Jesus told Ridgeland, Mississippi Mayor Gene McGee to kick all the queer books out of the town’s library.

Like his political mentor, Kim Jong-Un (plus this guy), Mayor Gene McGee thinks “governance” means everyone acts in strict conformity with Gene McGee’s personal whims. He is withholding taxpayer funds marked for the library until every book Jesus tells Mayor McGee to burn is burned.

While the city’s aldermen … approved the funds, … the mayor alone … is withholding [them]. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” [the director of the county’s library system] said.

I CAN HAVE THEM MAKE THAT DECISION.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS.

Jesus told Mayor Gene McGee to Run away! Run away! when the library board held a meeting to discuss the issue; and, with growing national attention directed to McGee and his town, McGee has also received a Jesus-directive not to respond to press inquiries.

One grateful townsperson does speak to the press.

… this morning’s Wordle. It took me five moves.

… AND one of the highest-profile, most powerful, orthodox Jews New York has ever produced, we do well to revisit Jeffrey Goldberg’s ruminations on consistently high rates of various forms of criminality among this extremely pious group (Silver’s son-in-law, a Ponzi schemer, not long ago was released from prison). Some of his thoughts also appear in this Google book excerpt. (Here are my Sheldon Silver posts.)

He theorizes that “insularity plus a hyper-legalistic approach to life” creates illegal conduct.

Can observing the ritual so fastidiously blind someone to the fact that there are a whole other set of laws governing the way we’re supposed to act toward our fellow man? … [Why do significant numbers of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox seem] to have contempt for non-Jews? … [They seem to have] transferred their attitudes from Europe to here, never contemplating for a moment that government here is fundamentally different.

Les Suissérables

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty jets and covid breaches
Now António’s dead and gone

He diverted to the Maldives

Just to have some harmless fun
And the bank paid for the Cessna
Which is — just the way it’s done…

But then nasty jealous voices

Spilled the beans on Chairman Tón
They objected to his privilege
And his seats at Wimbledon

I can hear his weeping now!

The very rules that he had broken
Became his last communion
On his final private flight
At dawn

‘Credit Suisse, oh Suisse, forgive me
That I drained you and am done
There’s much more I could have taken
But those dreams are dead and gone’

Phantom pilots at the cockpit
Phantom stewards at the door
Empty seats on empty Cessnas
Where António sits no more

The suspect was not a danger to other students; police determined there was not an ongoing threat. “It wasn’t an active shooter. There was no other threat to the school community.”

Magruder High sits eight miles away from Les UDs, and in the wake of an almost shot to death student found in one of its bathrooms, the authorities comfort the community with the assurance that a seventeen year old asshole (here’s another one – a few years older) shooting a gun off in the halls of a high school “was not a danger.”

Oh – you mean isn’t a danger now cuz he’s in custody until he gets released to his parents and sent back to Magruder High School? You mean he wasn’t a danger all that time he was packing heat before he decided to use it to shoot someone? You mean all the other fuckers carrying guns at Magruder High School are not a danger?

You mean we should feel okay because he wasn’t an ‘active shooter’ – he wasn’t roaming the halls randomly killing everyone in sight… He was, you know, just after this one guy… Take it easy…

“There was no other threat to the school community.”

Doesn’t everyone else who packs a gun into their backpack every morning constitute a threat? Does Magruder have any idea how many guns are in the school? How do guns get into the school? Does Magruder have Bring Your Guns to School days?

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

UPDATE: That’s more like it. Principal apologizes for saying no threat. There was plenty of threat. And, this being America, I’d say that the threat level at a bad public school like Magruder remains – will always remain? – reasonably high. Apparently there are violent fights rather often there. Who can be surprised that things eventually escalated to attempted murder with a ghost gun? And who – with any choice, any money, or any capacity to get their kid financial aid – would keep their kid in an environment like Magruder’s?

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

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bunch of other people were in the bathroom when the shooting occurred and not one said a word to a teacher, or called the police. Omerta, you know. Far more dangerous to talk than to shut up. Let the kid bleed to death while you go back to class.

And really – you want your kid to go to school there? If you have no options, I understand, and you have my sympathy. But if you have ANY options at all, get the hell out.

Amelia King, 42, told a school board meeting on Thursday, during a discussion of face masks in school, that ‘I will bring every single gun loaded and ready’. On Friday she was charged with making a terror threat, and released on a $5,000 bond. King, a dental hygienist from Luray, Virginia, apologized and insisted she was speaking figuratively.

More footage.

How do Jews disrupt a flight?

Two Israeli passengers caused a plane flying out of New York to turn back and land, as they clashed with cabin crew after allegedly refusing to prove they had tickets to sit in business class seats, Hebrew media reported Friday…

[T]he two passengers in question apparently decided to take advantage of [a half-full plane] and went to sit in the business section.

When flight attendants eventually asked the two to prove they had boarding passes entitling them to the seats, they refused to comply…

...firearm.

As we settle in for the trial of Malka Leifer, ultraorthodox school principal/child rapist – an event distinguished from SCADS of orthodox and ultraorthodox child/teen sex abuse cases all over the place only in that Leifer is a woman – we need to prepare ourselves for the articles in the American, European, and Israeli press about Okay! Now we’ve REALLY turned a corner with these people! With the eyes of the world following so many lurid high-profile orth. and ultraorth. cases things are REALLY going to change in these notoriously child-sex-abusive sects!

Vey, mes petites. Do a little reading on cults. Abuse rates are obscenely high among the super-strict, closed, sexually hyper-repressed because… I mean, hasn’t this sentence already, even before it finishes itself, answered the question it’s posing? Do I need to specify the precise menu ingredients here?

Okay.

1. Take a completely masculine cult, a cult where men are most of the time alone among themselves and hold total power (via the local rabbi overlord who holds power over the men) over women and children.
2. Blend in a reproductive rather than loving/pleasurable sexual relationship with these men’s wives, causing serious sexual repression problems among the men, whose daily lives, often involving no real work, allow them plenty of time to sit around fantasizing about sex with girls and boys who aren’t brood mares.
3. Check to make sure that both the husbands and wives in this group have been raised sexually repressed and sexually ignorant, and married off insanely early, so that their sexual/emotional maturity level is … elementary school?
4. Put them in a twisted patriarchal world that regards male sexual access to children as unscandalous, or, if scandalous, OUR scandal, which we will hush up rather than stop or report to the authorities. Men will be men. The ways of the lord are strange. It’s probably good for the kids.
5. Make the child victims utterly, unbelievably, innocent and ignorant. They don’t know what’s going on, much less know to report it. If, after years of being raped, they figure out something illegal is going on, they have probably also figured out that if they tell anyone, they and their family will be socially tortured and then thrown out of the cult.
6. Make everyone afraid – their parents, who might have noticed this or that bleeding vagina or anus; their friends, their teachers – make them and everyone in their world afraid. Does this all sound a touch Gothic to you? Are we being melodramatic? ….. Hello? Are you listening? This. Is. A. Cult. It’s no different from any other cult. Virtually all powerful men in all cults have access to/control the bodies of the most vulnerable cultists. Nature of the beast.
7. Make sure that the ideology of hatred/indifference toward, and exploitation of, local, state, and federal authority runs deep. Only the rabbi overlord has any moral/legal legitimacy. Whatever else is out there can fuck itself. (Hot off the press example: Although the authorities seem finally to have caught up with their notoriously criminal leader for his latest offenses – he has already spent two years in jail for his earlier ones – Israel’s ultraorthodox will certainly keep Aryeh Deri as their leader. I mean, who gives a shit that he breaks laws left and right. What laws? Who cares??) Only with this attitude do you guarantee that the rape of children will proceed normally.

Is any of this helping you understand why rates of child sexual abuse in orthodox and ultraorthodox communities are outrageously high? … To the extent that we can begin to measure them, that is, given the absolutely locked shut status of these cults… I mean, they’re not exactly going to cooperate, or disclose, or anything. It’s just child rape, for goodness sake.

And listen. If non-cultic communities cared at all about generations of raped children, they’d solve this.

And the solution isn’t that difficult. They need to take the Voting Blocs Detox Pledge:

I, important politician, pledge to overlook the fact that hundreds of thousands of these people vote as one for me/my party, and I pledge to move against them legally anyway. I pledge to put the interests of raped children above my partisan advantage.

Headline of the day.

Let us sing of a country all of whose prime ministers (well, more than a few) plagiarize their dissertations – dissertations written merely, it seems, to append DR to their names.

Seldom has the search for respectability led so many to such disreputability.

Indeed Romania’s current prime minister (in 2012, this blog covered the last plagiarizing prime minister) is plausibly accused of plagiarizing a third of his military thesis.

That’s a bit less than the 2012 guy plagiarized, so bravo…

And yet… UD has been writing about plagiarism long enough to know that when the given figure is a third, the actual figure is probably… Just making a rough calculation here… Let’s see… Uh… Yes. Got it: — The real figure is one hundred percent.

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

UPDATE: Amusing motive-explanation here.

A man charged for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot had his pretrial release revoked Tuesday after a dramatic arrest for allegedly driving while intoxicated. James Tate Grant was arrested for drunk driving in a Wake County, North Carolina in December. He told the police who flagged him down that he had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6 …

Grant attempted to get away during the arrest… In his car, the cops found an AR-15, 60 rounds of ammunition, and combat fatigues… [H]e awaits trial for allegedly assaulting a police officer on Jan. 6, prohibited firearm possession, excessive drinking, and drug use … He had previously tested positive for amphetamines twice…

Headline of the day.

And UD uses any golf game! For UD, there’s no white noise like the sotto voce, basso continuo, green-hills-far-away gestalt of golf.

Of course she’s not the first to discover this.

She discovered football as white noise in a long, very thoughtful New York Times comment thread appended to the 450th article UD has read in which a conscience-stricken person reckons with his inability to stop watching football even though it’s so nasty. This particular cri-de-coeur has become so common a plaint that it now constitutes a whole school of American philosophy: Reformed Calvinism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, Post-Thiesmann-Fracturism.

But what she really wanted to share was the most thoughtful comment of all. She plucks it from comment obscurity and places it here for you.

“Football is really the new American Pastime, not baseball. It’s like guns at this point – woven into the meaning of being American for large swaths of the populace. Among the potential player pool which is largely Black (as am I, and I played and loved football), it is still seen as a “way out” — fortune and glory overrides concern for CTE in their 50s. For a teen, life ends at 30 anyway. And for all the racism in the sport, the players are still largely black and show up to play every weekend, so it’s only logical that the public takes its cues from them. If they all went on strike to protest, then they could really open eyes.

And let’s not overlook the “manly” aspect of it. Those with more of a progressive streak will scoff at the barbarians smashing their heads together, but we’re still mammals. And mammals are hard wired in specific ways. Yes, over-glorification of manliness and the NFL’s fusing with military marketing is particularly perverse. But it comes from a real place.

Remember, boxing was a huge sport for a long time. 95% of the spectators would never get in a boxing ring to get their bodies pummeled for a living, but yet they came to watch. Now MMA is picking up where boxing left off. Let’s face it, we have a bloodlust as long as it’s someone else getting bloody.”