akuperma

Just because someone is halachically Jewish (had a Jewish mother, father irrelevant), or is a person of obvious Jewish descent (e.g. has a Jewish surname and claims to be Jewish), does not make them “one of us”. For someone to be part of our community, i.e. the Jewish community, the minimum is that the person openly keep kashrus and Shabbos. It is silly to consider someone, such as the politician in question who does not even claim to keep Shabbos and kashrus, to be Jewish. Most people you will meet have Jewish ancestors (going back to ancient times), but that doesn’t mean we should look at them as Jews.

The airlines will probably refuse to carry them since an airline is liable if a passenger is denied entrance, and Ukraine has made clear that they don’t want hordes of tourists. In case you haven’t followed the news of what the goyim are up to, Russia invaded Ukraine last winter and they are having a full scale war including bombing of civilian targets in cities, and unless one is anxious to get to Olam ha-Ba as soon as possible, tourist in a war zone is somewhat ill advised.

If he is leaving yeshiva to start working, does that not suggest the he never worked while being in yeshiva. I recall having been a student many years ago, and as I recall it involved much work. If the young people these days do not perceive yeshiva (or schools in general, as this seems to be a broader problem) as being “work”, we have a serious problem.

1. The Russians may not be bluffing (also, Putin has painted himself into a corner and might be desperate).
2. One has no idea what the Russian targets will be of if they can hit targets at all (so even if they aim at New York, it might not be a total “wipe out” that a well aimed H-Bomb would cause). Based on what is happening in the Ukraine, Russian weapons may underperform, and western counter-weapons may exceed expectations.
3. The biggest problem if one survives an attack will be getting food, since New York City is totally dependent on supplies coming from elsewhere

Out standard for judging goyim is based on halacha. The Evangelicals do most of the seven (or eight if you count having children) mitsvos. Secularists take pride in killing inconvenient babies and all sorts of sexual perversions, (and lets not ask about the fairness of their courts, or disbelief in the Creator, or dreaming up new sorts of avodah zarah to believe in). For the most, I find the Evangelicals to be fairly mentsch-like, and their weird belief in their mistranslations to be a bit amusing.

A lot of small non-profits are “sort of ” sketchy in that the people running them are also deriving their parnassah from them. As long as people (donors in particular) understand this (e.g. a shtiebel in which the Rav runs the shul and gets most of his livelihood from donated money) it is as much an ethical problem as a legal problem since the government expects non-profits to be run by independent boards who hire staff (rather than by staff which recruits a friendly board).

This is common throughout society (not just Yidden). As long as the person running the non-profit is doing a good job providing services, and sticks to a modest lifestyle, there is no problem.

The alternative would be to have big, quasi-government, bureaucracies doing the same job, and they would probably be less efficient and less responsive to needs of users (just look as the “non-profit” hospitals with seven-figure salaries for managers).

Comparing the early 21st to the mid-20th century, Americans have less “hang ups” about non-WASP ethnicities of all types, and significantly greater toleration of religious groups other than the “mainline” Protestant churches. We are benefits of this increased diversity.

jackk: Restricting non-criminals from gun ownership (what the Democrats are proposing) will in no way hamper criminals. Similarly, disarming or abolishing the police (another focus of much of the Democratic policy) will not result disarming or abolishing criminals. American culture is a function of 400 years of immigration policies which recruited large number of criminals (flee arrest/execution in their homelands) and rebels fed up with aristocratic societies (such of those in Europe) in which the elites had a monopoly on power and used it to ripoff everyone else.

Gun control would probably work well in countries with a long tradition of people accepting their place in society and being content to be ruled over by an elite which has a monopoly on power including gun ownership. For the most part, those who wanted to be rid of being ruled over have long ago packed the bags for the “wild west” of American, and left their sheepish cousins behind.

The bottom line is you can’t undo 400 years of cultural evolution by legislative fiat, and the US should accept its gun culture as something that can’t be easily changed and concentrate on disarming criminals and mentally ill persons and follow the “red state” solution (usually ignored in left wing media) of allowing armed citizens to shoot would be mass killers before they can do much harm.

Criminals refuse to follow the gun control laws, therefore all that you do by”banning” guns is making it easier for the criminals to shoot non-criminals. All the Democratic proposals for banning guns include no mechanism to disarm criminals, and a law that de facto limits gun ownership to criminals is counterproductive.

If you make enough noise about Trump serving idols, he may be able to expand his based and start picking up a lot of WOKE idol-worshippers.

If the Palestinians were bright, they would have accepted the idea of a bi-national state with an Arab majority which the zionists agreed to it 100 years ago. They could have accepted a much small zionist state, with most of the Jerusalem in the Arab state when the zionists agreed to that 75 years ago. Those zionists who still believe there is Ribbono shel Olam should see this as evidence that Ha-Shem has gifted them with incompetent and not clever enemies.

ujm (RE; retirement age)

If your goal is to reduce inflation, and raising the retirement age would reduce the death rate, it is a classic double-edged sword. A higher retirement age would increase the work force, and encourage lower wages for everyone. However it the is a causal relationship between retirement and death, higher retirement age would both make old people better off economically (which would increase consumer spending) while at the same time living longer (and consuming more). Higher consumption increases demand which is inflationary.

The most effective way to fight inflation would be to raise taxes, deliberately try to force wages down, and to increase entry of additional workers (e.g. recruit immigration enough to make wages fall). Raising the retirement age, ending disability insurance and forcing under employed people (students, housewives, etc.) into the labor market would also increase the labor supply which will encourage lower wages. Falling wages reduces demand, which lowers prices.

While the above work as a matter of economics, they tend to get a failing grade in terms of sociology and political science, and are hard to implement in democratic (small D) societies.

If you fix prices at a lower level than determined by the law of supply and demand, you will either have shortage (c: Soviet Union, where goods were always inexpensive, but often unavailable) or you need to institute rationing (which tends to mean the well connected get what they need, and others go without).

An alternative is to reduce demand, such as by raising taxes, especially on the poor (since higher taxes on the rich would result in lower savings, rather than consumption). Regressive taxes such as payroll taxes, flat rate income taxes or sales tax would reduce demand to it would be in equilibrium with lower prices. Importing a large number of workers would help to lower wages, but the new workers would also be consumer which would increase demand. Lowering wages would be very useful but that is hard to do (cutting the minimum wage won’t help when employers need to offer wages above the minimum wage to recruit employees). Cutting disability and retirement benefits to force people into the job market would fail since the higher incomes that employment would give the returnees would increase demand. Not printing money would help the most, but that requires raising taxes or cutting benefits from government programs, which raises political problems (few taxpayers want to pay more, and receive less).

You can also increase supply through deregulation (of business hostile rules) and changing the tax structure to encourage more supply, as well lowering tariff and non-tariff trade barriers for imports.

This could be unhealthy for your local neighborhood mugger, and will seriously impair terrorists and serial killer wannabees. Just think of what could if they go into a store, or school, or shul and start shooting – somebody might stop them before they can accomplish what they set up to do.

1. What is taught in public schools is a function of the states. Most frum Jews send their children to privately funded schools. Biden has nothing to do with them.

2. Biden’s administration is supporting allowing males to play on women’s teams by claiming they are female wannabees. This has no impact on our community since college athletics are routinely conducted in a manner that precludes those observing Shabbos (which is why frum Jews are for all purposes excluded from NCAA athletic scholarships, which by far are the largest non-need based college scholarships).

3. Brandon’s inept foreign and economic policies are reason enough to oppose him. Confusion about grammar is not a serious issue, at least from our perspective.

Perhaps because he never worked as a politician (whose tool set is how to minimize making enemies, being a bully can work for a tycoon, but never for someone who constantly needs to put together ever changing alliances), Trump has created a situation in which he is likely to be the only major Republican who won’t be able to beat Biden in 2024. Given that the alternative is four more years of Biden (or Harris, or who knows what fool the Democrats will turn to), even someone who loves Trump will prefer someone more likely to win the election.

If you are whining about gas prices your an ungreen deplorable and should worry about being cancelled. Our (assuming you are an American) democratically elected government is hard at work to save the country, the world and even the universe, from climate catastrophe which the official scientists have decided is caused by carbon emissions (only heretics point to frequent variability in climate throughout recorded history, and that it has often been warmer, and that warm periods tend to have higher standards of living due to increased food production). Our Democratic government has wisely coerced oil companies to cut back production by blocking drilling, banning new pipelines and carbon-related infrastructure, and subsidizing the worthy woke in switching to very expensive electric cars.

1. Turning over Europe to Putin, and the Asia-Pacific region to Xi

2. Outlawing politically incorrect behavior and cancelling all deplorables

3. Making everyone a millionaire (just like Germany in the 1920s, not to mention Israel and Zimbabwe more recently).

4. Saving the world by using environmental policies as an excuse to permanently end prosperity on a world wide basis

If frum Jews were all that much into opulence, they would need to maximize income. Studying Torah is a way to minimize income and reduce discretionary spending. Merely being Shomer Shabbos wipes out most of one’s earning potential (denies access to inexpensive high quality university education, reduces most job prospects, forces one to live in only a handful of fairly expensive areas). The truth is that even being “modern Orthodox” with a kippah in the pocket requires great mesiras nefesh.

The generation that survived the holocaust (especially those in Europe, but even those in America could be considered survivors since the war could have gone the other way) often saw living well as the best revenge (but also note that most Jews who were around then do not have frum descendants today).

The Committee needs a smoking gun (similar to what the Watergate Committee found) or the members of the Committee will end looking like fools. They need to find a witness who gives convincing evidence such as a recording of Trump saying “Well, how is the putsch going?” or perhaps a bunch of general and admirals testifying how Trump was sounding them out to stage a coup d’etat. A self-proclaimed “Shaman” (witchdoctor?) running around half naked in January wearing horns and carrying a broomstick is NOT sedition and hasn’t been considered treason since the middle ages (when casting spells on the king could get you burned at the stake). Unless the Democrats can come up with a way that Trump could have either recruited the military, and raised sufficient force to overcome the military, January 6 is not different that the many BLM riots (meaning the demonstrating is protected by the First amendment, and breaches of peace can be prosecuted in isolation).

I believe you are mistranslating the Hebrew word “avdut” (ayin veis daled vav saf) incorrectly. In American English, the work “slavery” includes the requirement (perhaps defining characteristic) that the owner can kill, maim or sexually exploit the slave, without the possibility of ever gaining complete freedom. The Hebrew word has no such meanings. I suggest a better translation would be “servant”, in some cases qualified with the adjective “hereditary” (though until recently many jobs were hereditary – if you were a farmer, your children would be farmers whether they wanted to or not). It is wrong to say that Yidden ever has anything similar to what the Americans call “slavery” (in fact, the only thing similar to it would probably be the Nazi concentration camps or the Communist gulags).

Given that being a mamzer is hereditary, so for most Yidden, that means assuming nothing that would make you a mamzer for well over 100 generations. We therefore have numerous presumptions that if someone seems kosher, and we have reason to believe it is kosher, it is kosher, so we can ignore the possibility that a Jewish ancestor of our’s over the last few thousands “cheated” secretly.

Having two names became common when population increased (Baruch ha-Shem), especially since it was before we used family surnames. Plus for a long period going back over a millenia, Jewish men developed an affection for a very limited number of personal names (major people from Tanach and a small number of extras), and in an era where everyone was “Piloni ben Piloni” there weren’t enoughs to avoid confusion.

America is a food exporter (except for luxury crops, such as out of season fruits). Thus there is no danger of a food shortage in America (absent something catastrophic such as a nuclear war). There can be distribution issues (often caused by unwise government policies), but they work themselves out. The worst that happens in the US is higher prices (since there is a global market and shortages elsewhere result in higher global prices).

Eretz Yisrael does rely somewhat on imported foods, and along with the rest of the Middle East, will have shortages (meaning higher prices) due to the disruption of food exports from Russia and Ukraine. Thus American farmers instead of selling wheat to an frum bakery in Brooklyn for “X” dollars, will sell it to a bakery in Israel for “X+Y” dollars, which will give “Y” dollars of extra happiness to the American farmer.