A blank canvas, after all, is better; and there won’t be any obnoxious Italian bureaucracy to tussle with. The absolute quiet, and the big views of ice-floes drifting along the Arctic, will conduce to shared visions of the Cathophate to come.

The reemergence of Tony Fauci, for instance, is one way. For UD, though, you see it even more compellingly in the reinstatement and promotion of people like Yevgeny Vindman.

… Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman, who was the senior ethics official at the National Security Council and its deputy legal adviser from July 2018 to February 2020 … [was] fired from the NSC a year ago by Trump, escorted out of the White House and sent back to the Pentagon.

Yevgeny Vindman is now on a list of colonel promotions that has been approved by the White House and is going to the Senate for formal confirmation…

Vindman chose to hit back hard against the motherfuckers.

Vindman filed a complaint last August with the Pentagon inspector general alleging he was retaliated against by his former White House counsel’s office bosses, John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis, for reporting misconduct by Trump. He also lodged allegations of ethics violations by former national security adviser Robert O’Brien for allegedly using NSC staff’s official time for personal errands and “demeaning and demoralizing sexist behavior against … female NSC professionals.”

Of course the Pentagon has more consequential stuff to worry about now. Complaints and ethics violations are all well and good; allowing domestic terrorists to attack the Capitol of the United States sounds like real trouble.

Making use of his deep Kurdish ties, Peter found a Canadian child at one of the Kurdish-run ISIS prisoner camps and repatriated her. Agonizingly, the child’s mother (an ISIS adherent; one assumes she no longer is, but the Canadians at the moment will not have her) had to agree to give her up, and she did so. This selfless gesture makes commendable an otherwise pitiable fanatic, and will perhaps stand her in good stead in case of a Canadian judicial review.

Another intriguing angle on this: Peter’s father, John Kenneth Galbraith, grew up in southern Ontario (he wrote a book – The Scotch – about it); bagpipes and Auld Lang Syne figured at his funeral. Perhaps Peter’s father’s deep Scottish-Canadian ties also helped.

Just after one burqa ban passes (Switzerland), another is announced: Sri Lanka, having suffered hideously at the hands of ISIS, attempts to deradicalize its citizens — taking on not merely the fundamentalist burqa, but also unregistered madrasas that refuse to teach the national curriculum.

He still can’t really see it; he’s been squinting at an enlarged image of it for some time.

So as Mr UD grapples with the concept of camouflage, eats the egg and sour dough slices I fried in olive oil, and packs for the beach, UD lets you know that she will be blogging from the president’s summer home for the next week.

‘MAKE EYE CONTACT AND SMALL TALK. [This is part of] being a citizen and a responsible member of society.‘

Burqa enthusiasts simply don’t care about this; for them, the total blacking out of women on the streets of their cities represents a higher value than responsible citizenship, than the open mutuality of open faces. An outfit designed to repel interaction – an outfit which, most shockingly and insultingly, features mesh over the mouth of a woman (small talk? no talk), fits perfectly, as Snyder’s argument suggests, in a tyrannical setting like Saudi Arabia. It has no place in a democracy, and, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid’s very long list of democratic – and would-be democratic – countries where burqas are outlawed suggests, more countries and municipalities realize that every day. Switzerland is only the latest; it will not be the last.

Again and again on EasyJet flights, stinky ungodly women are forced to change their seats so as not to infect any pure ultraorthodox men who may, through the machinations of some diabolical force, have been seated next to them.

If the women refuse, other passengers — far from, say, acknowledging overt gender discrimination — put pressure on the women to make them move.

Of course this goes on all the time on EasyJet and non-EasyJet to-and-from Israel flights, but only occasionally does a woman resolve to turn down, for instance, the one cup of free coffee that EasyJet offers as compensation and instead contact IRAC, which sues on her behalf and makes all sorts of money for her. The discrimination is so comically obvious, and enjoys so wide an audience, that when these particular suits come forward, airlines simply pay up. The latest beneficiary is Melanie Wolfson.

Since this is such a slam-dunk, UD proposes the following source of income in these uncertain covid times: Groups of women organize themselves to “seed” selected haredim-heavy flights. Inevitably, on any given flight, a number of these women will be seated next to out-of-my-sacred-space-godless-harlot men. Every one of these women files a lawsuit (knowing what will go down, the group will include someone designated to film events on board) and thereby earns for herself and her co-conspirators compensation in the tens of thousands. Takes more time to make than a coffee, but is more satisfying, and lasts longer.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) excoriated an oil company’s executive during a congressional hearing Tuesday after he suggested she did not understand a tax break under discussion. Speaking to Mark Murphy, president of Strata Production company, the chair of House Natural Resources Oversight Committee said, “How much of those intangible drilling costs do you get to deduct right away from your taxes?” Murphy responded, “We get to deduct all of those just like any other business. There seems to be a misconception out there that you’re operating from that somehow the oil and gas industry benefits from some special sort of tax structure. We don’t.”

To which Porter replied, “You do benefit from special rules. There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have. You get to deduct 70 percent of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream, so please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.”

Ok, so she lied about French schoolteacher Samuel Paty having blasphemed; but her father’s murderous campaign against Paty succeeded in exciting a local terrorist to behead him at the school, in front of students.

How could her account of Paty’s actions have been so wrong?

Well, for starters, she wasn’t there. She had been suspended for truancy.

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

And now the lives of two professors in Grenoble are in danger; a campus campaign against them might well stir up that city’s beheaders.

When the frats kill a particularly young one, I post this variant of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was .495 booze.

… is that this sort of social reality tends to make it easier to identify true burqa evil-doers. Like the Montreal father who told his four girls that if they ever took their burqas off he’d kill them. Just for good measure, he beat them all the time anyway. The teacher of one of the girls saw that things weren’t right, and reported the father to the authorities.

He has been found guilty of assault; the daughters, who were in court, are no longer under his authority.

**********

UD thanks David, a reader, for the link to ACTUALITÉ.

[In] the 45 years since it was first officially celebrated by the UN, [International Women’s Day] feels like it marks regress rather than progress when it comes to the African context…

Let’s talk child marriage …, another great “accomplishment” for women across Africa. Let’s look at the case of Nigerian senator Ahmad Sani Yerima, who married [as his fourth wife] a 13-year-old girl from Egypt in 2010 when he was 49 years of age, defending his actions based on his religion.

Yerima told the BBC at the time that the Muslim faith permitted this union, and that he would “not respect any law that contradicts it, and whoever wants to sanction me for that is free to do that.”

…national ban on the wearing of burqas/niqabs.