Those who are against doing anything but bombing Iran will like this one.
(GENEVA) — Secretary of State John Kerry was helicoptered to a Swiss hospital Sunday after a bike crash outside of Geneva, where he had been holding nuclear talks with Iran’s foreign minister.
I don’t mind talking with Iran. I just don’t like John Kerry. May he live a long life, far away from any sphere of power.
I learned at HaMivtar for a few months. I was in the same general circles that Riskin is involved with. Chovevei Torah, Hartman, all institutions I like. All private.
I’m not a big fan of Riskin’s pandering to Christians, but he can do what he wants.
I’m not even following why Riskin is being attacked now, and have no idea why particularly now, Bennett the Saint is calling Riskin for a “hearing”. Because the field-goal-mouthed pansy wants to sound cool I guess.
You know, this stuff used to matter to me, but I don’t care anymore. A bunch of legalists arguing about who is stretching halachic reasoning by how far and whether it’s legitimate or not…interests me about as much as the mating habits of microbes that reproduce by binary fission.
You have a state-funded Rabbi like Riskin who says things some people love, and some people hate, and because he’s funded by everybody’s taxes, the people who don’t like him think he’s the worst thing since the cambrian extinction. And the people who love him think that the other people are crazy wacknut zealots.
Just fire him and let private people who like him pay for his services if they feel like it.
And then fire every other state funded rabbi and the entire state rabbinate and let them all duke it out as to who makes a living Rabbi-ing and who doesn’t. Then make sure none of them can get any state stipends for learning or writing or doing anything “religious”. Those Rabbis that don’t make it can pick fruit. Or sweep gutters for all I care.
The back and forth over how you justify getting around the Agunah problem, what halachic logic you use, and if you use the wrong one you’ll create a bunch of mamzers and the Jewish people will be doomed forever…it’s the religious equivalent of the War on Terror fearmongering nonsensical drivel.
Everyone is stealing from everyone and we’re worried about what? The dangers of Riskin’s halachic justifications for whatever?
I’ll go out on a limb and say God doesn’t care. The discussion is important in and of itself as a continuation of halachic discourse. But the end result is just an accident of history. It doesn’t matter who wins. Privatize the whole thing, and women who want to get a get from recalcitrant husbands through some loophole will get it. And those who think the loophole is invalid won’t marry them. And those that think it’s fine will. And then everyone will forget about it and move on. The system always survives, so everyone chill out.
I have just been informed that Ariel Ronis, the guy that committed suicide after being called a racist on Facebook, is the same Shabak agent who interrogated Yigal Amir. One of many I’m sure.
Needless to say, I am not a fan of Shabak and I think it’s a total myth that they protect anybody from anything. All they do is stir hornets nests and torture people, both Arabs and Jews.
I do not know if Ronis ever personally tortured anybody, but it wouldn’t surprise me. That kind of thing would lead to the emotional instability required to kill yourself over a Facebook post.
As for Yigal Amir and Yitzhak Rabin, I am completely against violence directed against the State for practical reasons, especially killing a Head of State. Let whatever justice is coming to them be handled by the Beis Din Shel Ma’alah as they say, and let man stay completely out of it.
That said, Rabin was a murderer of Holocaust survivors and I do not mourn his death. Among many other obvious sins, that was the worst one.
I was a kid when Yigal Amir pulled the trigger and I remember the whole blitz of statist propaganda that followed. How Jews should all love one another unconditionally, how killing the leader of a State was the worst thing to ever happen to the Jewish people since Hitler, but even worse because Hitler at least wasn’t a Jew. And how the State of Israel is basically god, and how Yigal Amir is the devil incarnate and Rabin is an angel with wings and a cigarette preaching peace and love and garbage.
Yeah, well, tell that to the Altalena Holocaust survivors who jumped off the ship after Ben Gurion bombed it, and then Rabin personally shot the helpless survivors as they were swimming to shore.
“דפקנו אותם על האוניה ודפקנו אותם שוחים במים”
“We shot them on the boat and we shot them while they were swimming in the water.”
Anyway, I don’t know what Ronis is guilty of, if anything, so who knows if this was coming to him or not.
Conclusion: Against violence, but I don’t mourn either Ronis’s death or Rabin’s. I do not support what Yigal Amir did, but I do not consider Yigal Amir evil because of what he did. Stupid, yes. Killing Rabin only served to strengthen the Rabin mythos and Oslo propaganda machine. In terms of value judgements though, I abstain.
Is that legal? I guess if it’s not, I’ll just say Rabin was awesome and Amir is evil, Kol Od BaLevav Pnima, Oslo Oslo Peace Peace Peace, and killing holocaust survivors was necessary because if Rabin hadn’t killed them while swimming on shore, there would be two armies now and we’d be in constant civil war all the time hell on Earth etc. thank God for the State monopoly on violence.
Everybody discriminates. I would only marry a Jewish girl, and I did. I don’t consider non Jews inferior to Jews, as some Jews do, but I don’t care if some Jews do, as long as they leave the “inferior” people alone. I prefer living around English speaking people, because that is my mother tongue, and I discriminate based on language. A linguist? No, but you get the point. I don’t hang out with Ethiopian Jews, not because I don’t like them, but I just don’t, because most people hang out with people who are similar to them.
There are racists who don’t hate other races at all, like me, and the vast majority of other people on the planet. Then there are racists that do hate other races, but don’t commit violence against other races. I find that objectionable (the hatred part), but it’s no different than Jews thinking non Jews are inferior. Then there are racists who commit violence against other races because they hate other races. Those people are evil.
Some people try to hang out with people who are not similar to them and that’s fine, too. Most people don’t do that though.
I hang around people that are similar to me. Very few people are similar to me in my thinking, but what can you do. I don’t hang out with Arabs either. Or Druze. Or Moroccan Jews. I just don’t. Because I, like almost everyone else on the planet, am a racist.
I never considered marrying a man, because I’m a sexist, and heterosexual. My wife does the laundry. I take out the garbage, because I think that’s the man’s job. I just took out the diaper wipe garbage and the actual garbage. My wife doesn’t do that.
I never considered marrying an old woman, because I’m ageist. I don’t talk to old women very often. Most young people hang out with people their age. Most old people hang out with old people too. They’re just as ageist as I am. Most middle aged people hang out with middle aged people. And singles hang out together because they discriminate against married people. They don’t hate them. They just prefer hanging out with singles. Perhaps they are trying to marry one of them.
And married people don’t hang out with singles much because they discriminate against single people. No, they don’t hate single people. They just discriminate against them. I’m a racist, sexist, ageist guy who discriminates against singles, too. I don’t find old women attractive. I don’t find men attractive. I live in a community of married people, almost no singles.
Got it?
The difference between me and other people who claim not to be ageist, racist, or sexist, and who generally think that not being these things is important, is that I actually advocate against economic violence against these people. I am against the minimum wage that keeps blacks out of work. I am against compulsory government schooling that keeps children of poor black families forcibly unemployed. White families too, but blacks are more hurt by it. I am against welfare the keeps the poor dependent. I am against drug laws enforced mostly against black people.
The people that generally claim to not be racist, sexist, or ageist, these people economically abuse minorities, women, and old people by advocating for forced maternity leave, minimum wages, and a money-printing monopoly that destroys the savings of the aged who can no longer earn a steady income and lose everything to inflation.
So anyway, there was this guy, government worker, Ariel Ronis, who killed himself last week after a black woman accused him of racism for kicking her out of his office after she complained of racism against her because workers at some government office wouldn’t let her go into some line for women with small kids, but allegedly let the white women with small white kids in.
She wrote something on Facebook to that effect, and 6,000 people all concerned about racism shared it. So the guy killed himself. Because he couldn’t bear being thought of as a racist.
(Even though he hung out with white people and didn’t marry a black woman and never lived among Ethiopians. “Not being racist” was so important to him that he killed himself just because people thought he was racist. He was, but not for the reasons people thought he was. He just didn’t hate other races.)
His side of the story is that she wasn’t let in the short line for women with kids because she was being obnoxious and trying to cut in the middle of the line. Then she barged into his office and started yelling racism, so he kicked her out.
The worst part of this story, the absolute worst part is that this woman, after indirectly causing the death of some poor nebuch government worker, hasn’t learned a damn thing. This is what she wrote after she heard Ronis killed himself.
This morning I woke up to one of the worst pieces of news I had ever heard. I am dreadfully sorry for the loss of life. For years I have experienced discrimination in Israel. On the only occasion in which I told my story a man was hurt. There is no one more sorry than me. If I could (go back), I would have remained silent this time as well.
A man was “hurt”? A man was HURT?
But you crazy sick human being. He wasn’t hurt. He didn’t get a booboo.
He bleeping killed himself.
You’re not legally responsible. God will decide if you are morally responsible. But the least you can do, the least you can do. For the love of God. Is say it.
Your people have made for themselves a god of gold. Say it.
Ariel Ronis killed himself. Say it.
She still claims, after the guy killed himself in shame, that he was racist, by which she meant Ronis hated black people. The sick assertion that she’s “dreadfully sorry” and that she should have remained silent, silent about what? Silent about the hatred that obviously was hurled at her by Ronis because she is black. That’s what she’s saying. Not that she was wrong, that she was not actually being kept out of the line because she was black, but rather because she was obnoxious. She should have remained silent, she says.
The lesson, according to her, isn’t “Don’t assume everyone hates you because you’re black, because that can get people killed.”
The lesson is, “When someone obviously hates you because you’re black, shut up about it, because telling people about it can motivate that hateful person to “be hurt”. And we don’t want to “hurt” people, even if they are white supremacist assholes.
I hate fake apologies. But this one takes the cake.
What a lesson. I’m throwing my hands up.
If anyone accuses me of racism, I will just point them to this post, rather than kill myself. I’m guilty as charged. I’m preemptively saving myself from the shame.
The “anti Zionist” “State-hating” State-welfare-enthusiast hypocrites of Shas and UTJ were able to get Netanyahu to not only raise the child stipend welfare back up to its previous high, but forced a retroactive payment covering all the missed welfare payments from when it was reduced.
This is another proof of how and why the State can never, ever shrink. It can only keep growing until the parasite kills the host. Until there is nothing left to steal. Like what’s happening in Greece. It’s about to get much worse there. Default is now 11 days away, and when they start printing Drachmas, every Greek citizen will lose all of his savings.
So even when a government can temporarily shrink itself, not only does it grow again, but the actual shrinking that it undertook is reversed as well.
As a result, I, who am lucky enough to have 3 kids, will be getting 1,680 shekels in retroactive welfare payments from the state.
Already I get 420 a month, which I give to Moshe Feiglin and Zehut. I also get a מענק עבודה of something like 2,000 shekels every three months or so (seemingly, I’ve only gotten it twice) which I never asked for nor filled out a form to get, which I also give to Zehut.
I’ve always wanted to simply burn this money and return the inflation to the people. I’ve physically gone into the Bituach Leumi office here in Karnei Shomron and actually asked them to stop paying me. They said that’s impossible. So I closed my bank account, opened a new one, and didn’t tell them about it, hoping they would stop. But the payments just kept coming.
The main reason I haven’t burned any money yet, but give it away to who I think has the best chance of stopping this, is that the main advantage of destroying the money will be as a public statement. I’d rather give it away than destroy it privately. But with this retroactive payment coming my way, I’m now seriously considering making a video of me destroying 1,680 shekels and putting it on YouTube.
But since that may get me in trouble, I may not do it. I never challenge the State head on like that. It’s too dangerous.
Any suggestions? How illegal is it to burn money?
I’m not sure what inspired me to write this now, but for whatever reason I think it may be important to get down in writing. Amy Lee is the lead singer of Evanescence, a goth-rock-metal band. She is my favorite musician, no qualifiers. (Don’t give me the Kol Isha treatment please.)
Here’s why.
10) She’s a normal person. She’s not a drug addict. She doesn’t come off as if she’s from another planet like Lady Gaga, or “above all of you” like most other famous successful rock stars. She doesn’t try to market herself or bifurcate her personality into public and private beyond what normal people do, or put on some fake persona for her fans. She is who she is, WYSIWYG, as they say in acronymese.
9) She doesn’t have a promiscuous reputation like, say, Madonna. She’s married with a kid and a normal family life, or at least it sounds that way. She took 5 years off of music to be with her family and live a normal life.
8) She plays up the goth thing with satanic imagery and makeup, but it’s only a flavor, not an all-encompassing creepy Marilyn Manson disgusting mess. She dresses modestly on stage and in her music videos, not on a Haredi level of course, but there’s usually a long skirt involved, bushy and really cool that she designs herself.
7) She never has gross provocative dance moves like Britney Spears or Rihanna or that type (first yecch names that came to mind) who gyrate their hips and breasts at you to try and distract you from their boring unoriginal music. In fact, she openly detests fake pop stars.
6) She doesn’t write songs about sex, partying, drugs, or other cliches. She writes songs with deep feeling, emotional complexity, hope, despair, fear, death, exultation, happiness, the extremes of human existence we all have a hard time dealing with from time to time.
5) Even when she seems to be overdoing it, displaying too much emotion on the border of being fake about it, it still seems real. She can title a song “My Heart is Broken” which would sound overly melodramatic for any other musician and be almost too deep into her own performance but she can still pull it off somehow. See after 2:40 in this song:
4) Her voice sometimes cracks on stage when she can’t quite hit the high notes. She almost never performs perfectly when live, and you can tell she’s not trying to. She’s trying to connect with her audience and just enjoy her own music, rather than put on a performance to show you how amazingly awesome she is.
3) She can get a whole audience of troubled-looking goth teenagers to sing their hearts out at a concert in what looks like a cathartic explosion, as if she were their mother teaching them how to deal with their own negative emotions.
2) She’s beautiful, but not perfectly beautiful. She’s still got a bit of a chubby face, and depending on how it’s angled you can make out a small double chin.
That’s it. There is no number one. This isn’t really a top 10. You’ve been fooled. So let’s end it with my favorite Evanescence song and favorite Amy Lee performance: Going Under, this time polished.
“In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
Assar Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)
It’s all the same. There is never any change. It’s all the same total bullshit. The only reason people ever though Kahlon was different from all the other disgusting slime was that the media, licensed and directed by the State, decided it would be a good idea to paint a picture as if someone were slightly different in order to get people interested in granting the State more legitimacy.
Kahlon is a genius! He’ll stand up for the middle class! He’ll bring down housing prices! He’ll save everything! This is just Netanyahu’s way of getting 10 more seats in his stupid game. Kahlon is Likud, and he left it to get some more votes from the left for Bibi. That’s all this ever was. There is NO DIFFERENCE between Kahlon and Dov Henin or Bennett or Ahmed Tibi.
So his idea, just like I said it was going to be, is rent control. That’s the greatest idea that comes to any politician’s mind. Don’t let people build houses. Don’t give up your thieving control of the unhomesteaded land supply. Don’t help increase supply by getting out of the freaking way.
Just pass a law saying that higher prices are illegal. Why not pass a law that says everyone needs to have a yacht. Then they can sell it for a house. Why not pass a law that nobody is allowed to die.
We can see how well rent control is doing in Venezuela, where people there can’t even get basic goods while the government prints money to death and forbids prices from rising.
I already wrote a post about Tzipi Livni and Pretty Boy Lapid’s idea for bringing down housing prices. Guess what it was. Rent control. But if Kahlon says the same exact thing, he’s a freaking genius!
You know, when I first got into the whole libertarian crowd, and started seeing claims all over the place discrediting the media and claiming it was all rigged and worthless, I kind of poo-poohed it. These are just tinfoil hat types.
I already wrote about rent control here. What it does is destroy property, as landlords cannot charge enough to maintain the property, so they abandon it, and it becomes unliveable, which exacerbates the housing crisis.
It really is a simple issue. If there’s not enough of something, you MAKE MORE OF IT SO PRICE GOES DOWN.
But the government’s solution is tojust FORBID THE PRICE FROM GOING UP
What a vicious little nothing creature Moshe Kahlon is.
WOW! I go to 321gold.com last week to check the spot price. And I see this article about something called BitGold. To open an account for free, just click on that link or the link in the menu bar above. Apparently, they are a gold-backed Paypal service where you can buy gold with bank transfer, credit card, bitcoin, debit card, whatever you want, and store your gold in one of 6 vaults around the world.
You can redeem your gold physically for a $25 shipping fee. That’s it. The minimum delivery is 10 grams. That’s about $400, which is the smallest redemption minimum I’ve ever heard of.
The only fees are a 1% commission on each transaction, so if you buy $500 worth of gold, they get $5 on the buy, and $5 on the sell.
This is essentially a 100% backed gold standard bank account. That’s what it is. If it catches on, it will be huge.
And it is not open to US residents. (UPDATE: NOW OPEN TO US RESIDENTS) I signed up for an account and uploaded my Israeli driver’s license. Then they asked for my cell phone, and sent me a code by text to make sure I was physically in Israel. I now have a BitGold account and can buy physical gold down to a 10 gram cube and have it sent as payment to anyone else with a BitGold account, or have it physically delivered to me here in Israel.
This is just awesome. I literally shed tears of joy when I saw this.
And their stock, XAU on the Toronto Exchange, is going totally bonkers. Up 45% just today.
I wish them all the luck in the world, and soon I will be one of their competitors!
On May 15 Greece has to “roll over” €1.4B in debt, which means sell more debt to pay debt, or borrow money to pay money back. They can do that because the banks keep buying more T-Bills. What they can’t do is pay the IMF anymore. €305M on June 5. €343 a week later. There is no more money left in the IMF monopoly account at the IMF to pay the IMF back with. There’s nothing left.
It looks like it’s June 5th.
Yesterday’s gold flag faded after the morning, but this one is holding.
Bonds down. Stocks down. Dollar down.
Gold up $21.
Something’s stirring in the pot.
The Jewish Libertarian 