[The] recurrent leitmotif in ultra-Orthodox electoral messaging is “in line with Israeli Haredi school curricula” and its “contempt for civil society,” said Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se, an organization that studies the content of textbooks across the Middle East…
“The big picture is that there is a definite clear and concerted effort to keep Haredi children behind the walls they built up and away from everything they consider bad, all the temptations of the modern world,” Sheff explained. “That is to say, civics and democracy are taught in a very restricted manner” and many of the ultra-Orthodox “are not given an expansive view of how civil society and democracy works and [about] individual choice in choosing representatives. Take away the civics and democracy education, and give ‘rabbis-know-best education’ and presto, you have a situation where large [numbers] of people will be very open to being told how to vote at election time.”
… Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College, [says:] “The basic orientation is that individuals are not the ones to make political decisions, because if they are, then the power brokers lose their capacity to in effect deliver a bloc vote and their greatest power and strength is their ability to deliver that … I think the idea of every person thinking for himself, whether politics or anything else, is very threatening to the Haredi community. It’s not about politics so much as independent thinking and decision-making, and that’s the real risk.”
Mass gun slaughter: It’s everywhere you want to be!
… heading into Woodstock with my sister at the wheel, the two of us belting out Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. You know I sing and play guitar (though I mainly sing and play piano now), and that my roots are very Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. (My aspirational roots are Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, but let’s get real…) For Joni Mitchell’s 75th birthday, Canadian singers talk about their favorite songs of hers.
Although I sat around my freshman dorm room at Goucher College obsessively listening to the sad songs on Blue, it’s her fast ecstatic songs that have stayed with me: Woodstock, Carey, California. These are the songs that, decade after decade, sashay through my head while I sashay.
… these are among the universities near last night’s mass shooting at a college night in a bar in Thousand Oaks.
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“[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.”
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Also Pepperdine, Moorpark…
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“[S]ome [of the victims] were survivors of the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas that left 58 dead last year.”
Maybe I read too much Kafka growing up. Whatever – I hate and fear bureaucracy; I always assume having anything to do with it will be hell. So I ignore and neglect it as much as humanly possible.
Naturally therefore I filled out my retirement benefits application wrong – and wrong in a very — I hate this word — impactful way. I paid reasonable attention to what I was doing when I filled it out, but that wasn’t enough, and I made one significant mistake.
I ignored the first few letters from SSA alerting me to the rather expensive implications of my fuckupery; when I finally held my nose and began reading further letters, I realized I had to try to fix what I’d done. But how? Would the SSA even allow me to change the form?
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So … the rest of this narrative is going to be as UDesque as what I’ve already written. What you are about to read is in fact echt–UD.
I decided my best bet lay in action directe. Forget phones and internet: This would have to be face to face in a local SSA office. No doubt the office itself would be appalling and the wait (in order to be told to fuck myself) would be all day. Fine. I deserved the punishment.
Washington Avenue, Rockville, was all I had by way of location, but I figured I’d get to the vicinity and check my phone for the exact address. Except that my phone for some reason wasn’t connecting, so I had to keep walking and reading the fronts of office buildings… And there it was.
I entered exactly the crammed immiseration chamber I anticipated – six packed rows of seating from which you stared at numbered windows and a computer screen above them which told you what waiting list digits had just been called. I drew a deep sad breath, took my number (C395), and sat down with an article about the war in Yemen.
To my left, in a little alcove, hovered two genial but hawkish policemen: If your cell phone rang, they rushed over and told you to put it away or leave the room. When a large Chinese family loitered for a bit at the exit, they hurried them out. These two kept the room quiet and orderly.
I also noticed that the SSA clerks dealt calmly and efficiently with people — even disheveled, confused people.
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My number was called way, way before I figured it would be. I gathered my pathetic paperwork, mentally rehearsed the terse sob story I’d prepared, and drove forward to window 3. I expected one of the following outcomes.
1. You’re in the wrong office. You need to go to Silver Spring, Baltimore, New York…
2. What? I don’t understand.
3. Once you do what you did on the form, there’s no going back.
4. You have to file an appeal. Here’s a list of fees, forms, and attorneys…
5. Come back tomorrow with more documentation.
I had just watched the woman who asked my name and age handle a befuddled shuffling young man who said to her by way of introduction I’m very sensitive…
Rather broke my heart, if you really want to know, but she was kind and patient and solved his problem. Maybe she could even make some sense of ol’ UD.
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“No problem.”
Did I just hear that? Did she just say in answer to my convoluted hopeless entrapment in the deathcogs of the machine that she was about to reattach my positive negalator to my negative posilator licketysplit and all was well?
Yes.
“But tell me,” she said, trying to smooth out the incredibly creased pages of my passport so she could read them for i.d., “why did you make that mistake?”
“Because I’m dumb,” I grinned.
She didn’t grin.
“You know,” she said, “I have a bit of an issue with uninformed clients.”
What followed, as the immiserated masses waited their turns behind me, was the talking-to I mentioned in this post’s title. This was the sort of thing I was expected to know; it’s not all that difficult to understand what to do. One shouldn’t be afraid of bureaucracies. One has to deal with them sometimes. Etc. Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
I didn’t begrudge her. Au contraire, I deserved it; there were actual needy people all over the room, people not floating along on high FICO scores, lots of SSA money, and several other sources of funds. Why the hell was I clogging up the works?
I mean, she didn’t say that last stuff; that’s me talking. She simply – and kindly – told me to face the music.
Which – if true – is why the principal of Damascus High School, near UD‘s house, was foolish to write in her initial public statement that the rapes were limited to the school’s junior varsity football players.
Background here. As you know if you read this blog, anal rape and high school football go together like a horse and carriage.
(Most of its words and phrases
are taken from this article.)
——————————–
OUMUAMUA
Lightsail of artificial origin!
Non-trivial periodicity
Of the light curve! O Oumuamua:
I am in an excited state of spin.
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You are excited by external torques…
Curved sheet, hollow cone or ellipsoidal,
Part of the vast unbound population,
Are you alien, probe, mineral, Orc?
It’s okay to dislike football.
[T]hose who steer clear from football are not doing a disservice to the [University of Maryland] players; it’s a barbaric, violent sport that has a confirmed link with severe brain damage. While the university stands to benefit financially from the popularity of its football team, the players — almost all of whom will miss out on the NFL — do not.
A city overrun for years by violent primitives suddenly elects a reformist woman mayor. Her radical political platform featured making haredim educate their children; letting women walk on the street without having to find hiding places so that their vileness is kept from the view of men they might pass; and protecting women and girls from being spat on, called whores, and beaten up for draping only two rather than three black sheets over themselves.
Good luck, Mayor-Elect Bloch! Here’s hoping you have excellent personal security: These guys hate women and they’re coming after you.
A director of one of Don DeLillo’s plays describes his reaction to DeLillo’s writing. It’s my reaction too.
He interviews DeLillo:
Retirement … wouldn’t suit him the same way [it did Philip Roth]. “Everybody is different and there are always distractions. But I feel I have an idea in my mind I need to work on. And when I’m able to sit down and put my fingers on the typewriter, things are moving along pretty well. These days I’m much slower. I can’t work at the same pace. But what the hell, I’ll keep going. It’s what’s keeping me alive.”
These are the three big categories under which you will find repression of free speech on the contemporary American college campus. Let’s glance at each one:
1. Inquisition: Way-Christian schools are always alerting us that “Academic freedom is not sacrosanct. […] It too must submit to God in a Christian college,” so shut the fuck up.
2. Ineptitude: Drop-out factories like Chicago State University are the academic equivalent of North Korea because they’ve got an insane amount of corruption and fuckupery to keep quiet.
3. Ideology: One-party states like Sarah Lawrence and Reed College do not take kindly to conservative professors… or, in the case of Reed, to liberal professors.