I know it’s not supposed to make you laugh, but it makes it sound as though you turn to it only when the utilities fail.

SHORT OF ELECTRICITY, FOOD, AND WATER, VENEZUELANS TURN TO RELIGION

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Americans? Not so much.

Probably forever. And get a load of all the headlines, many of them featuring his Notre Dame connection. Which you can instantly confirm by clicking on his... Hero Page. UD remains baffled as to why football factories don’t employ someone (respectable universities do) to take down the pages of the disgraced.

After an evening rainfall, a misty Saturday morning in UD‘s woods.

The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

Oliver Sacks

… (the wedding took place under somewhat strained circumstances), seems to have the inside track for Maryland House Speaker.

Les UDs have been selling, via Bonham’s, a number of just these Fangor paintings from the ‘sixties. The next sale of one of their Fangors is on May 16 in New York City.

An excellent article about al-Hol camp raises the right questions.

The reporter’s walk through the camp reveals, in all its fullness, the surreality, depravity, and indescribable stupidity of its inmates.

But it also gets something fundamental wrong: The children are of course innocents, and governments are slowly identifying their child nationals and, if they can, taking them out of the camp. But “their women and children”? The women were also the enemy, fully paid-up, active ISIS members; and if descriptions of some of them in the camp are accurate, they are still very much caliphate combatants.

The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum gets it said. Little shocks ol’ UD, but she must say she is shocked by this.

… monstruos.

The German Minister [of the interior] said it would be a “good move” to set up an international court that would try foreign jihadists rather than have Germany and other nations repatriate fighters and their families back to their home countries, especially since “terrorism is an international issue,” according to Die Zeit.

“That’s always better, for me, than bringing all ISIS fighters of German nationality [back] to Germany,” before trial, he noted.

“If several states have a prosecution claim, the trials should be conducted there. Trials should be conducted where ISIS fighters are now in detention, for example in Iraq,” the official said.

Be on the faculty of Brigham Young University.

Which is fitting, because he might be getting arrestoed.

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Whoever among Ireland’s playwrights has inherited a gift closest to Samuel Beckett’s will find spectacular dialogue for her own Worstward Ho in a recent interview with an Irishwoman who joined ISIS in order to “fulfill her dream of living under Sharia law.” Read the following, if you can, with an artist’s eye.

We were in the taxi, he [her new husband] said, “When you go up here at the roundabout, close your eyes. There’s a man like this on the cross on the roundabout and his eyes are gouged out and he’s wearing a red suit and you don’t want to see it.” …

Life was like back home [in Ireland]. Just like back home. You get up in the morning, go shopping, get your stuff, come home, cook your dinner, clean your house. It’s just like my everyday life. Go visit a friend, drink some coffee.

This is what we came for, you know. We came for, like, no alcohol… no prostitution, no gays, no anything… And, for me, I really liked to live in the Islamic State because I never got to see any of this. I just had to experience a lot of bombing and this, that and the other, and hearing someone died and hearing this and hearing that but I didn’t have to see any of that.

You’re not gonna tell ol’ UD that this is not pure theatrical gold.

Rhino Poacher Trampled by Elephant and Eaten by Lions in South Africa

Snapshots from a country.