The Achronim Just Make Stuff Up

I don’t know how else to put it.

Here is an English summary of the highlights in a pseudo-halachic discussion of eating food left under the bed:

One may not store food and drink under a bed, even enclosed in metal, and these receive an “evil spirit”, and so should not be eaten. As the Shulchan Aruch (Y.D. 117:5) says:

ולא יתן תבשיל ולא משקים תחת המטה, מפני שרוח רעה שורה עליהם… וכל אלו הדברים הם משום סכנה, ושומר נפשו ירחק מהם ואסור לסמוך אנס או לסכן נפשו בכל כיוצא בזה. (ועיין בחושן משפט סימן תכ”ז).

  • It is customary to be lenient if the food was under a mattress or pillow or plane seat or a recliner (even though it is sometimes used for sleeping) or in a sleeping man’s pocket.
  • If it was under a child’s bed or stroller or double-decker bed, there is doubt. Some say the food is permitted if no one slept under the bed, or if it was slept on during the day, but it’s better to be stringent since the Gemara doesn’t go into these details.
  • If medicine was left under the bed, there is room to be lenient.
  • Some say one person cannot forbid another’s food (אין אדם אוסר דבר שאינו שלו – responsa Rav Pe’alim).
  • For more of this (Cooked or uncooked? Esrog for Succos? Chanukah oil? Hefsed Merubeh? etc.), see here.

The ugly truth is, there is no good proof for any of this. Since we don’t observe any danger in our time, we have no tools to analyze any of this. One needs to take some general approach, and either forbid everything or permit everything (see Pischei Teshuvah on the Shulchan Aruch).

There are hundreds of such pointless discussions in the Achronim and countless ink poured.

If you don’t know something, just admit it!

America: Will It Become Turkey or Greece?

Turkey Now, America Later?

In the past seven years, Turkey’s central bank has tripled the money supply and pushed interest rates down to 4.5 percent. While Turkey’s government did not adopt Ben Bernanke’s proposal to drop money from helicopters, Turkish politicians have taken advantage of easy money policies to increase subsidies for key voting blocs and special interests.

The results of the Turkish government’s inflation-fueled spending binge are not surprising to anyone familiar with Austrian economics or economic history. Turkey is now plagued with huge deficits, a collapsing currency, and a looming economic crisis, making it the next candidate for a European Union or Federal Reserve bailout.

Turkey’s combination of low interest rates, money creation, and massive government spending to “stimulate” the economy parallels the policies the US government has pursued for the past ten years. Without drastic changes in fiscal and monetary policies, economic trouble in America is around the corner.

The very large and growing federal debt will cause a major crisis as the government’s debt burden will be unsustainable. Instead of cutting spending or raising taxes, politicians can be expected to pressure the Federal Reserve to do their dirty work for them via inflation. We may even see the Fed “experiment” with negative interest rates, which would punish Americans for saving. The monetization of the federal debt will erode the dollar’s purchasing power and decimate middle-and-working-class Americans who are already seeing any gains in their incomes eaten away by inflation.

If we are lucky, the next Fed-caused downturn will cause only a resurgence of 1970s-style stagflation. The more likely scenario is the type of widespread economic chaos not seen in America since the Great Depression. The growth of cultural Marxism, the widespread entitlement mentality, and the willingness of partisans of various sides to use force against their political opponents suggests that this economic crisis will result in civil unrest that will be used to justify new crackdowns on individual liberty.

Those who understand the causes of, and cures for, our current predicament have two responsibilities. First, prepare a plan to protect your family when the crisis occurs. Second, do all you can to spread the truth in hopes the liberty movement reaches critical mass so it can force Congress to make the changes necessary to avert disaster.

Since the crisis will result in a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status, individuals should consider alternatives such as gold and other precious metals. Restoring a free-market monetary system should be a priority for the liberty movement. Other priorities include ending our interventionist foreign policy, cutting spending in all areas, rolling back the surveillance state, protecting all civil liberties, and auditing (and ending) the Federal Reserve. If we do our jobs, we can build a society of peace, prosperity, and liberty atop the ashes of the welfare-warfare state.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Staring Into the Abyss: What McCain Actually Was

Child of the State, Man of War

And now, John Sidney McCain, III is a corpse in a morgue awaiting his state burial. It is as it should be, perhaps for the first time in his entire life.

McCain – the holy terror of teenager and Naval Academy cadet, mad pilot and poster child for the horrors of the towering enemy we faced for our very survival as a Republic in Vietnam, and political animal for much of his life – clearly was not at home in this world.

In a world filled with people who are all pretty much accountable on a daily basis for their decisions, choices, actions, and for the pain they have and are causing, John McCain was missing from his post.

Instead, as a son of a successful Naval commander, he path was not entirely his own, and yet he did, repeatedly, choose that path.  His biggest tragedy may have been that he was the namesake of a distinguished military family.   Certainly, the life of his younger brother Joe Pinckney McCain is a testament to how being born into service of the state doesn’t have to result in the deaths of so many for so long.

Where failures and character flaws occur in all families, when they occur in the important chapter of the national narrative called “Military Heroism And Sacrifice In The Name Of National Greatness And Security,” something must be done.

And what was done?  Props, propaganda and prose all came forth, and we aren’t done being propagandized and prosed to death just yet.  The funeral is coming.

While much has been written about John McCain, it’s the stories we haven’t been told that bother most people.  How he made it through the Academy one our dime with massive numbers of demerits and low academic performance, how he avoided courts martials and discharge from the Navy after the first two plane crashes and flying through the telephone lines in Spain, all before the interesting roles he played on the deck of the USS Forrestal before, during and after it burned.

The story of being shot down, likely by friendly fire, and his subsequent capture and torture by the “North” Vietnamese (a state construct in its own right) is rarely told in detail, but rather bundled in the official narrative under “courage.”  His divorce of his first wife and disconnect from his first family – understandable because of what war, separation and the stress of a military society do to human beings – is not discussed.  Nor are the personal, political and financial machinations that led to his first Congressional seat, and shortly thereafter, a secure Senate seat for Arizona, a seat he has held since this weekend.

From being a savior of the A-10 Warthog program, refusing to allow it a natural death — ironically the aircraft known for causing the most friendly fire and civilian deaths — to saving Obamacare from the breach, to reliably supporting projects to change governments overseas, all while waging low-level but steady combat against liberty and the Constitution at home, McCain was a busy man, and a well-connected, well-funded politician.

The actions of McCain as Senator are legion, and while no doubt people of various political stripes may find at least one or two things to laud in his progressive neoconservative warmongering and state-strengthening agenda in over three decades, in reality, he earned no loyalty.  This glowing yet strangely surreal obit by Jeff Goldberg of the leftward progressive and warmongering Atlantic says it all – and has it all wrong.

Goldberg links John McCain to Anne Frank – someone who cares about the underdog and has a deep moral compass.  To study John McCain’s life and times would lead one to conclude many things, but that he cares about the underdog and was guided by a deep sustaining morality would not be among them.

A better way to understand John McCain is to see him for what he really was and what he never escaped, although in his wistful moments one wonders if he dreamed of it.  He was a child of the state, the military state specifically.  He was the namesake of men who fought for the state, sacrificed their principles and families for the state, he was schooled by the state, both in the many military base schools he attended as a child, then the Naval Academy, later the US Navy, even later a prison camp – and in all of these places John McCain was treated and handled just a little bit different than the average Joe.  In every way, he owed his very life and his very liberty to the fact that he was deeply connected to the elites who are the shining beneficiaries of the American empire.

Later, as long-serving Senator and presidential candidate he became one of those elites in his own right and earned every drip of contempt by the thinking people — and every plaudit by state mouthpieces — on his own merit.

I’ll never forget a story I heard, where, in the privacy of an elevator (with some people who didn’t count as witnesses) McCain repeatedly jabbed a fellow Senator in the chest while making his point and/or intimidating his inferior.   Even after he learned to box at the Academy, as Robert Timburg writes, he “would charge into the center of the ring and throw punches until someone went down.”  For a national narrative that likes physical courage and loves the quick fighter, McCain was tailor-made.

Timburg, in writing about McCain’s Naval Academy days, was extraordinarily prescient.  McCain was “…an unofficial trail boss for a lusty band of carousers and partygoers known as the Bad Bunch.”  That lusty band of carousers and partygoers we have seen before in our lives.  When that group persists for decades and rules an empire, it is because they are consistently protected from the consequences of their own decisions and actions.

Joe McCain, John’s younger brother, took a different path, where he would not become rich or powerful, where he would be accountable for his decisions and actions.  He is not lauded in the media, and in fact, was ridiculed when brother John was running for President in 2008 for calling 911 to find out what was happening in a traffic jam on the Wilson Bridge.

Both were children of the state.  Joe called 911 innocently, because why not, it’s there to serve me!  John rained hell on governments and populations around the planet, including his own, for similar reasons.  It’s a kind of entitlement mentality, and it is as understandable as it is deeply immoral.

In John McCain’s lifetime, the US Government has nearly quadrupled in size and scope, while popular trust in government has collapsed.   Solutions to local and global problems today, however, are far more accessible to far more people.  Today, no one would call 911 for a traffic report when they have real time traffic mapping in their cars, and a full range of productive things to do while waiting.  Technology and human nature both favor decentralization and individualism whenever they can get it, preferring liberty over lockstep marching in spitshined boots and buckles that young John resented so much at the USNA.

Perhaps he had an inkling about the future after all.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

The State of Diaspora Orthodox Jewry

In a major center of so-called Orthodox Jews outside the land of Israel:

  • Men work a full day on Friday, park their cars as Shabbos arrives, then walk to shul by foot.
  • Boys and girls of all ages are given entirely unfiltered smartphones so “they are exposed to the world”.
  • Youth are sent to a papist Catheterlick (Catholic) prep school for a year before going on to college.

All of this is considered normal and in no need of change.

Money Does Buy Happiness!

590 smily face.png
Reuters

Americans have a peculiar conviction that the one thing money can’t give us is satisfaction. You can’t buy happiness, we’ve all been told. “Mo Money Mo Problems”, Biggie concurred. And while we can all agree that desperate poverty is hideous, there is a broadly held view that after a certain level of income (around $75,000, say), more money doesn’t buy more well-being.

But it’s just not so. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been arguing for years that, yes, richer families tend to be happier, and no, there is not an automatic cut-off point. In other words: Mo money, fewer problems.

Continue reading…

From The Atlantic, here.