Mishna Berura on the ‘Trei Medanei Asa’ Minhag

M.B. Siman 297:10:

דאז עושין ככו”ע, עין בט”ז שכתב על מה דאיתא בטור בשם רבינו אפרים שהיה לו זכוכית מיוחדת שהיו בה מיני בשמים והיה מברך עליהן דאף דלהלכה יש לצדד דיכול לברך במ”ב גם על הבשמים שהיו מונחים בבית לצורך תבשיל כיון שנוטלן עתה בידו להריח בהן וכ”כ בספר תוספת שבת בפשיטות מ”מ רבינו אפרים עשה זה למצוה מן המובחר שייחד אותם מתחלה לשם ריח מצוה וכך נוהגין רוב העולם שמיחדין כלי לזה וקורין אותו הדס ע”ש שהיו מניחין שם בדורות הראשונים הדס כדי להריח.

There is a company trying to restore the custom of smelling hadasim, too.

(And, hey, it would be nice if you stopped borrowing the cinnamon from the kitchen…)

 

Rabbi Avigdor Miller on the Murderous Father of Murderer Cuomo

From here:

A very sick man, Cuomo, one of the worst cholei hanefesh, said, “It’s barbaric to kill murderers.” He’s the real barbarian because anybody who says it’s barbaric to kill murderers is a barbarian himself.

And again:

Among Jews we say נָקֹם יִנָּקֵם – Crime surely must be avenged (Shemos 21:20). It means that you have to be angry at criminals. Not like that criminal governor Cuomo who vetoed the death penalty. He’s the criminal; he’s the one who will be to blame for the murders that will take place in the future. Because now they know they have a friend in Albany — all the criminals and all their liberal lawyers know they can rely on him. It’s only when the leaders of society make a display of justified anger against wrongdoing, that’s when society functions properly.

We know טבע האב בבן, so (Breitbart)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aides rewrote a report from state health officials to hide 9,250 Chinese coronavirus deaths in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

The New York Times details the coverup citing new documents and interviews with six people involved in the concealment of deaths.

Cuomo (D) faced early criticism in his state for ordering nursing homes to take patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus, as the elderly are among those most vulnerable to the virus.

After reports surfaced in February that Cuomo was intentionally hiding the numbers, the governor’s office explained he was withholding the truth to prevent then-President Donald Trump’s administration from using the data to launch a politically motivated attack.

Cuomo blamed the “toxic political environment” and “disinformation” for the revised numbers.

But the Times states Cuomo began hiding the truth about the numbers long before the Justice Department began their investigation in August.

The June numbers showed the actual death toll in nursing homes was “roughly 50 percent higher” than the numbers ultimately cited by the Cuomo administration, according to the Times.

The actual number of 9,250 nursing home deaths by June were much larger than the reported 6,432 nursing-home deaths — more than a 40 percent increase.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the governor’s advisers stripped the number of nursing home residents who died after they were transferred to a hospital from the report, making the death toll look better for Cuomo.

The doctored report, released in July, allowed Cuomo to continue trumpeting his success in fighting the virus in New York.

“Whatever happens, this is going to be a period to learn from,” Cuomo said in a radio interview on July 10, just after the doctored information was released. “I am now thinking about writing a book about what we went through, lessons learned, the entire experience, because if we don’t learn from this, then it will really compound the whole crisis that we’ve gone through.”

More than 15,000 New Yorkers in nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from the Chinese coronavirus since March 2020.

Of course, oldsters are only a few years away from euthanasia, anyway, but females are an officially protected class, so Andrew Cuomo the son is in disgrace only for that.

For far more on Cuomo, see here.

(P.S., Not to address the death penalty, itself…)

מדיה מן המשנה מנין

משנה בבא מציעא ה’ י’:

רבי שמעון אומר, יש רבית דברים, לא יאמר לו דע לד כי בא איש פלוני ממקום פלוני.

Women in the Military? It All Depends on the GOAL of the Military!

Why are today’s women in the military in some countries, unlike in the past? Were previous generations less licentious?

I suspect it’s because today’s wars are frequently for sport or other purposes. If the goal is defense, however, women are counterproductive.

Repeating the obvious (excerpt from an LRC article):

The camaraderie and esprit de corps in a military unit or a police unit is heavily dependent on shared risk. When women are exposed to the same degree of risk of life and death, this disrupts the military-protective function, which is unquestionably masculine. In this sense, the military is different from the free market, in which shared risk is economic. In the corporate world, men have no sense of obligation to protect women. They may be quite happy to put rival women out of business.

Second, women in general are not as strong physically as men are. A soldier in the field cannot rely on a woman with the same degree of confidence that he can rely on a man.

Third, society imposes on men a protective impulse with regard to women. A soldier in the field will tend to disobey orders in order to defend a woman in the ranks, when he would not be equally ready to disobey an order to protect another male. This threatens to disrupt the chain of command. This is a reason why homosexuality in the military has been universally condemned in the West and in most non-Western armies. A combatant may abandon a buddy to his fate when the battle plan requires it, but he may not abandon a sexual partner. Homosexuality reduces the predictability of battle plans.

Fourth, women are required to obey orders on threat of court martial, just as men are. This creates opportunities for men of higher rank to misuse their rank for sexual exploitation.

Fifth, there is another factor that is rarely discussed in public: female homosexuality. The primary characteristics of success in combat are masculine. This subsidizes the careers of those women who possess masculine characteristics. It rewards certain features of female homosexuality. The creation of same-sex sexual relationships within a military chain of command leads to exploitation by rank and also leads to problems of protective impulses under combat conditions, and to hierarchical favoritism in peacetime, both of which undermine military discipline.

See the rest here…