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The “hole” in the ozone layer is in the Southern Hemisphere, so it doesn’t affect anyone who lives in the USA, Europe, or Israel.
And that “hole” has probably been there every southern winter since the world was created. There’s nothing new about it.
Romney does NOT believe in a trinity. He believes there are THOUSANDS if not MILLIONS of gods, one of whom happens to be the god of this world. And that this god used to be human, and has a wife and children. And that one day, if we are good, we will each be gods and create worlds to be god of.
I don’t know if that counts as avoda zara, or is too crazy for that.
“Plastic pollution is horrible for the world”
How, and how do you know? What harm does it actually do? If you assert that its mere presence is automatically harmful, you lose.
“The higher end stores do not provide cheep plastic bags, they provide branded bags so everyone know the tourist just went to a high end store.”
And those bags are about to become illegal too. Shopping-style plastic bags thicker than 1/100th of an inch are not manufactured.
What Trump did was perfectly appropriate. Biden’s corruption needs to be looked into and it was completely appropriate to ask the Ukraine to do so. The Democrats who complain that the aid he temporarily held up was essential, and that holding it up harmed our national security, are hypocrites, because they refused to give it at all. It was Trump who decided to give the aid in the first place, so he had the right to delay it and to put conditions on it.
The whole world is NOT affected by the “plastic mess in oceans, forests, etc”. Nobody is harmed by it. The so-called “great pacific garbage patch” is invisible. It’s made up of microscopic particles of plastic that bother nobody. Because the truth is that plastic does degrade into these tiny particles.
And the only paper bags that will be available have no handles, and cannot be relied on to get your groceries home in one piece while walking or taking the subway. The result is going to be less impulse buying, less buying from small shops, and more planned large shopping trips and shopping online. Which is going to hurt the small stores.
But the bottom line is that this is an invasion of our G-d given liberties. If we want to use plastic bags we have a RIGHT to use them, and no government has the right to prevent us. George Washington would be wondering why we haven’t yet strung up all these dictators from trees.
I remember a time before many of the vaccines we have now. We managed then (except the ones who died unnecessarily) and we can manage now without them. Right?
Wolf, of course it was. You are neither required nor even able to register other people.
CTlawyer, how wonderful for you that you have a car, and keep bags in it. Most of us in NYC do not drive casually around, and when we buy something we DEPEND on plastic bags to get it home. Paper bags will not work because they have no handles. If I can’t get a bag from the store, and I don’t happen to have shlepped a bag with me I WILL NOT BE ABLE BUY THINGS, because I will have no way to get them home on the subway. Even if I have taken a bag with me, I will only be able to buy as much as fits in that one bag. If I pass a store and see something good on sale, I will not be able to buy it in quantity unless I go around everywhere with five bags, just in case. This is insane.
Also, I will have to start buying garbage bags. And pet owners will have to start buying bags for that. What is the purpose served by all this? There is an almost UNLIMITED supply of landfill, so don’t drei me a kop about the garbage problem.
Not true. The Agudah does not support “Palestinian” statehood, and nothing in its statement implies that it does. The statement merely welcomes Trump’s plan despite this one flaw in it, which we hope will not end up meaning anything because the Arabs will reject it, or even if they accept it they will break it before this “statehood” is implemented, since it is to come at the end of a long process.
The power of suggestion. You tell the child the kiss will make it will feel better, so it does.
GHT, human blood is not forbidden min hatorah, and is forbidden miderabanan only because of mar’is ha’ayin. So there’s no room for gezeros.
No, of course nobody can register their sons. The sons have to register themselves.
Halklein, that is precisely the point. He regarded the scholarly study of kabalah as being like someone studying the four humors theory that dominated medicine for centuries, or the four elements theory of chemistry, or the Aristotelian laws of motion, without which one cannot understand classical works rooted in a world where those nonsensical theories were the accepted science of the day. The scholarship is worthwhile, but the subject of the study remains nonsense. And that is how Lieberman regarded kabalah — that it is nonsense r”l, but it is a fit subject for scholarship. Tell me how that does not make him an apikores.
Lieberman referred to kabbala as “nonsense”. In my book that makes him an apikores.
The bottom line is clear: Burisma hired Hunter Biden and paid him at least</i> $50,000 a month (and perhaps almost twice that) when the only thing he could possibly do for it was to use his father’s influence to protect it. So when his father openly bragged about doing just that, it creates a very strong presumption that he was delivering the goods he was being paid for.
Supposing Eric Trump had been in that position, paid $600K a year by a company for doing absolutely nothing, I have not the slightest doubt that CTLawyer would be howling for Trump to recuse himself from any decision even remotely connected to that company. And if Trump had then threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid if a prosecutor investigating this company were not fired, CTLawyer would be the first to accuse him of corruption. But because Biden is a Democrat, CTLawyer sees no evil. This is not law, it is evil.
The whole premise is ridiculous. Running for president doesn’t give someone immunity from investigation. Nobody knows that better than Donald Trump, after 0bama sicced the FBI and CIA on him while he was running for president. So there’s no reason in the world why Trump should not have asked the Ukraine, where the Bidens’ corruption took place, to investigate it.
As for his temporarily withholding the aid, the hypocrisy of the Democrats edited on this forum is astounding. This aid was so important, so vital, that 0bama and the Democrats refused to give it at all. Trump was the one who decided to give this aid in the first place, so he was surely entitled to delay it if he was concerned about anything going on there.
CTLawyer, you should take your whole family and go live in some hell-hole. Trump has done a lot more for this country than you have.
Wouldn’t martians still be subject to Sheva Mitzvot B’nai Noach??
Yes. And therefore the LR’s argument is that they would need to know about the Torah, and since they can’t know about it therefore they must not exist. My question is that until recently the same was true for the vast majority of humanity on this planet, who undoubtedly existed, and were obliged to obey the 7MBN, and yet had no way to find out about them.
(Remember that it is not sufficient for a BN to keep the 7 mitzvos because he figured them out himself and they make sense to him. He must keep them because Hashem commanded them to Moshe Rabbenu, in the Torah. And for this he must have heard of Moshe and of the Torah.
Who cares about him? He is NOT Jewish. Having a Jewish father means absolutely nothing. The Torah says that if your son marries a nochris her children are not your grandchildren, they have nothing to do with you, so you shouldn’t care if they serve avoda zara.
He advocated violence when the Torah advocates violence, and not at any other time. He was a huge talmid chochom, and a paragon of chessed and of ahavas yisroel,
Ubiquitin asked what risks a kidney donor needs to avoid. Besides high-risk sports, a kidney donor needs to take extra care to avoid dehydration, should somewhat limit protein intake, avoid or limit certain prescription drugs that are an acceptable risk for people with two kidneys, and basically have to look after themselves more carefully than they did before. When you’re 20 years old and feeling invulnerable these are not considerations that come naturally to mind. (Certainly not when you’re under 20 and reckless.) So you have to consciously sit down and consider that one day, with Hashem’s help, you will be middle aged and then elderly, and you won’t have the safety margin that you were designed to have. It’s really as simple as that. Consider carefully, consult widely, and then make your decision.
GHD, first of all where did you get the idea that all treif will become kosher?
Second, we will not need to work for our livings, because ועמדו זרים ורעו צאנכם, and we will be free to spend all our time learning Torah, so if there’s no need for mashgichim that will be a good thing.Actually the Lubavitcher Rebbe said that while there might be life on other planets there cannot be intelligent life there, because such people would need the Torah to tell them how to behave, and there can only be one matan torah in the universe.
I don’t understand this argument. Just as the Australian Aborigines and the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa and of the Americas had to wait thousands of years till the Torah could reach them, why could the same not be true for the inhabitants of Mars or Titan, or of some planet orbiting Tau Ceti? Until humans with the Torah contact them, Hashem may have left them to their own devices and judges them accordingly, just as He did with so many humans.
Only the brain of the shibuta is supposed to taste like chazer. I have personally seen an expert food taster who is familiar with the taste of chazir (as the poskim call such a person, a קפילא) who tasted the flesh of a shibuta and proclaimed that it does not taste anything like pork. Unfortunately he did not get any of the brain to taste, so the jury remains out on that.
DrYidd, the Lubavicher Rebbe was an enrolled full-time student at the Sorbonne, after graduating from ESTP, which is one of the most prestigious civil engineering schools in France. Since you’re so wrong about that, you’re not reliable about Berlin either.
What records do you think should exist for Hildesheimer students who took classes at the University? Do such records exist for the dozens or hundreds of other students who did this? And how do you know?
I accidentally found the easiest way to clean a menorah. A few days ago I brushed past the menorah and it fell to the floor and smashed into three pieces. I cleaned up the mess and threw it out, and next year I have to buy a new one, which will be clean 🙂
The chapter and verse numbering in the Pentateuch was established by the Greeks before the time of Hillel.
No, it was not. The division of the Bible into chapters was created by Stephen Langton in the early 13th century, and only really caught on among Jews when printing came along, and chumashim were published using this system.
Of course I would. Why on earth not?
Of course since it costs more than real meat, I don’t plan to eat it very often. But once to try it, sure.
Avi, the difference an invitation makes is clear: it’s the difference between a public gathering and a private event. His shita is that private events don’t need to be separate, public gatherings do. It’s got nothing to do with how people dress.
It’s not surprising that he says one or two women, on a casual basis, is OK — he says is the case even in a shul, so of course it’s also the case at a shiva house.
LOTR92, an AR-15 is not an assault rifle. It’s an ordinary semi-automatic rifle like any other.
The main advantage of an AR-15 for self-defense is that it’s recoilless, which means women, smaller men, and children can handle it much more easily.
Avi, see the teshuva on shiva houses, and there’s another one on shiurim. In both he says that since they’re open to the public they must be segregated.
Smerel Rav Hutner certainly did study at Berlin University; that was the only reason he was in Berlin in the first place. That he was not registered there was because he was a foreigner without the qualifications to be admitted, so like all similarly situated students he officially registered as a student at the Hidesheimer Yeshivah, which had an arrangement with the Berlin University to allow its students to take classes there, much like YU students can take classes at Columbia. But this was just a cover; de facto, these students were full-time university students who occasionally attended a shiur at the yeshivah, not full-time yeshivah students who occasionally attended a university lecture.
Avi K, I don’t have the volume and chapter reference, and I’m not going to go looking for it now, but this is what he explicitly says in multiple places: Any gathering that is open to the public needs a mechitza, gatherings that are private, meaning that people can attend only by invitation, do not. Thus, he says, a wedding doesn’t need one, but a shiva house does.
By the way it is not true that all his children’s weddings were mixed. He did whatever the mechutonim wanted, so two were completely separate, one was mixed, and one was mostly separate with some mixed tables.
Coffee Addict, Reb Moshe does NOT permit mixed seating at public shiurim, or at any other event that is open to the public. He permits it only at private gatherings, to which one needs an invitation.
It makes no difference whether a marriage is “alive” or “dead”. If it is not one of those cases in which Chazal authorized kefiyas get, the husband has no obligation to give one, and if he refuses the wife is not an aguna, she is a moredes. She is married to him, and the Torah demands that she stay married to him unless she can persuade him to let her go. Often this means paying him what he wants, or making the concessions that he is demanding.
And post-Rabbenu-Gershom the same is true in the other direction; if it is not the equivalent of a case where Chazal authorized kefiyas get the wife has no obligation to accept a get, and if she refuses the husband is a mored, and must give her what she wants in return for her consent to let him go.
Kefiya is only allowed in those cases where Chazal said so, or that are equivalent to those cases.
The very fact that this person is dead makes us safer. He was dangerous, and now he’s not. Therefore we are safer.
Ubiquitin, what you wrote is simply not true, and quoting a bunch of liars doesn’t make it true. When you adjust for demographics the US is very far from the lead in homicide rates, even if you artificially limit your inquiry to “high income countries” (and why would you do that?)
Further, you can’t really compare homicide rates across countries which have different definitions and cultures. For instance, in Japan where there is no stigma on suicide they are much more likely to classify deaths as suicide rather than homicide.
And no, the problem has not been solved. In NY private sellers are at the mercy of dealers because they have to get a dealer to run the check for them. That is a big problem.
Are you really claiming that in order to prevent a schizophrenic with criminal history from getting a gun you would be willing to let anyone run a criminal check on you, for any reason they like?! Because if you’re not, then how do you suggest private sellers of guns get access to background checks on their buyers?
And the fact remains that there are NO prosecutions of people whose check comes back negative, which is very strong evidence that the overwhelming majority of such cases are false negatives, and the check system is a massive failure.
Another point: Imposing background checks on private sellers will do nothing to satisfy the gun-grabbers. They are already demanding and introducing legislation to require checks for any transfer of a weapon, including lending it to someone, or just having someone hold it while you tie your shoe.
Declarations of war are done by the Congress. They have a lot of baggage which is why they have disappeared since the mid-20th century.
Not true. It’s just that nowadays Congress likes to call it a more bureaucratic-sounding name — Authorization of the Use of Military Force. That is a declaration of war.
Also, no declaration is necessary if a state of war already exists.
” However, look around a vast majority of places with gun control. People get attacked,”
This is not true and has been studiesd over and over.
On the national level, on the state level more gun control (generally) leads to less gun deaths.Ubiquitin, what you write is not true at all. Further, even if it were true, it’s dishonest to segregate gun deaths from other deaths; dead is dead, and where people are able to defend themselves they are at less risk of being killed. That is a fact.
Requiring private sellers to run a background check on their buyer has one big problem — private people are unable to do that. And the reason is obvious: You would not want anyone to be able to run a check on anyone, at any time, without a good reason. So the background check system is only available to dealers.
If I have a gun to sell, and I find someone to buy it, making me run a check means effectively telling me I can’t sell it. I would have to go find a dealer who is willing to run the check for me, and who will charge me whatever he likes for the service, which adds significantly to the price I have to charge the buyer. And if the check doesn’t come back immediately, what am I supposed to do? I don’t have a store that the buyer can come back to in a few days.
And all of this is completely unnecessary, since the background check system for dealers is a complete failure. Ask yourself why people whose checks come back negative are NEVER prosecuted for attempting to buy a gun illegally? The most obvious reason is that almost ALL negative results are false negatives, so there’s nothing to prosecute.
What most people tell pollsters they want is irrelevant, because most people have no idea what the current law is.
Because most of us do not know the facts of each case, so we have no way to know whether the man is indeed unjustly refusing to give a get that an honest beis din has properly ordered him to give, or whether he is justly fighting for his rights against a moredes, who is demanding a get without any right whatsoever, and thinks that instead of persuading him she can get what she wants by applying communal pressure. Even if some poster claims a beis din ordered a get, we don’t know whether it did so validly, or it’s one of those fake “botei din” that unlawfully order a get whenever the wife wants one. Since we don’t know who is right, we stay out of it.
“Reb” Eliezer, you are an outright liar. Trump has NEVER encouraged antisemitism or antisemites. It is a blood libel that you knowingly repeat.
He said that in the Charlottesville riot there were good people as well as thugs on both sides. That is a simple fact, and if you can’t acknowledge it then YOU are the one so filled with hate that you are projecting it on others. He never said one good word about the UNRELATED anti-semitic march the PREVIOUS NIGHT.
Yes. McIvor’s blended whiskies are aged for five, twelve and seventeen years in cask barrels previously used to age rum, giving the whiskies their distinct flavors. Rum is kosher, therefore there is no shayla on McIvors.
To answer the original question, if it turned out that Trump was a racist I’d be surprised and disappointed, but so long as he wasn’t against OUR race it wouldn’t stop me from supporting him. Racism is not an aveira, and there is certainly no mitzvah to oppose all racism. It’s a bad midah, but we already know Trump has many bad midos, though none as bad as those of all his opponents.
If it had turned out that he or his campaign did after all conspire with Russians to leak the DNC emails, that wouldn’t bother me AT ALL. It’s not a crime, and the leak, no matter what motivated it, was a positive thing. It gave the voters valuable information that NOBODY DISPUTES WAS TRUE. But of course we now know that the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by the Democratic Party in order to undermine Trump, and everyone who supported it needs to held responsible.
Likewise, it would not bother me AT ALL had he actually explicitly told the Ukranians that the aid HE decided to give them (after 0bama had refused) would only be forthcoming if they investigated Burisma. This would be no different from Biden’s BRAGGING about having blackmailed the previous Ukranian govenrment into firing the prosecutor who was conducting the investigation.
Reb Eliezer is a liar. Trump has NEVER encouraged antisemitism, and never said one good word about the neo-nazis who were at Charlottesville. He CORRECTLY pointed out that they were not the only ones there.
The Charlottesville riot was a battle between nazi thugs and communist thugs. The communists attacked the nazis, who were there to peacefully protest, so if one had to take sides an honest person would have to choose the nazis. But one doesn’t have to choose sides, one can correctly say, AS TRUMP DID that there were bad people on both sides. But one must also acknowledge, as Trump did, that there were good people on both sides too, and it’s a shame that some of them got hurt.
He explicitly said that the nazis who were there were NOT good people.
And yes, Spyfall’s art is not necessarily for frum eyes. Also, you need a good group to play it. At least 4, preferably more, and they have to know each other fairly well.
Random3x, I meant deck building games.
Speaking of which, have you seen Clank!? Someone took Ascension and bolted it on to a dungeon-exploring board game. Every turn you first play a hand of what is very clearly an Ascension rip-off (they hardly bothered filing off the serial numbers), but instead of generating points it generates movement and hit points that you then use to move around the dungeon. Two games in one!
And playable on Shabbos. Unlike the latest game I tried, Letter Jam, which *can* be played on Shabbos but it wouldn’t be easy. You’d have to have a good memory.
The president can’t declare war. But he can recognize that a state of war already exists, and act accordingly. A state of war does NOT depend on a declaration; it depends on the facts. If our forces are in combat, we’re at war.
How do I know Rubashkin isn’t Moshiach? Because he’s a Levi, that’s how.
Katan Hashtus, while chazal did not teach that being careless about dina d’malchusa and being a convicted felon [specifics edited] qualify one to be moishiach, they also didn’t teach that it disqualifies one. It’s completely irrelevant. And the whole Rubashkin family are true tzadikim, as anyone who knows them can attest. But they are not descended in a male line from Dovid Hamelech, so that rules them out.
Meh. Machi Koro is OK, but if I’m going to play that sort of game I’d rather play Dominion.
Wow. I gave you the source. Beis Rebbi is a very reliable and reputable source. If it says the Alter Rebbe said this, then he said it. And you have NO RIGHT to criticize him or second guess him.
What on earth are both of you yammering about? There never were any plans for a mobile mikveh. Not by Prof Zlotnick, nor by Chabad, nor by anyone else. There is no such thing. The OP simply made it up