The Satmar Rebbe Gives Anti-Zionism a Bad Name

The Satmar Rebbe is usually presented as not only prescient, which he wasn’t, a Torah scholar, which he most certainly was not, but also genuinely empathetic to his opponents, praying for them, giving them charity, and judging them favorably in private.

The very last tale comes not from any direct evidence but is an extrapolation made by Rabbi Sternbuch (among others) from a vort (homily) he said in this last week’s Parsha, Vayera: If he attributed something to Avraham Avinu, he must have also done the same himself. (This is actually partly logically sound because the opposite is impossible: Like most rabbis, he had no interest in a historical, factual examination of the Torah, so almost everything he said was a psychological projection, of sorts). Except the vort is bowdlerized (nor is there anything particularly creative about it), so you don’t notice that the lesson pertaining to the man himself is flatly false.

Here’s the vort (the omitted part in bold):

Bereishis 19:27: “Avraham got up early to pray where he usually did…” [referring to the plea Hashem spare Sedom]. Why did Avraham wait until morning? Chazal say it’s because a Talmid Chacham may not travel alone at night (at least according to Tosafos, Chulin 91b).

Asks the Satmar Rebbe, why couldn’t he bring people along, as he did by the Akeidah?

Answered the Satmar Rebbe, this was because he didn’t want anyone hearing him finding merit in Sedom, lest they follow in their ways. Indeed, he added, although there is a Mitzvah to oppose the wicked, as David says in Tehillim, Your hater, Hashem, I will hate, and I will fight those who rise up against You, etc, when one is speaking to Hashem himself, one should ask for mercy for them. This is since when Hashem punishes the wicked, he often punishes others as well, as the Gemara states in Bava Kama 60a.

See the difference with the added part?

I’m not going to try and comment on the ludicrous content itself (although it was just a homily).

Medical Mass Murder

How Pharma Sabotaged the Drug Enforcement Agency and Caused Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths

By 

Mercola.com

November 3, 2017

Opioid-related statistics reveal the U.S. has an enormous problem on its hands. Americans use 80 percent of all the opioids sold worldwide.1 In Alabama, which has the highest opioid prescription rate in the U.S., 143 prescriptions are written for every 100 people.2 A result of this over-prescription trend is skyrocketing deaths from overdoses.3,4

As recently reported by CNN, the Manchester, New Hampshire, fire department responds to more calls for drug overdoses than fires these days.5 In 2015, 52,404 Americans died from drug overdoses; 33,091 of them involved an opioid and nearly one-third of them, 15,281, were by prescription.6,7,8

The following graph by the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows the progressive incline in overdose deaths related to opioid pain relievers between 2002 and 2015.9 This does not include deaths from heroin addiction, which we now know is a common side effect of getting hooked on these powerful prescription narcotics. In all, we’re looking at just over 202,600 deaths in this 13-year time frame alone.10

Meanwhile, kidney disease, listed as the ninth leading cause of death on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) top 10 list, killed 48,146.11 The CDC does not include drug overdoses on this list, but if you did, drug overdoses (63 percent of which are opioids), would replace kidney disease as the ninth leading cause of death as of 2015. As if that wasn’t bad enough, recent statistics reveal that in Americans under the age of 50, opioids are now the LEADING cause of death.

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Deal With It!

Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference.