the haredim: How dare you ghettoize us!

Just because the “silence [of haredi authorities] betrayed and imperiled their community,” that’s no reason enlightened and responsible Israelis have to climb on board a doomed ship of fools and sink with them. They don’t think their raison d’être is to submit to criminally stupid rabbis; they believe in the germ theory of disease and act accordingly. Their misfortune is to have set up shop alongside a wretched medieval outpost that their state, which should above all be about protecting its citizens, has chosen, over decades, to ignore or, worse, to encourage. Now there’s really no way out.

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

Lest New Yorkers miss out on the fun.

… is going to collide more and more dramatically with this administration. The people who run the country are getting desperate, while their scientific advisors – like Tony Fauci – stubbornly do the only thing they can do: hang tough on behalf of empirical method. Utterly random figures like trade advisers can throw all of the enthusiastic hydroxychloroquine newspaper articles they want at Fauci; Fauci will never do anything other than point out the way science works and hope this will get through to most of the people in the room.

… UD sets out appropriately distanced Adirondacks.

… in UD‘s Garrett Park.

… Chesapeake Bay.

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

“My heart is crushed, yet we shall try to summon the grace of God and what strength we have to honor the hope, energy and passion that Maeve and Gideon set forth into the world.”

… is its treatment of female terrorists. To read deeply, as UD does, in the literature of ISIS women is to conclude that qua gender we are incapable of understanding ideology, much less committing ourselves to ideologically motivated activity. We certainly can’t breed people excited by the sight of infidels getting beheaded. ISIS women are always innocents led astray by men exploiting their pathetic need for love; they are such damaged traumatized people that they will go with anyone who presents himself as caring even a little bit about them.

Even in obvious cases, like Canada’s hardened veteran Ayan Jama, experts are always being wheeled out to assure us that chicks itching to explode themselves and bystanders in an act of martyrdom are really drifty ethereal lost souls, gentle troubled Amanda Wingfields… We are intended to listen to their bullshit with interest and sympathy…

While she acknowledged wanting martyrdom, she said that did not only mean to die in battle…

To be sure, certain forms of interpretive dance can also be expressions of martyrdom..

So, like, Canada wants her out, has refused to renew her passport, etc., and she’s complaining that not only has this meant the poor woman has “lost marriage proposals,” but she’s a fine upstanding etc etc and the bomb-making stuff government investigators found is just … I mean… who hasn’t experimented, especially during these tedious at-home coronavirus days, with building a bomb?

Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard.

********

The original headline on Michelle Goldberg’s piece was JARED KUSHNER IS GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED. Now it’s PUTTING JARED KUSHNER IN CHARGE IS UTTER MADNESS. I guess the first one was a bit over the top.

*********

Seth Meyers:

Oh, you’re doing your own [ventilator need] projections? Did your parents just buy you a TI-84 [graphing calculator]? … You’re not qualified to do anything, let alone tell New York how many ventilators they need. You’re a nepotism case, and you only got the White House job because you married into the family, and because the security guards believed your fake ID.