Year: 2024

Mr. Connor O’Keeffe over at Mises Wire asks the obvious question: Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?

Of course, there are weirdos who still think the President “presides”.

To quote a funny old Republican speechwriter-ess:

The president’s rationalizers point out that he’s fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am sure presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia will only decide to take back Taiwan or move on Poland at lunch time EST, to keep things fair. Why wouldn’t they schedule their aggressions around the president’s needs?

The operative excerpt:

Every four years, we’re supposed to pretend that a single individual, who we collectively choose at the ballot box, takes charge of the federal government and acts as we would to address the problems we face at home and abroad.

Biden’s inability to get through a debate and a sit-down interview without issues shatters the illusion that he is the one running things in Washington and across America’s globe-spanning sphere of influence.

So, if Biden is not actually running the government, who is?

The short answer:

Court intellectuals use their establishment-sanctioned “expertise” to argue that society’s problems must be solved with government interventions. Politicians offer to enact these interventions in exchange for votes and donations. Plutocrats work to warp the interventions to their own benefit and then lobby and pay politicians to legislate even more lucrative interventions. After they are enacted, the easily predicted bad consequences of the interventions are used by court intellectuals and politicians to justify even more interventions.

Meanwhile, the bureaucratic group gains jobs, money, and power that it works with court intellectuals to protect and expand. The ever-growing interventions build up more government power that is then offered up to interested plutocratic buyers. All the while, politicians put on their sham fights with each other over minor policy differences along with their electoral and legislative rituals to obscure the scam and to keep us all believing that we live in a representative democratic republic.

(I’m not saying it’s exactly this way, no simplifications or complexities, but this does give us the general picture nicely.)

Read the rest here…

I’ll tell you how they once made themselves happy amid depression.

Once there was a King who had an only son. The King wanted to transfer the kingdom to his son during his lifetime, so he threw a grand party (which they call a “ball”). Now, when the King throws a ball there is certainly great merriment, so especially now that he was transferring the kingdom to his son during his lifetime, there was certainly a very great celebration. And there at the ball were all the royal officers and all the dukes and gentry, and people were very merry at the ball. And the country too was enjoying this — the king’s transferring his kingdom to his son in his lifetime — for it is a great honorific event for the King. So a very great celebration took place there, and there were all types of festivities there: song groups, drama groups and so forth, as well as everything useful just for merriment — it was all there at the ball.

And when they had waxed very merry, the King got up and said to his son, “Being that I am a stargazer, I see that you will at some time fall from the kingship. Therefore see to it that you have no sadness (that is, no grief) when you fall from reign; just be happy. And if you will be happy, I will also be happy. Even if you will have sadness I will still be happy that you are not king, since you are not fit to be king if you cannot keep yourself happy. (In other words, if you are the kind of man that you cannot keep yourself happy even when you fall from reign then you aren’t fit to be any sort of king). But when you will be happy then I will be extraordinarily happy.”

…

From Wikisource.

Ponder well.

I don’t usually read Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, but here’s his latest column.

First, he points out that the Leftist, lying “power religion” in the West seems to be mostly winning, so far. He adds some pessimistic speculation about politics I didn’t understand.

Then Rabbi Lipschutz asks the question we hear all around:

Where does that leave us? How are we to live our lives in a period such as the one we now face? Should we engage in outreach, attempting to explain the Torah to those who mock and vilify us? Should we demonstrate the truths that have been guiding us ever since we stood at Har Sinai? After all, we are in the 21^st century now. Perhaps we should be using modern tools to explain to the world how wrong they are about us. Maybe they hate us because we have a marketing problem.

And he answers:

The first Rashi of the parsha quotes the Medrash Tanchuma, which states that the Soton and nations of the world mock us and ask for the rationale of this mitzvah. Therefore, says Rashi, the Torah spells out that Parah Adumah is a chok, a gezeirah min haShomayim, and we do not ask questions about it.

The nations of the world, and those who mock us and attempt to steer us from the path of our forefathers, question us and our practices. They say that the mitzvos are backward and without reason. We don’t answer them. We don’t try to explain it to them. We reinforce to ourselves that we are following the word of Hashem, which is a chok. This way, we are able to succeed and flourish in a world of sheker.

Well, not all the mitzvos are chukim, but OK. (Also, Charedi Judaism≠Torah Truth!)

For as long as people alive today can remember, gedolim such as the Chazon Ish and Rav Shach have been saying that the proper response to such situations is to add more yeshivos, more Bais Yaakovs, more elementary schools, and more kollelim. The way to respond to those who curse our existence, to those who seek to stem our growth and to the various festering issues, is by ignoring their calls and dedicating ourselves to increase our own study of Torah and to increase the study of Torah in general.

In our personal lives as well, when we are acting properly and people mock us and seek to harm us, our reputations, and things that we have worked hard to build up, our response shouldn’t be to get in the gutter with them. We should instead take the higher road and do our best to continue living our lives according to the Torah, halacha and darkei mussar.

We shouldn’t let detractors get us down and lead us to curtail our good actions. We should seek out seforim based on the Torah and mesorah to strengthen ourselves and give ourselves chizuk.

Life is tough enough without us stopping to engage with detractors of all types and fretting over the future.

Well Put (I would say it more aggressively than just “hunker down”)!

Read the rest here…

1. “אום אני חומה סערוויס”
2. חבורות “בני חורין”
3. “משרד להציל”

מתוך “לוח למעיישה” מס’ 13 (כולל טופס להצטרפות):

Download (PDF, 492KB)

הערה: לא בדקתי.

Wrote one of our readers in response to our exposé.

He couldn’t accept that a magazine affiliated with Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer and Rabbi Dovid Laibel could violate basic halachos in Shulchan Aruch (!).

So, he went and checked himself and found an immodest image in a recent “Hamakom” magazine (#38, page unknown).

Turns out, I wasn’t lying after all!