… dark covid days (altering a Joni Mitchell phrase here), the Economist promises many corporate scandals once they’re over.

Given that the priorities of public health and Haredi leaders are not in opposition…

Uh, yes they are.  Examine long-standing haredi attitudes toward vaccines too, if you’d like.  And the physical treatment of women and children. Plus hey: No education in science plus patriarchal prudery equals raising people who don’t understand their bodies and how to keep them alive.

Public health authorities and Haredi religious leaders have seen that the price of not collaborating effectively is tragically high…

No they haven’t.  The authorities didn’t have to see this, because they already knew, having been educated in history and empiricism.  They had no need to ‘see’ the tragic price this go ’round because they are familiar with the tragic price paid in, I don’t know, the bubonic plague era.

As for the haredim (Why does the writer speak exclusively of haredi leadership, by the way?  Have ordinary ultraorthodox Jews no independent agency?  If they don’t – if the modern state of Israel has generated a large, growing minority of people who are completely passive morally – then the problem of coronavirus infection in Israel is really just an itty bitty problem.), like a lot of ignorant cults they don’t see avoidable death as tragic but as one of many mysterious divine blessings.

… UD‘s back deck. The deck features the newly-stained brown that both UDs, on seeing it completed, decided looked like diarrhea. They had already made preparations to have it redone when the virus postponed things.

In the time she’s been living with it, UD has gradually become fond of it… What wonderfully adaptive beings are human beings…

On a high branch in one of the very big trees in the distance, UD watched, yesterday afternoon, with her green and black binoculars, a Cooper’s Hawk. It perched there a long time. Good call. The name of the ground game chez UD is rabbit/squirrel/vole.

Recall the 2008 case of Stanford University med school faculty member John Borchers (scroll down), a long-term addict of many drugs, who continued to the very end of his life (massively drugged, he piloted a plane into a mountain) to see patients. To this day, Stanford has said not a word about why it felt okay retaining this wreck of a man in a position of enormous responsibility.

Then there’s hero-pitcher Roy Halladay.

Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Famer Roy Halladay was doing acrobatic stunts in his plane before his fatal crash in 2017… Halladay had 10 times the acceptable levels of amphetamines in his system as well as morphine and an unnamed antidepressant that can impair judgment. Just before he died, the NTSB found, Halladay had performed a series of dangerous maneuvers like high-speed climbs and dives as well as turns just five feet above the waters of Tampa Bay. One sequence of climbs and dives ended with his plane hitting the water, killing him, according to the report.

The Daily Beast calls this a “fatal joyride,” but you and I know that in both cases, these rides were precisely the opposite of joyful. These were suicides, just as if they’d gone the cheaper traditional route — accelerating hyperdrunk into trees.

Headline of the day.

********

Original headline (which I forgot to link to) has been altered.

As a few op/eds defending covid-flouting haredim straggle out of the gate, UD makes it a point to read them all.

They run the gamut from completely nuts to completely nuts.

UD has to read them for you because she knows you won’t read them. And why won’t you? Let us count the ways.

It’s just a few primitifs scattered here and there in the world… Maybe you saw Unorthodox and you know they treat their women like shit, but ladeedah… there but for the grace of god full stop. You’re vaguely aware welfare fraud rages and yeah ok their schools are a national disgrace but meh. The world is full of problems. Viewed from an anthropological lens, these people are certainly… interesting…

Oh, and here’s the most important reason of all. Play it again, Sam.

It is taboo in our society to criticize a person’s religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious discourse – our religious beliefs – are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

Even when social practices are getting us killed, we don’t criticize them because they’re religious. Thus, indignant defenders of the haredim point out that these people live in appallingly substandard conditions, packed into tiny apartments without access to televisions, computers, or any news of the outside world, and that they get all of their instructions for how to live every aspect of their lives from a rabbi. These writers seem to believe that they are successfully arguing that since the haredim’s creation of some of the world’s hottest viral zones is simply an epiphenomenon of their faith, we are vicious anti-religionists to criticize them. But listen up, O Israel:

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.

Rich countries like America and Israel have been rich enough to ignore/appease/tolerate ways of life belligerently at odds with everything modern democratic states stand for; but now that the anti-empirical, anti-state position of the haredim is literally killing us, something surely has to be done. No more bullshit about how it’s only a radical minority within a minority – that obviously doesn’t matter anymore. No more bullshit about how if you’re nice to them eventually they’ll assimilate more and more to normal society. No – as Sam Harris and Haviv Rettig Gur point out, these people believe what they believe, and it ain’t just ideas — it’s salvation.

In the full light of day, to quote Gur, socially destructive ultraorthodox practices must be exposed. We have to stop looking away.

Sing along.

If I were King of the Nation — not queen, not duke, not prince.
My regal robes of the Nation, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.
I’d command each thing, be it fish or fowl.
With a woof and a woof and a royal growl.
As I’d click my heel, all the trees would kneel.
And the mountains bow and the bulls kowtow.
And the sparrow would take wing – If I – If I – were King!

Each network would show respect to me. Reporters genuflect to me.
Though my tongue would lash, I would show compash
For every underling!
If I – If I – were King!
Just King!
Monarch of all I survey — Mo–na-a-a–a-arch of all I survey!

Your majesty, if you were King, you wouldn’t be afraid of anything?
Not nobody! Not no how!
Not even a coronavirus?
Impossirirus!
How about a Constitutionus?
Why, I’d thrash it from top to boottomus.
Supposing you met an elephant?
I’d wrap him up in sellaphant.
What if it were a brontosaurus?
I’d show him who’s King of the forest!

How!? How!?
Courage.
What makes a king out of an ass? Courage.
What waves the flag on the mast? Courage.
What makes the elephant charge his tusks
In the misty mist
Or the dusky dusk
What makes the muskrat guard his musk?
Courage.
What makes the Sphinx the seventh wonder?
Courage.
What makes the dawn come up like thunder?
Courage.
What makes the Hottentots so hot?
What puts the ape in apricot?
What do they got that I ain’t got?

Courage.

You can say that again.

There I am, foreground, in a little white sweater, pacing the tree with my siblings. It’s 1960. We lived in London that year, but this moment has us in Sea Palling, beside an eerie old holiday house our parents had rented.

I remember little from that long ago, but distinctly recall crawling in and out of the strange hidden little rooms and crevices of the Sea Palling house on dreary days when we couldn’t walk the beach.

This woman for awhile mapped every monkey puzzle tree she could find in England, but no Sea Palling tree appears in her search engine. Is this one still there? They live for a thousand years and grow to over a hundred feet. This one looks to be about thirty feet. If it exists, it’s massive.

I’m in love with the name Sea Palling. Like pure music, it means everything and nothing — I mean, the words pulse with significance, yet when you actually look at them together they’re semantically silent… The town used to be called only Palling – Victorians attached “sea” in a bid for tourists – and could have meant anything even at the beginning. No one, that is, can tell you what the name of the town means. The two words compressed seem to become one – seapalling … appalling? The sea palling, fading in power or beauty, its waves receding… Or in a deathly (funeral pall) way, the sea whitening, blanching, as when Blake describes

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.

SPA WITH INFRARED SAUNA AND STEAM SHOWER, GLASS ENCLOSED WINE CELLAR, BUILT IN LOWER LEVEL BAR, INDOOR GOLF SIMULATOR ROOM AND INDOOR SPORT COURT WITH SYNTHETIC ICE

A Virginia bishop who defied warnings about the danger of religious gatherings during the pandemic and vowed to keep preaching “unless I’m in jail or the hospital” died over the weekend after contracting Covid-19.

**********

“With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die.”

… scientist?

At some point, everyone has to be held responsible for at least some of their own behavior. This would seem thunderingly obvious, but it ain’t.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams is on the hot plate. His sin? With new indications that the coronavirus is disproportionately killing black and brown people, he suggested that we refrain from alcohol and cigarettes… [A number of] commentators were appalled that Adams had had the nerve to urge people of color to change their behavior, rather than resting with his acknowledgment that societal inequality exposes them to more risk from the virus.

… Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, was roasted for supposedly condescending to a black audience in urging black men to take a larger role in rearing their children. Even though he did this with a vernacular warmth that his audience ate up with a spoon, legions of black thinkers reviled the president for addressing behavior rather than the broader causes that made counsel such as his necessary in the first place. [Similarly,] why is Adams not allowed to remind black and brown people to hold off on the smoking?

… the mass-killer instinct.

UD is not the first to notice something strange and soothing about the simple singsong flow of the Swedish accent.

She has lately, under plague conditions, also noticed that long sessions of Swedish (a language totally unknown to her) piped into her ear on clear quiet self-isolated evenings while she lies abed generate calm, and even occasional flashes of Bergmanian life wisdom…

The film she streams the most, however, isn’t one of his — it’s The Emigrants, which not only features infinite accent (the movie is interminable), but also, when you open your eyes and take a look at a scene, offers either Liv Ullmann’s childlike passive Swedish peasant eyes, or Max Von Sydow’s horse-heavy plough hopelessly working its way around boulders. Pure Ambien.

The unease associated with a concealed face is not an antique prejudice: Just a few years ago, but in what already feels like a bygone era, many European nations, confronted with the Islamic practice of veiling, prohibited face coverings. In 2014 France successfully argued in the European Court of Human Rights that “the voluntary concealment of the face is … incompatible with the fundamental requirements of living together … [and] the minimum requirement of civility that is necessary for social interaction.” … [But now, under threat of the virus,] we are forced to abandon the physical intimacy and openness that normally foster trust and community…

Anti-burqa talk, already accepted and routine in European nations, now becomes something you can read in Slate. Expect more American keening, in these plague times, about the terrible damage done to civic life (And hey: Imagine if world governments currently mandated that masks must be worn only by women.) through masking.