This is really fascinating and exciting. Facebook has refused to show up to an IRS summons on one of its tax avoidance strategies. The IRS has sent them summonses demanding access to its books. Facebook is so far standing its ground. Zuckerberg, if you ever had any guts now is the time to use them.
Stand up to these bastards and do not break. You are powerful enough that you don’t even have to go to jail. You can just threaten to shut down the site so all the world’s politicians can no longer get likes for their miserable pages. Even the IRS has a godforsaken Facebook page.
I don’t believe you’ll keep fighting but I implore you to do so. Don’t give in. You’re more powerful than they are. If you stand up to them you will be my hero. If you have to temporarily shut down the second most popular site on the internet, DO IT. Just don’t answer them. Atlas Shrugged these sick thieves and SHUT IT DOWN.
I used to like this guy. Not because of anything of substance he ever did, but because he was entertaining and less of an open jerk than Floyd Mayweather. After today though, I am absolutely convinced that as big of a schmuck that Mayweather is, he’s a mensch compared to Pacquiao.
The president of the Philippines, an insane psychopathic killing machine named Rodrigo Duterte, is engaged in a mass murder campaign of drug addict and dealers, encouraging ordinary Filipinos to kill them on sight and promising to give pardons to anyone who does so. He sees himself as the next Idi Amin, in his own words. Duterte absolutely has the potential to be the next Pol Pot and kill half the Philippines if he decides he feels like it. So far at least 300 people have been killed and 60,000 have surrendered. Pacquiao is now a Filipino Senator who theoretically has the popularity to stop this but he supports it.
Manny Pacquiao is a Bible-thumping hypocritical bastard boxer turned politician who is now an accessory to murder. Maybe Mayweather will give him another shot at fighting him and Mayweather can give him the same treatment that Ivan Drago gave to Apollo Creed.
If they ever fight again, I’ll be rooting for Mayweather to give him a severe beating.
I’m selling the $190 call option position in Sarepta (SRPT) for a 60% gain. Check the model portfolio at the menu bar. It’s always easy to Monday morning quarterback and say we should have bought more, but high risk options are for small positions only. If you’re lucky you can get a big gain on a small sum, which is what we got here.
I’m color blind. I’ve never known what that really meant until yesterday, when I put on a pair of Enchroma glasses for the color blind and discovered what it’s like to see full color, or at least fuller color than I usually see. Being color blind doesn’t mean I don’t see color. I don’t live in a black and white movie. It means I see color as if everything was put through 100 laundry cycles of washing and drying. I can “identify” colors, but I can’t really “see” them.
When everything is dull and faded, faded red and faded green look pretty similar. If I try really hard and squint and contemplate what I’m seeing really carefully, I can perhaps make out a difference between red and green. But it’s too little of a difference to matter really. It was nothing more than a trivia question to me, the difference between red and green. I didn’t understand why anyone cared about red or green, since they were both almost the same. I could tell the difference and pass one of those “what color is this?” exams on the fly if I tried really hard, but I didn’t understand why people cared about the difference at all.
Then I said שהחיינו, the blessing you say for something exciting and new, and the blessing פוקח עיוורים (Blessed are you God King of the Universe etc. who gives sight to the blind) because it fit the occasion, and put on the glasses in a new flower garden with fresh soil that just happened to be planted in the synagogue front yard recently by my house. (Shout out to the Nussbacher family for planting it.) At first I saw no difference. Then the glasses kicked in a little bit after about 20 seconds or so and the first thing I noticed was that the soil was RED. Not laundered and faded red like I used to see, but RED. Then I noticed purple flowers, because purple has red in it. I knew that intellectually, but didn’t really know it experientially.
The REDness of the RED made the green stand out more as GREEN.
But none of this made me cry. It was really cool. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed by two things. First was last night, when my wife started going through her Facebook profile pictures while I was wearing the Enchroma glasses. These were pictures of memories I actually have in my brain, sitting there in storage. Real moments I remember with faded overlaundered “colors” I saw as a color blind person. Moments with my kids climbing and playing in parks and such. Now I saw these pictures with actual color, vivid extreme color, and my brain was forced back into these memories and then forced to rewrite the entire memory in color.
Every time I had a memory that Natasha reminded me of involving color, I was forced back into that memory to rewrite it entirely in terms of the picture I have of that memory in my head. It was like the scene from the movie The Butterfly Effect when Ashton Kutcher goes back in time to change one event in the past in order to change the course of his life, and then goes back to the present and his brain has to rewrite all the new memories that have happened subsequently just in a few seconds and it causes a seizure.
Now, my experience was not as intense as that. I wasn’t bleeding from the nose or anything and I didn’t wake up without limbs. I didn’t seize either, thankfully. But each time I went back in time in my head I could physically feel my brain cycling through memories very quickly and coloring them, overlaying a totally new dimension to each memory and it made the actual matter of my brain hurt. It was a physical headache quantifiable as pressure rather than pain, stemming from the very center of my head and radiating out as memories were literally rewritten. I could feel neurons firing and reorganizing themselves. Maybe I was just imagining it but I thought I could feel it. Not only the color of the memories was rewired but the associated emotions of the memories as well.
Brain scientists really need to wire up the brain of a color blind person using Enchroma for the first time while being shown pictures of his past and then monitor the brain scan. It’s gotta be a crazy thing. I felt so tired after that because doing all that rewiring that I could not stop, was totally exhausting. I teared up from that but I didn’t totally cry.
I did, however, completely break down the next day, which is today, this morning July 19th 2016, for about 5 seconds. I’m writing this at 12:30am Israel time and this happened at about 8:30am.
I walk into my daughter’s gan (camp, day care) and I see some of the arts and crafts the kids made. They were extremely colorful, very beautiful. The ganenet (teacher, supervisor) just happened to be cutting up really neon color paper as well. I mean neon color that I would have seen as bright even without my new glasses. With the glasses they looked totally radioactive to me. It was so bright I could barely stand it but still couldn’t stop looking at it.
Then I turned back to the arts and crafts the kids made, and my daughter (I’m tearing up right now thinking about it) who sees full color showed me the thing she made. It was an ice cream like thing with semi-spheres glued on to paper and a cup thing below, with glitter and sparkles and all that.
Tzivia showed me what she had made, and I could actually see the colors of it clearly. It wasn’t the colors themselves that broke me, but the fact that seeing it, I understood what colors she liked and why she chose the colors she chose in making that thing above. She wasn’t just picking colors at random and putting them all together which is what I would have done as a kid. She picked specific colors that reflected what she liked, what she enjoyed looking at, and put them all together because they matched, and made a complete picture of coherent color. And suddenly I saw how those colors fit with her personality in some kind of extra-dimensional fit of her identity that I could never see before.
It was like a whole new dimension of my daughter’s personality and existence opened up to me in a split second and I understood and I couldn’t take it. What she was doing when she made this thing, why she picked each color and why she placed one next to the other. It wasn’t the colors themselves, but my understanding of her and the fact that I just had no idea, that is what had me break down crying in front of a bunch of 5 year old kids. That a whole new dimension of her personality just flooded me instantly, too much for one brain to take without overload. I could see her picking the matching colors to make it and why.
Just crazy. I had to leave the room and calm down.
It’s like when someone says they love a certain movie but you’ve never seen the movie, so you don’t really understand why they love the movie or what about the movie moved them in whatever way. But then you see the movie and you understand more about the person because you understand what movies the person likes.
If you’re color blind, either a deutan or a protan, get these glasses. For God’s sake get the glasses. Really – for His sake, He made the world, He made our minds, which discovered how to make these glasses, so you owe it to Him to see the world as He made it. Or at least closer to how He made it than you can currently see.
Or just get them for yourself if the whole religious thing isn’t your thing. It makes waking up every day that much more exciting.
At this point I feel like the android Data in that scene from Star Trek First Contact when he is going to attack the Borg together with Captain Picard. Data is feeling a new emotion, anxiety, from his new emotion chip and he’s describing it to Picard. Picard suggests that he deactivate his emotion chip for now. Data does. Picard says, “Data, there are times that I envy you.”
If ever I want to dull it down a bit and not be distracted so much by all the vibrant insane colors, I can just take off the glasses and go back to my laundered and weathered dull reality to rest a bit and relax. Other people have to live with all that vivid color all the time and can’t turn it off. But I can.
Haha. It’s nice to be able to turn off your senses at will.
Today was a very good lesson on how the government media operates. Two soldiers were killed today in the Golan. The headlines are all “Accident” and “Husam Wanted a Military Career” and “Two Soldiers Killed After Grenade Explodes In Golan”
What is being buried deep within the article is this:
תחקיר ראשוני העלה כי סמוך לשעה 7:10 הגיע ג’יפ הסיור הממוגן ממשימות פתיחת ציר שגרתית בגבול עם סוריה, לקרבת המוצב שאותו חוצה כל מבקר במרגלות החרמון. טפאש והחיילים שברכב ניהלו שיחה, ובשלב מסוים, כשהג’יפ עצר צמוד למוצב, הנהג יצא ממנו, אחז רימון רסס בידו וצעד לכיוון דלת המפקד. הוא הקיף את חזית הג’יפ. כאשר דלת המפקד נפתחה, טפאש הנהג חזר לאחור ואז התפוצץ הרימון.
Translated:
An initial investigation stated that around 7:10am on Sunday morning, the military patrol jeep came from a routine brush cleaning operation on the border with Syria. The jeep approached an IDF outpost on the foothills of Mt. Hebron. Tafash and the soldiers in the jeep talked about something, and at some point there was the an altercation that ensued between the driver Tafash and the soldiers on the force. At a certain point, as the jeep got close to the outpost, the driver got out of the jeep, pulled the pin out of a fragmentation grenade, and walked towards the commander’s door. He then went to the front of the jeep, and when the commander’s door opened, Tafash the driver pushed his way inside and released the grenade.
The translation is from here with my bold additions, but even so it is not an exact translation even though both are Ynet and certain details are even different, so I don’t know which source to trust. Is the driver Tafash, or is Tafash someone else? The news is doing its best to cover up what happened here to make it look like some poor guy stepped on a grenade. What happened was murder and it is what can happen when you have a militarized culture where everyone is taken by force to “serve”.
Not a single article will dare question the draft so they have to bury what actually happened.
If Tafash is the driver, the news is certainly trying to hide it and bury it deep within the article and obfuscate so as not to kill the coexistence narrative between Druze and Jews. This is exactly how the media controls the national dialogue. When whatever happened is discovered beyond doubt, look for it to be in a tiny non-article somewhere in the classifieds.
Actually, I just found a more detailed account at Jpost, which Israelis don’t read. It seems Tafash was the driver, the murdered soldier was trying to stop him and stood between him and the Jeep. So, it seems the loan soldier Shlomo Rindenow may have saved the other soldiers from this Druze driver who was attempting to murder them all. Maybe this is what happened. We don’t know because the army keeps saying “we do not understand what happened.
A senior IDF source provided preliminary details of the incident.
According to the source’s account, an IDF David light armored vehicle, carrying soldiers and a commander from the 601 battalion – a part of the Combat Engineers Brigade – pulled over near the Majdal checkpoint position. The jeep came to a stop a meter away from the position’s concrete wall.
“At this stage, a conversation began, and the driver exited the vehicle, holding the grenade,” the source said. The driver, a reservist from the northern Druse village of Beit Jann, had previously served as a career military driver, and recently returned to service. As the driver walked around the front of the vehicle, holding the grenade, the lone soldier, who was part of the checkpoint personnel, stood between the jeep and the wall.
“We do not understand the circumstances of this event yet,” the source said. “The commander of the David vehicle then opened his door. At this time, the blast occurred.” The explosion killed the driver holding the grenade, and the lone soldier standing between the jeep and the wall. The commander in the vehicle sustained serious injuries. Two additional soldiers were lightly wounded by shrapnel.
Nobody “died for their country” today.
Reminds me of Gilad Shalit. The story of his kidnapping is so pathetic it’ll make you cringe. He did absolutely nothing right during the whole ordeal, and it would not have happened if he were not drafted by force.
These people died for the draft. Did one murder the other? Where they both victims of a third? Does anyone want to report what actually happened and put it in a headline??
Let’s be fair to this guy for a minute. He’s the up and coming head Rabbi of Tzahal. In that position, he’ll be doing precisely nothing, which is something I deeply respect out of government employees (seriously, no joke). But in any case, I don’t want this blog to turn into those sorts of blogs that look for opportunities to bash Rabbis for having quotes taken out of context just for the sake of making fun of some political side or other. I hate all political sides so I shouldn’t single one out.
Rabbis are generally so incredibly weak in terms of moral authority and ability to enforce it these days that anything they say is almost always constricted to the 4 amos of theoretical Halacha and never taken out into the real world. I have no doubt that this guy issued his teshuva (answer) on raping women during wartime in a theoretical halachic construct that has nothing to do with reality. This contrasts heavily with Islamic fatwas calling even homosexual rape during interrogations permissible according to Islamic Sharia. In that case, I’m pretty sure the Imams are quite serious and intend for their sharia psak to be followed in reality. Anyone think I’m wrong?
Rabbis saying things like this are saying it in a purely academic context. There are 10,000 qualifications that would never allow the raping of an Arab woman for the purpose of spicing up soldier morale. For example, it can only be done to an idolator, not a monotheist, so that automatically disqualifies Muslims from being raped. It can only be done during a halachic war (Reshus or Mitzva anyone know?) which does not happen these days because we have politician wars rather than Sanhedrin directed wars. Being a professional Rabbi means building all these walls specifically so that any psak outside of a purely ritualistic framework has zero application to the world we actually live in. Which itself illustrates the rather sad state of Judaism as we know it today.
So what Rabbi Karim Non Abdul Jabbar was saying is that in the theoretical non-existent case of Eshes Yefas Toar (the pretty captive woman in wartime) from Deuteronomy, he holds that the case allows rape before the 30 day waiting period that the Torah mandates before marrying the woman. I think this is an incorrect reading, but we should recognize the statement for what it is – stupidity rather than evil. Not a Rabbi giving his hechsher (kosher stamp) to actual wholesale gang rape during wartime, but a Rabbi crudely intellectually masturbating in public for purely academic reasons wondering what would theoretically move a scoreboard in heaven and what won’t, in his own mental construction of what triggers the score.
So as a shoutout to the AIPAC fans and those that insist that Jews are more moral than Muslims on issues of micro-morality such as this here’s my mainstream statement: More muslim soldiers would rape Jewish women (and Muslim women and Muslim men as well) in wartime than Jewish men would rape muslim women in wartime. That much I do think is true.
But it doesn’t change the fact that when it comes to macro-morality, as in what Jews are doing with their army as a whole in the first place and whose land they’re on, Jews have serious problems.
Here’s Rav Karim’s teshuva on the rape issue from 4 years ago where he pretty much says that rape during wartime nowadays is completely ussur, which of course is the right answer to the question.
As for my questions for the Rabbi:
At what point is one justified in disobeying the orders of his superiors during wartime
If some soldier in the real actual world were really actually raping a woman, am I permitted/commanded to stop him?
If a Jewish soldier is expelling a Jew from his home, am I allowed to stop that soldier short of killing him?
If I believe the military occupation is wrong and against the Torah, do I still have to serve in the army?
Obviously, Rav Karim cannot answer these questions, because if he did he’d be fired, and instead of doing nothing, he’d have to actually do something. Great and powerful Rabbis. Fleh. Go and crawl back under your theoretical halachic rock that doesn’t exist. The light of the real world is too bright for you to deal with.
As is my wont, when checking the mainstream news, which I only do for safety reasons in case there is an attack or advisory, I only read headlines. Apparently now, some Rabbi guy with a beard who looks very Jewish and who is some sort of next in line head Rabbi Honcho of the government’s army, has said that it’s halachically permissible to rape an Arab woman to keep up soldier morale.
I wonder why people care what some government Rabbi who collects a tax paycheck for doing nothing says about anything. He has no authority even if he becomes “Chief Rabbi” of the army. He’s paid my money to preach about whatever. He would never be able to implement his rape teshuva, so why not just make him chief Rabbi of the world? Why not the solar system? Tell him he has the ability over every planet to preach whatever he wants. He can even paskin to the Oort Cloud as far as I care.
As long as he’s in a position where he can’t do anything or force anything and he’s only נהנה מהגזל then he’s doing less damage that he otherwise would if he were in a position of power. I say take all the Rabbis with state power over people’s lives and make them all Chief Rabbis of the Known Universe. We can divide the universe into however many sections and give each of them quadrillions of miles of space to Rabbinify. Pay them from the tax pile to paskin to space so long as they have no power to do anything or force anything on any human being on this planet and I’m all for it.
Whoever This Rabbi Is for Chief Rabbi of the Omegaquadrant of the Milky Way. Congratulations Rabbi. Keep blithering. If you have to take my money, take it for doing nothing and just saying whatever it is you want to say.
When the average indoctrinated government curriculum (private or public school educated) person thinks of cops or or other government-trained human weapons, he immediately thinks of “public service”. I have no doubt that many people become government-trained killers because they think it is noble. No doubt some of what they do, minus the thievery in order to do it, is noble. Many cops protect people. Many soldiers protect people. But all cops and all soldiers without exception are sworn to serve politicians, because they are sworn to uphold the laws that these politicians pass, whether they are good laws or horrible laws. Most government trained armies think they are fulfilling some kind of duty by upholding evil laws.
Let’s keep in mind that the murderer of the cops in Dallas was a government-trained killer. When you send people to war for a cause that is not 100% obviously defensively just, it causes people to lose their minds. Let us also never forget that the amount of suicides among Vietnam veterans is higher than the actual death toll of US soldiers in Vietnam.
Send people out to murder other human beings and they will kill themselves. And sometimes others before they kill themselves, as is the case with this Dallas shooter.
No doubt if the government monopolized the food sector and forbade anyone from supplying food privately, as is the case in Canada regarding healthcare and as it almost was in the US had Hillarycare passed in the mid 90’s, then government food suppliers would think of themselves as feeding the hungry and fulfilling their “civic duty”. When in truth, all they are doing is forcing themselves on an entire sector and causing many to starve. The fact that they exist means that private security forces cannot. If government monopolized food, millions would die. This is exactly what happened in China under Mao Zedung’s reign, and 45 million people died in unutterably horrible ways. Thank God the government only monopolizes police and army and lets the food sector be dealt with through the free market (minus farm subsidies and various government food regulations).
Government monopolizes domestic security through police forces, and monopolizes foreign security through its army of trained killers. Every so often these people who make up these monopoly forces save lives. But most of the time they are simply out harassing people and making everyone’s lives miserable. Marijuana possession, selling narcotics, setting up a business without a license, tax evasion, whatever non-crime it happens to be, they will be there to draw a gun and kill you if they have to.
Concession statement: One should always pay taxes l’chumra and only set up businesses with a license and never deal drugs if they care about what little freedom they have and their very lives. Doing any of these things can get you killed by the police.
We are taught that it is wrong to judge government-trained killers because they are simply “enforcers”. In Israel we have government-trained killers expelling Jews and Arabs from their homes and anyone who fights back is called suicidal. Antiwar people are accused of not “supporting the troops” when it is specifically the antiwar people who support the troops because we don’t want any of them killing or being killed. The war hawks care little about human life so long as their amorphous goals are achieved. What those are, they war hawks themselves couldn’t even tell you beyond “end terror”. Good luck with that.
I lend my moral support to Black Lives Matter only insofar as they attempt to disrupt police activity without destroying private property or hurting private citizens or even hurting government agents who are not an immediate danger to them. Killing cops or soldiers is morally outrageous so long as the cop or soldier poses no immediate physical threat to your life.
The problem is, this Black Lives Matter movement is fueled by anger with no reason behind it. They think the problem is white people. If they were in charge, they’d go on a white murder spree, so keep your distance from them. But still I want to let them know that I understand what has set them off, as shallow and unreasoned as they are.
There is no war of white against black. There is no war of rich against poor. There are two classes of people, and two classes only. There are the tax payers, and the tax receivers. The war is always between those two classes.
White lives matter too. All lives matter. Even the lives of government-trained killers. If Black Lives Matter wants to be relevant, they need to adopt nonviolent measures immediately. Set a citizen’s siege of police headquarters. Surround it on all sides, old school war style. Do not actively resist arrest. Have replacements come and fill in for those arrested. Overwhelm the prison system until there is nowhere else they can put you. Do not fight back unless your life is in immediate danger.
Bring lots of food and water for staying power. If tanks come, treat them like Tank Man in Tianenman Square. The US government has still not sunk to the depths of firing on unarmed civilian protests, thank God.
Notice that whenever riots break out, the police do nothing to protect private property, as is their supposed job. They only protect their own buildings and leave everyone else to the dogs.
Everyone’s lives matter. Its us vs government, and all we need to do is fight it nonviolently and we will win. Because the taxpayers vastly outnumber the tax receivers. The minute that tax receivers outnumber taxpayers, and that day is fast approaching, society collapses.
I dream of the day when it becomes shameful to join the police or the army. It should be embarrassing, like going on welfare. When the truth is that going on welfare is more honorable than becoming a government policemen or soldier, because at least welfare recipients don’t actively harass you. They only collect their loot.
Every parent in Israel whose 18 year old is kidnapped into the army should feel shame, not pride. The only exception is if the 18 year old joins the army and swears to himself never to uphold any unjust law or war, even at the expense of prison.
I will personally do everything in my power to discourage my kids from joining the army or doing national service, what they call שירות לאומי here. God forbid my kids should ever be government agents.
I recently and proudly exclaimed to people close to me that I refuse to serve in Miluim, the Israeli army reserve. I was almost taken for a week of wasted time but it was cancelled two days before I was to be taken. I proudly said that I would have gone to prison rather than followed orders from people forcing me out of the honorable routine of MY life, to serve the routine of detestable politicians.
What I got was boos.
But the joke is on them. If I stop working and stop making money, there would be no money to support the army they love. Perhaps I should be honored for refusing, because that way I will make more money and more resources will go to the army that supposedly protects everyone from everything.
Back in 1967, in response to the outbreak of the Six Day War, Dr. Murray Rothbard penned an article entitled “War Guilt in the Middle East“. In the article, Rothbard denies Israel’s right to exist and accuses it of starting an unjust war. We, obviously, disagree.
Now, 50 years later, we his students have written a rebuttal, just published in The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law. It is coauthored by Alan Futerman, Dr. Walter Block, and me.
Here it is. Click the link below and it will download the PDF.
Those following the investment game, gold is up again this morning as is silver but not very strongly. I’m setting an automatic stop (automated sell order) for the model portfolio on USLV at $25.30 and NUGT at $150. That means if these levels get broken we lock in our imaginary gains.
The Jewish Libertarian 