Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
There’s nothing wrong with it. Search for an NPR article titled “So, What’s The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With ‘So’?”
Ubiquitin, a few years ago someone told me that some time in the next few years there will be a big storm or some other emergency, and you will be stuck at home for at least a week, so you should prepare by making sure you always have enough supplies at home to get you through. And lo and behold, three years later there was a blizzard. How could he possibly have known? He must control the weather.
Oh, and the Logan Act?! Give me a break. Nobody takes that seriously. It is almost certainly unconstitutional, which is why no prosecutor has ever dared charge anyone with it, because the first time a judge gets a look at it it will be struck down.
RE, don’t be an idiot. It is extremely common for people to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. It is literally maasim bechol yom. If you are offered a plea bargain, and the penalty you will have to pay is not much more (or often even less) than it would cost you — in money, time, and agmas nefesh — to defend yourself, your lawyer will advise you to take the deal, even if it means giving a false allocution, rather than risk being falsely convicted.
I personally know someone who served three years for a burglary he did not commit, because his public defender and his parents persuaded him to plead guilty rather than risk conviction at trial and a much harsher sentence. Decades later he now regrets it, but it’s too late.
In Flynn’s case we now know that there could not have been a crime, because there was no legitimate investigation to which his statement could be material. Therefore even if he had deliberately lied he would be innocent. But in fact he didn’t lie.
First of all, we don’t know exactly what he said, because the FBI, as a matter of policy, never records interviews and the only record is a written summary the agents prepare afterwards. It is very easy for them to lie, or to forget or misunderstand, and whatever they write down is now the record. This is a huge problem, it’s inherently corrupt, and it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t been reformed.
Second, he was deliberately not told that this was a formal interview; he was led to believe it was a casual conversation to do with handling the transition. So he was not on notice that he had to be exact about everything he said. He had had hundreds of phone calls with various people; he could hardly be expected to recall every detail of every call he made, weeks later, without even a reason to try hard to remember.
Third, the agents themselves wrote that they did not believe he was trying to mislead them. The corrupt criminal FBI ignored that.
Fourth, his lawyers had a huge conflict of interest, which they did not disclose to him or to the court. They persuaded him that he had in fact committed a crime, by not saying the exact truth to the agents. Also they were responsible for preparing his and his son’s foreign agent registrations, so any error was their fault, so they needed him to plead guilty so as not to attract blame themselves.
Finally, the secret deal not to charge his son, in exchange for his guilty plea, was illegal. The law requires all inducements offered for a guilty plea to be disclosed to the judge, but they told him to hide this. That’s a crime.
For all these reasons, Flynn is a completely innocent man, and what was done to him was criminal. Those responsible need to be charged themselves and should suffer what they put him through. But I don’t trust the DOJ to do that. They will let their criminal colleagues off, just as they have done so many times. It’s disgusting.
Ubiquitin, the difference is that it’s an adverb, not a preposition. An adverb is a description of an action. In “to stop by”, “stop” is the action, and “by” is the way you are doing it. That’s why you can say “stop by”, without specifying a place; you couldn’t do that with the Yiddish preposition “bei”.
“Stop by” is a synonym of “drop in”. And just as you don’t “drop in your cousin”, but rather you “drop in to your cousin”, or “…at your cousin’s home”, so too with stopping by; you stop by at her home.
I suspect that “stopping by her home”, which you cite from the Cambridge, is either a usage that derives from the Yiddish/German, or else it a modified form of “passing by her home”, but in this case pausing briefly; in that case “by” is being used in the sense of “near”.
RE, yes, exactly. One of the meanings of “a lot” is “a large quantity”. It’s just as correct as the other meanings, including “a parcel of land”.
The latest news is that a substantial majority of those recently admitted to hospitals in NYC for COVID-19 were pretty much staying at home, retired or unemployed. They did not use mass transit.
That is just not true. 66% of new hospital admissions were admitted from home. That just means they were living there, as opposed to a nursing home, college dorm, prison, etc. It absolutely does NOT mean they were staying there, and it certainly doesn’t say anything about their employment status or how much they used the subways.
Huju you couldn’t be more wrong. It is not a Torah rule; on the contrary, the Torah itself uses that term. That it’s not politically correct, and out of tune with the current fad for egalitarianism is irrelevant; don’t ever confuse fashion with morality.
No, those are illegal and when the cops come by they try to hide it. But those selling printed material, drawings, etc. are perfectly legal. So are the arba-minim dealers.
The statistic is SOURCE OF ADMISSION. Nothing else.
66% were admitted from home
18% from nursing homes
4% from assisted living facilities
2% from “congregate” homes, which I guess means dorms, hostels, etc.
2% were homeless
less than 1% were from jail/prison
and 8% were from “other”.The statement that immediately preceded it, of course. And the “larger yeshivah world” is no wiser than the MO yeshivos.
By the way, the same principle explains why New York streets are filled with unlicensed vendors of books, art, etc. The city has a law requiring a license of anyone selling anything in the street, and naturally that would apply to these dealers too. However following the Civil War it made one exception: for wounded veterans. They are allowed to sell anything in the street and need no license. That seems very reasonable and limited, but once the city makes this one exception it must make the same exception for vendors of all constitutionally protected goods, such as printed matter, videos, art, etc. This also explains the legality of the arba-minim markets that crop up on the streets in the week before Sukkos. The city could get rid of all of these if it were to revoke the veterans’ exception, but it won’t do that.
Joseph, no respect is due that statement. The opinions of the “larger” yeshivah world (במנין perhaps, but not בחכמה) are irrelevant.
There has been a reduction of service, but it’s not deliberate, it’s because there aren’t enough crews.
And one factor in crowding is that many cars are unusable because of bums turning them into bedrooms and toilets. They get a car each, and the normal people have to crowd into the one or two cars they are not inhabiting. In my opinion THAT is the main reason for the four-hour shutdown that Cuomo has now imposed; it gives the police an opportunity to roust the bums out, and hopefully some of them will take a while coming back.
DMB, he didn’t start with “one/few million dollars”. That is merely the amount his father deliberately “lost” at his casino on one occasion, as a means of bailing him out from a jam he’d got himself into. The inheritance he left him was far larger that that.
It also helps if you develop a habit of stiffing suppliers and contractors.
And according to the ghost writer, Trump did not write a word of The Art of the Deal.
No, doing my best, it is not at all crazy to suggest that medical researchers investigate some method of applying the power of disinfectants or UV light internally. And in fact with regard to UV light that is a very serious possibility. With disinfectants maybe not, but it’s a fair question to ask.
The LIE is that he ever suggested, or could have been understood to suggest, that people attempt the internal use of disinfectants, whether by injection or ingestion or any other method. He simply didn’t, and the hundreds of “reporters” who either insinuated or outright said that he had done so were deliberately lying. So were those who invented out of whole cloth a claim that his words have led to people actually doing so, thus causing an increase in calls to poison control. There was no such spike, and there is not a single known case of anyone trying it.
Ubiquitin: “The facts are simple: What he said was perfectly sensible and logical,”
Amazing Stuff!
Even Trump says he was being “sarcastic” but his blind followers still bend realityCome on, you ought to know better than that. Suddenly when he says he was being “sarcastic” you expect everyone to believe him?! I am nobody’s “blind follower”, and few of Trump’s supporters are blind followers.
When he suggested that doctors might explore some way to put the power of disinfectants to some internal use he was being serious. When he later said he had been sarcastic he was mesing with the stupid lying reporters.
Joseph: Ubiq: Donald Trump is far far wealthier than his father ever was. His inheritance, whatever it was, wouldn’t on its own magically grow hundred-fold, as it has.
Joseph, ubiquitin is right on this one. Had he simply put his inheritance in index funds and spent the intervening 25 years doing nothing, it would have automatically grown to more than he has now.
His major achievement has been to make himself famous for being wealthy, and then turn that fame into a source of wealth. Essentially he was a Kardashian before anyone ever heard of the Katdashians.
Would you refer to a 29 year old as a boy? Then you cannot refer to a 29 year old as a girl.
Actually you can, because “girl” is not only the opposite of “boy”, it is also the opposite of “guy”. We say “boys and girls”, but also “guys and girls”.
In addition, “boy” and “girl” can refer even to old people, if they are servants. This is unpopular in today’s egalitarian environment, but it remains correct English, just as its equivalent in Hebrew is correct and attested to in Tanach (נער).
And then of course there is the usage “the boys”, or “the girls”, which refers to a group of same-sex friends, even if they are quite old. And there is “old boy” or “old girl”, which davka refers to an old person.
Ubiquitin, the definition you refer to is for “by” as an adverb, not as a preposition. So you can certainly stop by at your cousin’s home, but you cannot, in English, stay by your cousin, or even by her home. The use of “by” in that sense is restricted to Jews and Germans, because it is not the English word “by” at all, but the German word “bei”.
You would have been better off citing the 11th definition of “by” as a preposition, “in the opinion of : from the point of view of. // OK by me”. I believe that this usage derives directly from Yiddish, but is limited to that form. It does not extend to all the other uses German and Yiddish have for “bei”, such as “at”, or “with”.
And, according to a beloved English teacher, “a lot” is a parcel of real estate, not an expression of high quantity.
Once again your teacher was wrong. You seem to have had very bad luck in teachers.
Huju, the “rule” against splitting infinitives has not “eroded” — there never ever was such a rule in the first place. Some crank in the 19th century invented it out of whole cloth, and gullible fools like your school teachers eagerly adopted it and attempted to brainwash their students with it. But all that time the language carried merrily along without it, ignoring them and their fatuous dictates. If your teachers taught you a “rule” against using possessives for inanimate objects that was just another example of the same ignorance, but less widespread.
funnybone, enough with the “rodef” nonsense. You have NO RIGHT to call someone a rodef just because they refuse to participate in some social experiment or follow the latest fad. A rodef is someone who knows he is infected, and nevertheless carries his infection to vulnerable people. Not someone who simply davens with a minyan without any reason to believe that he is harming anyone else by doing so.
Common, Police v Newark was a free exercise case, not a reasonable accommodation case.
n0m, you are wrong about standing. If you discover some defect in a traffic law you can and should sue over it, and the fact that you are not “uniquely” affected makes no difference. On the contrary, the fact that you are one of millions affected makes your case stronger. What keeps the courts out of legislation and budges is the separation of powers, and the fact that nobody is directly harmed by them.
RE, the President was accurately reflecting what was known at the time. He was on top of the situation since January, while his critics were completely ignoring it. He set his task force into place and announced it at the State of the Union speech, while Pelosi threw a tantrum and claimed the whole speech was garbage and needed to be ripped up. Then the Democrats, while still dismissing it and encouraging people to mingle and to go to densely concentrated places, simultaneously contradicted themselves by grossly exaggerating the danger (compared to what was then known) so they could accuse the President of neglecting it. Meanwhile he was taking the most measured and calm approach that the information available warranted.
One problem was that the state of information early on was bad, because the Chinese deliberately hid what they knew, and lied to the world, via their puppet the WHO. So there was no way for anyone outside China to know what was really going on.
Yserbius”There still hasn’t been one lab confirming that the virus is man made.”
So still a conspiracy? Even after the secretary of state said it’s most likely the case evidently?
No, he didn’t. NOBODY serious is saying it’s man-made, or even suggesting that it may be. What people are talking about is the POSSIBILITY, and that’s all it is, that the outbreak started, not at a wet market, but at a lab that got sloppy about safety procedures. Or a combination of the two. But whether it came from the wild or from a lab, it’s still a naturally-mutated virus.
rkefrat, our communist mayor is many things, but he is NOT in charge of the subways, so he had nothing to do with their remaining open.
Also, it is not true that the MTA ran fewer trains because of lower ridership. The MTA is running as close to a normal schedule as it can; the reason for the service reduction is that many workers are off sick (or unfortunately dead).
And closing the subways is not a realistic option. Too many people depend on it to get where they HAVE to go. The city can’t function without it.
I just noticed this, from ubiquitin: “There is a reason why the CDC had a pandemic office that Trumop got rid of since it hadnt been used.”
Another LIE invented by the fake “reporters” in order to defame Trump.
You need a minyan. (Except according to R Schachter, but almost nobody agrees with him.)
Common, R Schachter’s rebbe, R YB Soloveichik, was famous for saying that a rov has to make his own decisions and NOT simply follow his rebbe’s opinions. Of course it’s possible that R Schachter disagrees with that opinion :-), or that many of his talmidim do :-),
Common, Police v Newark says that if the state has a rule, which is valid and it’s allowed to make, but it makes any exceptions to that rule, then it had better have a good reason why it can’t make the same exceptions for constitutionally protected activities such as religious exercise. Simply saying that it wants to keep the exceptions to a minimum, so it allows them only for what it regards as essential cases, is not good enough.
(Edited)
Zelenko’s only mistake was getting involved with a flake like Corsi. I assume he had not previously heard of him, and didn’t know his reputation. I have known his name for over 30 years, and not in a complimentary context.
The facts are simple: What he said was perfectly sensible and logical, and the only way to make it sound crazy is to LIE about it and insinuate that he suggested people drink disinfectant, or inject themselves with it, and that since his supporters are stupid some of them will do it and their blood will be on his hands. So naturally that is exactly what those Democrats with bylines who call themselves “journalists” did. And the dishonest Democrat operatives here repeated that lie.
There is no such thing as an honest Democrat. Anywhere.
One of the main ways the virus has spread in NYC is on the subways. This city depends on the subways, and they cannot be shut down. Even doing it for a few hours every night is going to be difficult, but doing it all day is impossible. Israel doesn’t have that problem. Buses are much less of a problem.
Common, the bare minimum without a minyan is only 3 men, since the mesader kidushin can be one of the eidim. (In fact in some communities the rov and the chazan were traditionally the ediim at all weddings.) So to make up a minyan you would need 7 more.
And indeed most poskim do hold that you can’t have a chupa without sheva brochos, and therefore you do need a minyan. But there must be some who agree with R Hershel Shachter that bish’as had’chak you can skip the sheva brochos and it’s not called כלה בלי ברכה. At the very least, most of his many talmidim probably accept his psak.
Anon, CTL is correct. Injunctions and precedents are two completely different things. National injunctions are issued when the defendant is the USA; the Sixth Circuit couldn’t have issued an injunction against New Jersey because it wasn’t a defendant in the case.
However, the law here is not in any serious dispute. The third circuit would have reached the same decision as the sixth, because there really isn’t any other decision to reach. And Police v Newark IS a third circuit decision, which is directly on point.
Huju, there is no reason at all to avoid using possessives for things. ALL things have properties. I’ve never heard of your proposed “rule”, but it’s as silly and bogus as the made-up “rule” against splitting infinitives.
No, it is not ribbis. You are not allowed to charge extra for late payment, but you are allowed to give a discount for early payment. If payment is due now, and for a higher price you allow the customer to pay at the end of the month, that is ribbis. But if payment is not due till the end of the month, you are allowed to offer a lower price if the customer pays now. The same applies to gift certificates: payment is not due until the goods are purchased, so it’s OK to offer a discount in return for payment in advance.
This so-called “investigation” is a complete fraud and scandal, just like the Mueller “investigation” of the Russia hoax that this guy was involved in. The “investigator” is far more likely to face criminal charges than Dr Z is. Now that we have solid proof that the Flynn charges were knowingly false, the whole scandal is going to unravel and there will be FBI agents in prison.
The bottom line is that even if Dr Z had knowingly and deliberately claimed to be running an FDA-approved study, it would not be illegal because it was in a private communication. The government cannot regulate what individuals say to each other in a non-commercial setting. Thus there is no basis for any investigation. Now if he’d advertised such a claim, in some form that could be considered commercial speech, then there would be something to talk about, but that’s not what happened.
CTL, see the 6th circuit decision in Kentucky, dismissing the distinction between “life-sustaining” and “soul-sustaining” activities. Also see the multiple decisions requiring states that have banned elective surgery to make an exception for abortion. The right to the free exercise of religion is at least as constitutionally important as the right to murder ones baby, and the same considerations apply: Ditto for closing gun shops; states cannot do that unless they allow some other method of purchasing guns, such as allowing a dealer to set up a table outside the store.
A state may not substantially burden a constitutional right without allowing an alternative method for it to be exercised. Nor may a state decide what is an adequate fulfillment of a religious obligation. Thus it is illegal for a state to ban tefillah betzibur altogether, but it may impose reasonable restrictions on it, i.e. restrictions that are capable of being obeyed and thus don’t constitute a de facto ban.
As far as I know #2 and #3 are equally plausible, and there is no evidence for one over the other. Many web sites claim that #3 can be ruled out because there are no horseshoe bats within hundreds of miles of Wuhan, and they are not sold at the wet market. However all of these go back ton one single report, purportedly by someone in China, that made this claim. I know of no way to verify it, so one shouldn’t put too much trust in it.
Epoch Times?! Please.
The idea that it’s a bioweapon is crazy, and I believe the reason it has gained currency is that the Chinese are paying people to raise it whenever someone mentions the — very plausible — possibility that it’s a natural virus that got out of the lab. By immediately jumping from #2 to #1, the two are conflated in people’s minds, and are thus both rejected as paranoid nonsense. Many mainstream reporters have been doing this, ridiculing any suggestion that it came from a lab by pretending that the person must think it’s a bioweapon, and only crazy people would think that. This helps China, so the most likely reason why someone would do it is because they’re getting paid.
So how will Chabad be vindicated, if it turns out to be, say, R’ Chaim Kanievsky?
Because it will show that the campaign to convince Hashem to bring Moshiach succeeded. What that person turns out to be is completely irrelevant to that goal.
Indeed the fact that the whole frum world now believes and accepts that Moshiach is a real person, who will come literally at any moment, and that we should be seriously trying to bring that about as soon as possible, means Chabad has already been vindicated. Because not so long ago many people didn’t accept or acknowledge that. That was the essence of the opposition and ridicule to Chabad’s Moshiach campaign. I think most people know the name of the one who mocked Chabad, saying “They think Moshiach is a bosor vodom”. Nowadays nobody would say that.
No less a person than the Alter Rebbe said that Moshiach will have to be a misnaged, because if he’s a chossid the misnagdim won’t accept him, whereas the chassidim will accept him whoever he is.
People who are in a sane frame of mind do not say that the doctors should look into putting disinfectant into people.
Why on earth not? It’s a perfectly reasonable idea to suggest as a direction for research.
Rava, nowhere that I have seen does it say that women, children, and the elderly don’t count for the numerator in this deadly equation. It says they don’t count for the denominator. That’s why I wrote that if we assume working-age men are 1/4 of the population then the threshold for a plague is a daily death rate of approximately 1/2,000, or 50/100,000. But those deaths can be those of women, children, and elderly men.
Halacha actually gives us a definition of דבר בעיר. People have been quoting various sources about what to do in a time of דבר, but they ignore the definition. According to the halacha, דבר exists when on three consecutive days the death rate exceeds one death per 500 working-age men. So if we assume 1/4 of the population consists of men of working age, that would be one death per 2,000 people, or 50 per 100,000, each day.
Of course the current epidemic has not come anywhere near that. Which means the halachos of דבר do not apply, and through Hashem’s mercy what we are experiencing, however bad it is, is nothing like what our ancestors used to experience routinely every 15-20 years if not more often. May we never see such times, and may our current suffering be enough to atone for all our sins and to achieve whatever it is supposed to.
RE, yes, people put their trust in him. So what? What did he say that could possibly be misunderstood and harm anyone? Nothing he said could possibly be understood as encouraging anyone to ingest or inject disinfectants. Anyone who claims he suggested such a thing, even indirectly, is a damned liar.
Matisyahu, what do I make of his comment the next day? That he was trolling the stupid lying reporters. If they insist on lying about what he said, then he will have fun with them. What he said that day certainly did not sound sarcastic; it sounded serious and it was completely reasonable. If you think it wasn’t, explain why.
DMB, yes, he did NOT suggest in any way that people should drink it or inject it. That is a fact. And yes, there ARE studies going on about the internal use of UV light for precisely that purpose. That is also a fact. What contradiction do you see between these two facts? I’m not aware of any studies currently happening to try to somehow use disinfectants internally, but it was a reasonable thing to speculate about, and there is NO WAY that such speculation could possibly induce anyone to drink the stuff. Anyone who drinks bleach is doing so out of their own stupidity, and anyone who claims they were acting on Trump’s advice is lying, like that fish tank cleaner woman, who is an active Democrat and Trump-hater, and made it up as an excuse to kill her husband.
And no, you shouldn’t use a spray; where on earth did you get that idea? Certainly not from anything Trump said.
PS: Techiyas Hameisim will happen in stages, and Lubavitchers are convinced that even if the Rebbe is not Moshiach he will come back in the first wave, together with Moshe and Aharon and other major leaders.
The only way Chabad would be ‘vindicated’, so to speak, is if Moshiach turns out to be the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Not at all. Chabad will be vindicated when Moshiach comes, regardless of who it is. It will be more vindicated when the Rebbe returns to “lead us to meet Moshiach”, as he often put it. And of course if he does turn out to be Moshiach after all it will certainly be vindicated, but that’s completely unnecessary.
Moshiach’s identity is completely unimportant to Chabad. Of course during the Rebbe’s life most of his chassidim thought he would be the one. It seemed completely logical. But even then, had Moshiach come and it was someone else everyone would have been delighted. After his passing the probability of his being Moshiach is obviously lower, but so long as some chance remains most of his chassidim still hold out hope for it. But obviously if it’s someone else they will be just as happy, and will wait for him to return and confirm for them that this person is the real moshiach.
(To quote at least one Gadol, let it be the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as long as he comes already…)
And any Lubavitcher would say let it not be the Rebbe, so long as he comes already.