akuperma

Unfair, there are many countries where the police routinely harass leaders of the opposition. Indeed that is the norm in most countries. It is just American exceptionalism to believe in things such as fair play and free speech and due process. Next think you know, you’ll be objecting to canceling teachers and media people who don’t hold correct views.

Not likely. A good deal of Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan still exists under a Republican label. If Trump and his supporters can’t reconcile themselves, they’ll have to form their own party. While Romney couldn’t win without the “deplorables”, Trump couldn’t win without the support of the established Republicans.

The Democrats have moved so far to the left, that they no longer the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy, etc. A more likely scenario is there will be three parties in the future, a “Progressive” (non-democratic, socialist, woke, authoritarian, elitist), a MAGA (populist, “deplorables”), and one (or perhaps two) moderate parties in the middle. In fact, that’s already happened, and what is left to see is how they organize themselves.

Even when they were farmers, Jews did not live in isolated homesteads (the way Americans do), but would live in a village from which everyone would walk to their fields (as is probably the case in most of the world), and would go to a regional center for market days. That would have especially been true of Jews living in northern Europe during the last 1000 years (and remember the topic under discussion is keeping warm in winter, which is an issue in places where you can go several months with temperatures being clearly above freezing – but never was an issue in Eretz Yisrael).

There is no indication he or his ancestors kept Shabbos or kashrus, so kis conversion would have been as valid as those arranged by the zionist government for secular non-Jewish immigrants of Jewish descent. Note there were several “kings” (more or less Roman vassals than monarchs) with that name, and some were definitely halachicly Jewish based on maternal descent from women who were definitely Jewish.

There is no prohibition of women signing. The prohibition is on men listening to them. On YouTube, no one makes you listen or watch anything – you have to click on something to make it play.

Republicans are too disunited and don’t have clear ideas on policy (at least ones they all agree one). Many of them are too busy claiming vote fraud in 2020 to deal with new issues. Also they are divided between Neocons (who want to vigorously oppose the Russians and Chinese), and “America First” types who want to avoid foreign wars. Even if the Republicans get control of either house, they won’t have a strong enough majority to do anything.

Jackk : The way the Democrats (going WOKE), and the Republicans (going MAGA) are going, in 2025 the two parties won’t be the “Democrats and the Republicans” (at least in fact, one should note that the post-civil war Democrats while keeping the name with substantially different than the antebellum version).

The new acne. Not even life threatening. While not sexually transmitted, it will be hard to catch it since it is spread by coughing. However it may be a good economic opportunity for those in the medical sciences business, since people are getting bored with Covid19 so that’s not much money to be made from a new coronavirus.

Defeated candidates have managed to end up winning the White House (Nixon lost being Governor of California, and then won the Presidency). Abraham Lincoln ran and lost for Senate, and then won the Presidency.

If the Republicans run Trump (or a fanatic MAGA isolationist), and the Democrats run Biden (or even better, run an enthusiastic WOKE candidate), there will be an opportunity for a third party founded by the “ruins” of the moderate wings of the Democratic and Republican parties. Cheney and Romney (and perhaps Collins or Murkowski) are possible founders of a new party. McMullin if he wins a Senate seat would be a very strong possibility. Among Democrats, candidates, or at least founders, of a third party would include former Senator Lieberman, Manchin and perhaps Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii.

For a third party to win, both the Democrats and Republicans have to move to radical extremes. The third party doesn’t need to win a majority of electoral votes, but only enough to force the election into the House of Representatives where being the second choice of both parties would be enough to win.

anything that promotes early mortality is actually not a problem, since it benefits society to kill off old people after they have finished their productive years and in the future will be living off savings (including retirement accounts and pensions), which with their demise can be repurposed for more useful things

alcohol, on the other hand, often kills people in their most productive years, which hurts society

yeshiva kids wanting to be “cool” like the goyim is a self-limiting problem, since if their big concern in life is to be like the goyim, they won’t stay in a “uncool” yeshiva environment

Just because someone is halachically Jewish (had a Jewish mother, father irrelevant), or is a person of obvious Jewish descent (e.g. has a Jewish surname and claims to be Jewish), does not make them “one of us”. For someone to be part of our community, i.e. the Jewish community, the minimum is that the person openly keep kashrus and Shabbos. It is silly to consider someone, such as the politician in question who does not even claim to keep Shabbos and kashrus, to be Jewish. Most people you will meet have Jewish ancestors (going back to ancient times), but that doesn’t mean we should look at them as Jews.

The airlines will probably refuse to carry them since an airline is liable if a passenger is denied entrance, and Ukraine has made clear that they don’t want hordes of tourists. In case you haven’t followed the news of what the goyim are up to, Russia invaded Ukraine last winter and they are having a full scale war including bombing of civilian targets in cities, and unless one is anxious to get to Olam ha-Ba as soon as possible, tourist in a war zone is somewhat ill advised.

If he is leaving yeshiva to start working, does that not suggest the he never worked while being in yeshiva. I recall having been a student many years ago, and as I recall it involved much work. If the young people these days do not perceive yeshiva (or schools in general, as this seems to be a broader problem) as being “work”, we have a serious problem.

1. The Russians may not be bluffing (also, Putin has painted himself into a corner and might be desperate).
2. One has no idea what the Russian targets will be of if they can hit targets at all (so even if they aim at New York, it might not be a total “wipe out” that a well aimed H-Bomb would cause). Based on what is happening in the Ukraine, Russian weapons may underperform, and western counter-weapons may exceed expectations.
3. The biggest problem if one survives an attack will be getting food, since New York City is totally dependent on supplies coming from elsewhere

Out standard for judging goyim is based on halacha. The Evangelicals do most of the seven (or eight if you count having children) mitsvos. Secularists take pride in killing inconvenient babies and all sorts of sexual perversions, (and lets not ask about the fairness of their courts, or disbelief in the Creator, or dreaming up new sorts of avodah zarah to believe in). For the most, I find the Evangelicals to be fairly mentsch-like, and their weird belief in their mistranslations to be a bit amusing.

A lot of small non-profits are “sort of ” sketchy in that the people running them are also deriving their parnassah from them. As long as people (donors in particular) understand this (e.g. a shtiebel in which the Rav runs the shul and gets most of his livelihood from donated money) it is as much an ethical problem as a legal problem since the government expects non-profits to be run by independent boards who hire staff (rather than by staff which recruits a friendly board).

This is common throughout society (not just Yidden). As long as the person running the non-profit is doing a good job providing services, and sticks to a modest lifestyle, there is no problem.

The alternative would be to have big, quasi-government, bureaucracies doing the same job, and they would probably be less efficient and less responsive to needs of users (just look as the “non-profit” hospitals with seven-figure salaries for managers).

Comparing the early 21st to the mid-20th century, Americans have less “hang ups” about non-WASP ethnicities of all types, and significantly greater toleration of religious groups other than the “mainline” Protestant churches. We are benefits of this increased diversity.

jackk: Restricting non-criminals from gun ownership (what the Democrats are proposing) will in no way hamper criminals. Similarly, disarming or abolishing the police (another focus of much of the Democratic policy) will not result disarming or abolishing criminals. American culture is a function of 400 years of immigration policies which recruited large number of criminals (flee arrest/execution in their homelands) and rebels fed up with aristocratic societies (such of those in Europe) in which the elites had a monopoly on power and used it to ripoff everyone else.

Gun control would probably work well in countries with a long tradition of people accepting their place in society and being content to be ruled over by an elite which has a monopoly on power including gun ownership. For the most part, those who wanted to be rid of being ruled over have long ago packed the bags for the “wild west” of American, and left their sheepish cousins behind.

The bottom line is you can’t undo 400 years of cultural evolution by legislative fiat, and the US should accept its gun culture as something that can’t be easily changed and concentrate on disarming criminals and mentally ill persons and follow the “red state” solution (usually ignored in left wing media) of allowing armed citizens to shoot would be mass killers before they can do much harm.

Criminals refuse to follow the gun control laws, therefore all that you do by”banning” guns is making it easier for the criminals to shoot non-criminals. All the Democratic proposals for banning guns include no mechanism to disarm criminals, and a law that de facto limits gun ownership to criminals is counterproductive.

If you make enough noise about Trump serving idols, he may be able to expand his based and start picking up a lot of WOKE idol-worshippers.

If the Palestinians were bright, they would have accepted the idea of a bi-national state with an Arab majority which the zionists agreed to it 100 years ago. They could have accepted a much small zionist state, with most of the Jerusalem in the Arab state when the zionists agreed to that 75 years ago. Those zionists who still believe there is Ribbono shel Olam should see this as evidence that Ha-Shem has gifted them with incompetent and not clever enemies.

ujm (RE; retirement age)

If your goal is to reduce inflation, and raising the retirement age would reduce the death rate, it is a classic double-edged sword. A higher retirement age would increase the work force, and encourage lower wages for everyone. However it the is a causal relationship between retirement and death, higher retirement age would both make old people better off economically (which would increase consumer spending) while at the same time living longer (and consuming more). Higher consumption increases demand which is inflationary.

The most effective way to fight inflation would be to raise taxes, deliberately try to force wages down, and to increase entry of additional workers (e.g. recruit immigration enough to make wages fall). Raising the retirement age, ending disability insurance and forcing under employed people (students, housewives, etc.) into the labor market would also increase the labor supply which will encourage lower wages. Falling wages reduces demand, which lowers prices.

While the above work as a matter of economics, they tend to get a failing grade in terms of sociology and political science, and are hard to implement in democratic (small D) societies.

If you fix prices at a lower level than determined by the law of supply and demand, you will either have shortage (c: Soviet Union, where goods were always inexpensive, but often unavailable) or you need to institute rationing (which tends to mean the well connected get what they need, and others go without).

An alternative is to reduce demand, such as by raising taxes, especially on the poor (since higher taxes on the rich would result in lower savings, rather than consumption). Regressive taxes such as payroll taxes, flat rate income taxes or sales tax would reduce demand to it would be in equilibrium with lower prices. Importing a large number of workers would help to lower wages, but the new workers would also be consumer which would increase demand. Lowering wages would be very useful but that is hard to do (cutting the minimum wage won’t help when employers need to offer wages above the minimum wage to recruit employees). Cutting disability and retirement benefits to force people into the job market would fail since the higher incomes that employment would give the returnees would increase demand. Not printing money would help the most, but that requires raising taxes or cutting benefits from government programs, which raises political problems (few taxpayers want to pay more, and receive less).

You can also increase supply through deregulation (of business hostile rules) and changing the tax structure to encourage more supply, as well lowering tariff and non-tariff trade barriers for imports.