Chris Keller is the “last officer standing” in the Men’s Garden Club.

But otherwise it’s such a clean program!

At drug firms there’s truly a science

To being the Chief of Compliance:

A grasp geographic

Of best towns to traffic

Plus conspiracy, greed, and connivance.

KAPOW! College football is corrupt!

Fuckin’ bombshell, man.

Sad opinion piece in the New York Times, by a Hasidic Jew distraught at the failure of significant numbers of his fellow orthodox to protect their children – and the rest of us – from disease. Here’s the most interesting passage of an essay that rehearses ironclad destructive know-nothingism in several aspects (these most notoriously at the moment include the un-education of children and certain grotesque forms of circumcision) of the larger ultraorthodox community – not merely in the anti-vaccination preaching of a powerful subgroup within that community.

Whether out of shortsightedness or strategic malice, some of our religious leaders have directly fostered an atmosphere where thorough research is sneered at, the scientific method is doubted and the motivations of professionals are assumed to be nefarious and steeped in anti-religious animus.

Hardly shortsightedness, is it? I mean, that’s a pretty innocuous word, suggesting that if we can only point out the longer-term results of various rabbis’ behavior, they will maybe change it. No, the author’s use of the phrase strategic malice is far more interesting. The author’s rightly seeking a nasty motive for a nasty set of behaviors. Malice against whom? Strategic in regard to what end? (If he’d written ignorant malice, we could say What do you expect, given the appalling state of education in many American yeshivas? Weep for where the rejection of enlightened modernity lands you…)

The author repeats the word strategic at the end of his essay: Certain religious leaders are exhibiting “the strategic deployment of a siege mentality.” What’s the percentage, for powerful rabbis, of inculcating in their followers an outside-world-rejectionist mentality so severe as to mentally and physically cripple significant numbers of their children for life, and to put the health of the rest of us at risk because of their followers’ behavior? Answer: It’s obvious. These men are insanely power-hungry. As in other abusive, endgame cults, this is how cult leaders totally control people. Unto besieged death.

And, to use the technical term, this is nuts, ain’t it?

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

Nuts it may be, but it’s hardly unprecedented or enigmatic behavior. Mildly cultic groups notoriously spin off radical subcults (see Warren Jeffs and the like), and respectable sects know to shun their various psycho subsectarians. Maybe they’ve got people sucking infants’ penises and thereby infecting and sometimes killing them. Maybe they’re infecting their own children with measles. “While it is reasonable to allow adults to martyr themselves to their religion, it is not reasonable to allow them to martyr their children,” says an observer.

UD‘s pretty sure it ain’t reasonable to allow adults to self-martyrize either; but anyway the theme within some orthodox Jewish communities of – in a remarkable number of ways – martyring their children is lately unignorable. Yet these communities – often modern as well as ultra – seem incapable of the shunning that other secretive and tight-knit religious communities are able to accomplish. (Not that they don’t love to shun! They just seem to shun the wrong things.) Nor is New York City’s government willing to go there. So here we are.

Read it once for enjoyment, and a second time to learn how to write well.

… (read all of these posts to refresh your memory) and he’s just beginning to claim his share of the attention he deserves from the larger world. But we need to be patient; he remains — despite having been rewarded with seven hundred million dollars in personal compensation over ten years for addicting much of the state of West Virginia — parenthetic.

For most businesses, $150 million [in fines] would be a lot of money. At McKesson, it was less than the $159 million retirement package the company granted its longtime chief executive, John H. Hammergren, in 2013. (After a public backlash — a Forbes headline asked if it was “The World’s Most Outrageous Pension Deal?” — the company later reduced the package to $114 million.)

PARENTHESIS $114 million? And why not mention that this, er, specimen sits on the board of the Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients, bringing his knowledge of drug distribution to global thinking at the highest levels? There’s a lot to say about John Hammergren. But people seem willing to wait until he gets arrested (think it can’t happen?) to say it. Here on University Diaries, we’re saying it now.

Holds ’em steady for a better shot.

When almost thirty years ago she decided she’d had enough of driving cars, people would gaze at her and say things like My grandmother had that problem. Now

If teenagers are any guide, Americans’ love affair with the automobile may no longer be something car makers can bank on.

The percentage of teens with a driver’s license has tumbled in the last few decades and more young people are delaying purchasing their first car—if buying one at all…

UD, as veteran readers know, thinks it likely she’s a happier, calmer person not only because she stopped driving, but because she stopped driving in the DC area’s notoriously bad conditions.

LOL.

Joe’s brother Nathan owned various Ocean City properties and concessions as far back at 1912, and the one you see in the picture – now a Dumser’s ice cream parlor – has remained in the Rapoport family all this time. The city has been trying to evict them, claiming it’s been owned by OC all this time.

The state’s highest court on Friday denied a petition by the Town of Ocean City to hear an appeal in the battle over ownership of a Boardwalk property, essentially bringing closure to the longstanding case.

The state’s Court of Appeals on Friday denied a petition for writ of certiorari filed in February by the town against Nathans Associates, the heir and owners of the century-old-plus building the east side of the Boardwalk at South Division Street, which, for decades, has been home to the iconic Dumser’s Dairyland. The petition asked the Court of Appeals to hear the case after the lower Court of Special Appeals ruled twice against the town.

… ladies’ version.

Oh, those girls!

… Just another football game.

The fanatics refusing to vaccinate their children suffer a setback from a judge.

“A fireman need not obtain the informed consent of the owner before extinguishing a house fire,” [Lawrence] Knipel wrote in his ruling. “Vaccination is known to extinguish the fire of contagion.”

Featured takoyaki. Karyna, my companion, spends every summer in Japan, and was thrilled. La Kid joined us, at the end of her workday.