akuperma

“Aren’t we raising a generation of poor, barely employable generation by sending them to schools that barely, if at all, teach English, math and how to write?” — Well, that is a problem with American schools (not just Jewish ones). At least in the frum schools they get a good introduction to language (learning a foreign language gives you a much better perspective on thiings such as grammar and syntax, I never understood what a direct object was until I learned about את) – most Americans are infamously monolingual. More importantly, our schools at least train students (without them realizing it, which is feature) to work independently or with a fellow student which is a very useful skill, unlike American kids who need to be “spoon fed” by the teacher and can’t learn otherwise.

1. Trump is not an idiot or a fool, no matter what the liberal media claim. North Korea is at most an annoyance to the US, even if it is a real threat to South Korea and Japan. Killing tens of millions people is not something one does without thinking, especially if there are less messy ways to accomplish the same result.

2. Anything bigger than a tactical nuclear weapon would seriously endanger the South Koreans and the Japanese due to radication. Much of the US arsenal designed for “end of the world” situations is not useable.

3. The South Koreans want to take over North Korea with its population and economy intact. That is the best solution from an American perspective as well.

4. One should remember that unlike Japan and Germany in World War II, whose decision to go to war was made by leaders they elected, North Korea never had a free election. The only crime of the North Korean people is they got conquered by Kim and his family. No one elected him. Hitler, on the other hand, was a democratically chosen leader, as were the Japanese and Italian leaders in World War II.

Humans do affect climate/weather, and that is beyond doubt since it can be observed without needing to fudge data (e.g. compare the temperatures in Lakewood and Monsey to Manhattan and Philadelphia – cites are warmer, which is people of all types prefer to “go away to the country”).

The issue is how much of climate variability is natural and how much is due to humans (and in particular, due to industrialization). The climate alarmists like to assume that the 1600-1700s were normal, but there is strong evidence that was one of the coldest periods in human history (sort of like looking at February and freaking out since it is warmed in August). While thermometers were invented only a few centuries ago, there are records of what rivers frozen and when, and what crops grew where – and these suggest the medieval period (time of the Rishonim) was even warmer than today. Similarly the “classical age” (period of Bayis Sheini) was warmer than the period that followed.

If the goyim’s scientists are to be believed, Long Island Sound used to be dry land, and it used to be possible to walk from England to France, or from Siberia to Alaska, without getting your feet wet – and all those changes did not involve humans messing with the climate.

So the question isn’t so much “do you believe in global warming” but rather do you believe that the primary cause is human activities, since if not, there is nothing the government can or could do about it. This doesn’t address the question as to whether global warming is good or bad, though given the large number of climate refugees fleeing to Florida every winter, I tend to think that warmer would a good thing.

All Ashkenazi and Sefardi clothing with a few exceptions are copies from the goyim. We have are own fashion sense, but it is largely based on the goyim’s. We take what meets our needs. No one today dresses like people did 500 or 1000 years ago. Even such “Jewish fashions” as a streimel, or a black fedora, or a white shirts, are goyish fashion items that we co-opted for our needs.

The only exception is the tallis, and there is every indication that our tallesim look just like those of our ancestors (though they wore it a bit differently, especially when goyim wore cloaks all day, and we wore our tallesim which were our cloaks – but cloaks dropped out of style a long time ago).

The term has many meanings, depending on context, cf. Nuclear families as well as Nuclear weapons.

People elected a reality TV star. They wanted to have a government that worked like a semi-scripted TV show. Perhaps after a while they’ll get bored and vote in a dull boring president who puts everyone to sleep. People got fed up with snide and condescending politicians who ignored public opinion and held most of the country to be “deplorables” whose opinions weren’t worth noting.

It is an issue where the electric utilities are owned by non-frum Jews and hire Jewish workers to run them. That is an issue in Eretz Yisrael since if you make use of the government’s electric supplier, you are in effect hiring Jews to do malacha for you on Shabbos.

An alternative is not to use electricity on Shabbos (note that no gedolim used electricity on Shabbos prior to the late 19th century or early 20th century), or to use only batteries and one’s own generator (if it can run safely without human involvement), or to have one’s own generator and hire a non-Jew to run it.

Some people prefer paying for medical care or groceries rather than buying life insurance. If you can afford, say “Baruch ha-Shem”.

A smartphone combines a mobile/portable phone with a computer. Obviously if you object to computers, you would also object to a smartphone. But even if one doesn’t object to a computer, the extreme portability of a smartphone (phone plus computer in one device) means that it tends to take over your life and distract you from anything and everything such as the shiur you are supposed to be attending, or the car that took an unexpected turn and is running you over, or davening (so tempting to check the stock prices while waiting for the shliach tzibur to reach kedusah), or the broken pavement you are about to trip over. Its no coincidence that the stereotype of the “millenials” is someone walking around with a small device in front of their face and oblivious to the rest of the the world. While the content of the internet is an issue with halachic dimensions, the “Smartphone” raises additional issues that aren’t uniquely Jewish or halachic. Among the goyim, one frequently finds them banned in situations where one wants people to pay attention to what they are supposed to be doing.

Iron clothes (other than those pressed professionally)??????

Brings back memories of the days of typewriters and ice boxes and home deliveries by horse drawn wagons (I was a heart-broken toddler when my family moved to a nieghborhood where deliveries came by truck)

You could make a kosher sun dial but it wouldn’t be as accurate. We are used to paying close attention to minutes and seconds, and a sundial might be accurate withing five or ten minutes at best. That is why they disappeared and were replaced with clocks. Not to mention that sundials never worked at night or when it was cloudy.

okay Joseph and Rox: You can avoid using American Indians as Shabbos Goyim.

P.S. Just because you hear something on the internet, doesn’t mean its true.

Indictment is an accusation, made typically by a prosecutor to a grand jury with no opportunity for the accused to offer evidence or rebut the charges. It proves only that a prosecutor is out to get you, not that you are guilty.
It is quite possible in a case such as this one that the accused did not understand the regulations (is the accuased a JD and experience in administrative law?), or did not keep books competently (is the accused a certified public accountant). Even if everything a prosecutor says is true, which is not always the case, and perhaps not often the case, there are still defenses such as incompetence (rather than criminal intent) in keeping books and doing paperwork. One should never jump to the conclusion that someone is a “criminal” based on an “indictment.”

Reconciliation. The US wanted to make sure the war was “history.” They wanted no hard feelings. Remember the southern states weren’t merely defeated, they were utterly and totally crushed, their cities were leveled, their economy destroyed to such an extent that, at best, they didn’t recover until the late 20th century. The civil war still impacts many area, such as why no southern university is “Ivy League” (their endowments were wiped out by the war), to the fact that post-1865 northern English is the American standard and souther dialect is considered inferior and a sign of poor intelligence.

Loyalists, such as Benedict Arnold weren’t a problem since they left and moved to Canada (though the US was always on the brink of war with Canada for the next century, and only became buddies in the early 20th century). It took a century for the US and Britain to become friends again.

In Britain there was no reconciliation after their civil wars of the 17th and 18th centuries (no statues honoring Jacobites, and Cromwell remained controversial until 250 years over his death) – and the aftereffects of those civil wars are still a major factor in British politics.

The US didn’t want the losers going around with a chip on their shoulder, and honoring the memory of the fallen rebels was a major part of reconciliation.

The myth that is agreed on is that the southern rebels were an honorable opponent (and ignoring that slavery was the major issue), and after the war we all became friends again. Honoring Lee and Jackson was painless since they career soldiers who didn’t own more than a negligible number of slaves (Lee spent most of his career in the army, and his main connection to slavery was an executor of an estate that owned slaves, which he emancipated). The alternative to the myth is to let the old wounds fester. In Britain they had a civil war in the 17th and 18th century, and made no such myths about reconciliation, and they are still have problems pertaining to those wars.

One doesn’t want losers to go around with a chip on their shoulder, and for winner to gloat is bad policy.

P.S. And of course the civil war was about slavery, even if most southerners didn’t own slaves. All the compromises suggested focused on slavery. While most northern soldiers had never seem a black before the war, when they ran into slaves when invading the south they had a reaction very similar to how allied soldiers reacted when they discoved the concentration camps (the leaders knew about them all along, the rank and file didn’t, and it gave anti-semitism a bad name in most western countries whereas previously it was politically correct to be anti-semitic). While most northerners were only mildly opposed to slavery in 1861, by 1865 they were overwhelmingly anti-slavery.

Re: but only far-rightists are likely to commit hate crimes or terrorism against us”

Actually the “left” is often involved only the authorities treat these as “normal ” crime, ignoring that the anti-Jewish attitudes that encourage them. And the Muslims are now considered “left” but anyone who object to their attacks on Jews is an “Islamaphobe.”

And if you work outside the Jewish community, you’ll discover that it isn’t the Christians who object to accommodating our religious practices, but the ultra-secular liberals (often Jews).

CTLAWYER: Jewish philosophy is similar. Most “welfare” to able body men is given through kollels (they have to show up and learn to get paid) or through make-work jobs. The problem with make-work jobs is that they are very inefficient in a macroeconomic sort of way. One reason the Soviet Union had trouble keeping up with the US was a policy of full employment, so for example, their libraries stuck with card catalogs (providing employment to card typists and filers) while the US switched to online. The US developed machinery, and they provided full employment. Indeed, the “find work for all abled body adults” is a luddite argument, and is similar to those who want to ban self-driving cars . As a lawyer, conside what has happened to the large numbers of clerks, scriveners, cite chckers, loose-leaf filers who are now unemployed due to modern technology – perhaps we can find employment for them in law firms by banning word processing and computerized legal research tools. — But as I said, Jews traditionally pay people to do something useful, and the Americans have the demeaning custom of giving handouts and making the recipient feel like a failure.

The establishment media, including the secular Jewish establishment, view the “alt left” favorably and see them as at most being over-enthsiastic in opposing the Trump administration. Their violence, opposition to free speech and freedom of religion, anti-semitism, etc., is willfully overlooked. They are increasingly taking over the Democratic party. The “right” include those who were anti-semitic in the past, but except for some extreme nutcases, the “right” views religious Jews favorably.

mw13: The American aid to Israel provides jobs for thousands of American workers making equipment that would otherwise be made by Israeli workers. In addition, Israeli improvements and technologies flow to the US readily thanks to the aid. Remember that the most significant weapon now in use by the American military is the drone, which was an Israeli invention. While it would no longer matter now the US is energy independent and exporting oil, for many years the Israelis would have seriously weakened their enemies by taking out the Arab oil industry, which would have crippled them economically, and seriously hurt the Americans. Note that in 1947-48, when American military aid would have helped Israel, the US prohibited such aid – and subsequent aid was always based on American self-interest.

In all fairness, much American foreign aid, including most of what the Americans give Israel, is in the form of credits to buy American goods. Thus the Israeli military pays to keep American workers employed making weapons that are in fact more expensive, and perhaps inferior, to what would be made by Israeli workers but for the subsidies in the form of foreign aid. It’s hardly charity. If this is done outside of a foreign aid program it would be considered selling goods below cost, and would violate the international law prohibition of “dumping.”

I suspect the parents of children for whom Yiddish is the language at home, and what they play in, will not want children who are Anglo-phones at home to be in the same school.

If Medinat Yisrael falls (not impossible,especially if the Muslims ever unite, and if the western world including the United States becomes more influenced by growing Muslim populations and openly supports the Muslims against Israel), Satmar will be seen as the ones who were right all along.

If the Medinah manages to make peace with the Muslims, which will allow normal relations and most importantly, abolition of conscription, Satmar will be irrelevant politically, and will become just another hasidic group.

However as long as Eretz Yisrael is ruled by zionists committed to war with the Muslims, and to coercing Jews to distance themselves from Torah, Satmar will remain politically important.

Some countries call them “Naval Infantry”. Originally ships fought each other with the goal being to board the enemy ship and capture it (BTW, the crew got bonuses based on what they captured, similar to pirates even though this was government work). Countries whose armed forces were created once boarding become unlikely, such as Israel, are unlikely to have a separate marine (navel infantry) unit.

From an economic perspective, smoking gives parnassah to tobacco farmers and those who manufacture that which is smoked. It also reduces the burden on social security and other retirement systems by reducing the number of elderly people who need to be supported (indeed, in an ideal way, as smokers get killed only at the end of their productive years).

I suspect it had to do with the age of consent (the age at which a woman is allowed to marry, and to consent to intimate relations). Among Jews, that age is 12 (for girls) and we often make a fuss about it – even that under Dina Malchusa Dina we do hold that way, de facto. The fact that in most states the age in now 18 (younger girls have to get permission, often from a judge) is irrelevant.