סיור וירטואלי בגן העופל

שרידי בית המקדש בגן העופל | געגועים ונקודות למחשבה | הרב ישראל גולדווסר | ‘מתחת לפני השטח’ 4

Aug 11, 2020

בגן העופל, הגן הארכיאולוגי הצמוד לכותל הדרומי ושערי חולדה ישנם ממצאים ארכיאולוגיים רבים ושרידים של בית המקדש השני. הרב ישראל גולדווסר לוקח אותנו לסיור וירטואלי בעקבות התגליות הארכיאולוגיות, השאלות שעלו והתשובות המשוערות. מסע רווי געגועים ומחשבות על הבית הגדול והקדוש, שיבנה במהרה בימינו.

כנס ‘מתחת לפני השטח’ הרביעי, מבית אגודת ‘מטמוני ארץ’ התקיים בשיתוף ‘צריך’ עיון וגופים נוספים בחודש אב תש”פ, בעקבות מגפת הקורונה מתכונת הכנס הועברה לשידור מקוון.
אהבתם? הרשמו לערוץ. לחצו על הפעמון 🔔 ותוכלו לקבל התראה על כל קובץ חדש שעולה.
אתם גם מוזמנים לכתוב לנו את דעתכם בתגובות 👇🏽 ולשתף 🔗 את הסרטון עם חברים ובני משפחה

לעוד תוכן איכותי היכנסו לאתר שלנו:
https://iyun.org.il/
דף הפייסבוק שלנו:
https://www.facebook.com/Tzarichiyun/
#ארכיאולוגיה_ויהדות #תורה_ומדע

מאתר יוטיוב, כאן.

An Ad for Allison Josephs’ Project Makom

(Anti-)Orthodox

The media always seems to miss the big story about Orthodox Jews.


I was turning the pages of a popular Jewish periodical when I got to the book review section. I inhaled deeply and thought, here we go again. The review focused on a new memoir about the author’s rejection of his Jewish religious upbringing and how he found happiness at last in a life liberated from the shackles of Orthodoxy.

I could hardly be surprised. With very few exceptions, the only memoirs published in recent years that have had the word “Orthodox” associated with them and that have captured significant media attention have been anti-Orthodox, written by people who left their communities in pain and sometimes, bitterness.

I have great sympathy for any individual who feels misunderstood and stifled in a life that feels inauthentic and constricting. The mission to discover who we are meant to be, and how best to fulfill our potential, can take years of soul-searching, as well as trial and error. I respect that the process can take us in varying directions.

However, as someone who chose a Torah life more than thirty years ago, and as a journalist attuned to the secular bias of most journalists, I was pained and increasingly frustrated each time I saw another such memoir reviewed or author interviewed. Even memoirists with no previous track record as writers – no “platform,” in the parlance of book PR – were able to capture prime real estate in some of the most elite media outlets. The Jewish Book Council, a major clearinghouse of new books of Jewish interest, reviewed nearly all of them, even though they are only able to review a small fraction of new Jewish book titles.

Continue reading…

From Aish.com, here.

Communism Lost, but Social Democracy Won

Myths of the Mixed Economy

The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen. The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the contributors—Keynesian, socialist, communist, and fascist—agreed with that point, including such luminaries as Sidney Hook, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.

But the book was honest. It linked Stalin and Keynes, fascism and the New Deal. The plans were not identical, of course, but all agreed on government “rationality” as versus the “chaos” of the free market.

Most of the authors advocated the “mixed economy,” Mises’s name for an admixture of capitalism and socialism. Such a combination, he showed, is necessarily unstable, and our own mixed economy is tilting towards statism, with such regulatory disasters in the last few years as the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the Civil Rights Act.

Today, no part of the economy is left untouched by the President’s budget and the swarm of regulatory agencies. Buttressed by most of the economics profession, the regulatory state today rules and ruins America. Communism lost, but social democracy won.

In the American mixed economy, it is the job of the planner to: ensure “full employment” (as federal policies create joblessness); encourage technological innovation (not through markets, but through subsidies); ensure a “fair” distribution of wealth (rewarding parasites and punishing the productive); manage international trade (though it needs no more management than domestic trade); and keep “public goods” out of private hands (even though public ownership must always be less efficient than private).

The planner has taboos as well. He must never mention private property, praise the coordinative function of prices, criticize pressure groups unless they’re anti-big-government, be cynical about the uses of power, call for a tax cut, or identify the real source of prosperity as the free market.

Charles Schultze, President Carter’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, adheres to these rules and taboos in his book and “guide to macroeconomics” . He sets out these rules for every policymaker to follow in the future.

In the entire work, he has not one good word to say about the market, private property, or the price system. His central assumption is that the government must manage the economy to prosperity. According to Schultze, we should believe that: the Federal Reserve protects the dollar, when our money has lost 94% of its value since the Fed was established; the Fed can cure business cycles, when every decade or so, it causes a serious economic setback; the government can create full employment, even as it causes unemployment with such welfare measures as the minimum wage and civil rights; the government can develop new technologies, even though bureaucracy is a proven technology killer; we can trust the government to improve our standard of living, though our standard of living has fallen for nearly twenty years; the government protects us from monopolistic capitalists, even while government creates and sustains destructive monopolies from the post office to the schools; regulatory agencies do protect us from dirty air, unsafe drugs, and lead poisoning, while everywhere government is biggest, from Moscow to D.C., life is dirty and unsafe.

Naturally, mainstream economists—the useful idiots of the interventionist state—advise presidents on economic policy. Today, these economic planners see their primary task as “keeping supply and demand in balance.” That doesn’t mean allowing the market to work, of course, but rather pushing and releasing buttons on the planning machine.

There are two views on how to do this, one mainstream and one rival. The mainstream view says that a decrease in overall demand causes economic downturns, and so demand should be increased by government spending and money creation. This is supposed to make up for the deficiencies of the private sector.

The rival view says declines are caused by a fall in overall supply, caused by any number of factors, including an irrational fear of investment. So, boosting overall demand through spending or inflation only exacerbates the troubles.

The second view has better policy implications, but both are misguided. They assumed that there is something called overall demand conglomerating the values of consumers and producers alike. This obscures the real economy.

The obscurantist aggregations don’t stop with “supply” and “demand.” The planners also discuss such categories as capital and investment as if they were homogeneous, representing these very diverse groupings as single letters in their macroeconomic models.

Both views also assume that government managers are smarter than the market. Imagine that you had to plan the household finances of your next-door neighbor, with little or no information about their income, tastes, and talents, all of which can and do change. Yet the planners have been trying to do this for decades, to the entire economy.

To explain their way out of this problem, the planners separate the “micro” economy from the “macro” and claim the decisions of individuals have nothing to do with the overall picture. It’s true that no one individual can, for example, change the net rate of savings in the economy, but there would be no net rate of savings without individual decisions.

It is out of the millions of decisions of real people that the economy is created, and it is the job of the economist to understand and explain how that happens, not to encumber it.

The planners of the mixed economy like to talk about supply and demand as if they needed the government to coordinate them. Yet supply and demand describe the natural pattern of economic behavior in the absence of government interference.

If there is a chicken plague, the price of eggs will soar. The consumer doesn’t have to read the “Chicken Health Update” to know that he should economize on eggs. The price tells him that, and he can then look for substitutes.

Conversely, if Frank Perdue genetically engineers a superchicken that lays many more eggs than the normal bird, the price of eggs will plummet. But the consumer doesn’t need to read “Techno-Poultry Weekly” to know that. He need only look at the price.

In a free market, there is no need for planners to bring supply and demand into line. The daily transactions of millions of consumers do so, leavened by the risk-bearing entrepreneurs. It is the mixed economy itself that creates the demand for economic planners to run it. Massive deficits destabilize the economy, leading to calls for government to stabilize it.

The “entitlement” programs are interventions as well. Government spending may increase the demand for some goods and services, but it drains resources from the private economy just as surely as taxes. Yet the “opportunity costs” of confiscating these resources never factor into the planners’ models.

How much does the mixed economy cost us? We can’t know. Despite the well-intentioned attempts of some economists to figure it out, no one can know the effects of technologies never created; firms never started; people never hired; others hired by government fiat; central bank–created recessions; and higher prices from taxes, regulations, and government-generated demand. We can only know that the effect is gigantic, harmful, and growing.

Government intervention can be criticized on a number of other grounds that the mixed-economy planners do not mention:

First, politicians and bureaucrats are self-interested. In the private sector, self-interest works to the common good. In the public sector, it means expansion of the government’s budget and power, which attacks the common good.

Second, the market can sometimes anticipate the planners, negating the effects of government action. If the Federal Reserve increases the money supply, the market can take account of the likely inflationary effects and prices will rise sooner and higher than the managers thought.

Third, intervention increases the incentive to evade the law, thereby enlarging the less-efficient and societally unfortunate underground economy.

Fourth, intervention distorts the price system and the interest rate, which work to coordinate the use of resources. Price controls and regulations cause misallocation, and Fed-lowered interest rates cause businessmen to make bad investments.

Fifth, intervention undermines the division of labor, preventing people from doing the tasks they are most suited for because regulation prevents employers from hiring on merit.

If the mixed economy is such a disaster, why do we have one? Because it enables the well-connected to loot the rest of us in a social democracy disguised as “democratic capitalism.” To get away with the looting, the mixed-economy state attacks all countervailing institutions: families, neighborhoods, businesses, private schools, and charitable and religious organizations. The result is the barbarism and increasing poverty we see all around us.

The Planned Society didn’t mention that, but it is the inevitable outcome of what it recommended, and what the U.S. government practiced in 1937, and today.

[Originally published September 14, 2006.]

From LRC, here.

COVID Origins: Our Gatekeepers Remain but the Gates Are Down

Earlier by Ann Coulter: “I Will Not Be Scienced”—Experts Wrong, Covid Could Have Come From Wuhan Lab After All

The sudden dramatic collapse of the elite-enforced Narrative that Covid-19 could not possibly have originated in a Chinese laboratory is one of the most extraordinary developments in modern political history [That Didn’t Age Well: Wuhan Propaganda From MSM Laid Bareby Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, May 27, 2021]. Equally dramatic but much less well-known: the earlier collapse of the elite Narrative that, in the words of CNN Medical Talking Head Dr. Sanjay Gupta [Tweet him] Covid-19 “doesn’t discriminate based on race. We must learn three chilling lessons from this scandal: (1) The authorities cannot trusted; (2) The “Main Stream” media is only “mainstream” because of the extent to which it will limit its questioning of these authorities; (3) Only trusted members of the Ruling Class may question the authorities.

I have a personal stake in this. In February 2020, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow killed a column I wrote about the evidence that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory and speculating that it might have been a bioweapon. Brimelow’s motive was frankly fear: Silicon Valley’s Tech Totalitarians were on the rampage against any deviationism, especially from the elite-enforced line that Covid-19 originated naturally. Twitter had just banned the huge ZeroHedge account for running a story about Covid’s possible lab origin [Twitter bans Zero Hedge after it posts coronavirus conspiracy theory, by Kate Gibson, CBS News, February 3, 2020].. (ZeroHedge was subsequently mysteriously restored). Facebook had just banned VDARE.com for obviously fallacious reasons, part of its campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Brimelow just didn’t want to take the risk, especially since the origins of the disease was not central to VDARE.com Immigration Disaster/ National Question focus.

But I was denied a scoop.

When Covid-19 began to become a major news issue in early 2020, nobody really knew what was going on. All that we could do was speculate intelligently, based on the available evidence (which of course did not include data about racial incidence, suppressed by our race-denying Ruling Class).

I must confess that I made the mistake at first of thinking that, as with previous outbreaks of similar diseases like SARS and MERS, Covid-19 would be unlikely to have much an impact outside East Asia. That was a reasonable hypothesis. But it was not correct.

And I, like everybody else who wrote about Covid, was under the impression that it was a “fact” that Covid had started in a Chinese market. It definitely hadn’t leaked from a Chinese lab that experiments with creating dangerous diseases. There was no way that could so, because the authorities told us that it was wild, absurd conspiracy theory.

Of course, that was apparently not correct either. It now seems that “authorities”—such as Dr Anthony Fauci and the entire Ruling Class—were wrong in asserting as indisputable fact that the virus came from a Chinese “wet market” and definitely did not leak from a Wuhan laboratory. And wrong again in the way they acted upon their certainty,

Remember, when the lab theory came to light, it had to be condemned by all right-thinking people. As Stephen L. Miller has written in The Spectator, it was a denounced as a “nut-job idea…first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media” [Don’t let the media get away with U-turning on the lab leak theoryMay 24, 2021]. It was utterly condemned in the pages of the leading medical journal The Lancet, where a group of senior scientists proclaimed that they “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife” [Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19by Charles Calisher et al., February 19, 2020]. The following month, in the journal Nature Medicine, another group of scientists claimed: “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 [the latest name for Covid-19) emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus” [The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, by Kristian Anderson et al.March 17, 2020].

In the panic of the time, with people confronted with the possibility of a serious plague, they craved certainty. And here they were being offered it by pillars of the Medical Establishment. Only “nut jobs” and “Far Right” types, were going to question this, obviously.

This is because, as is surely clear now that we are cancelling mathematics as “racist” [Reality check: mathematics is not racist, by Mark Ronan, The Critic, March 21, 2021], “Far Right” increasingly means anybody of genuinely questioning disposition…anybody who is prepared to put facts and logic over emotion.

“Fact Checks” by Leftist news organs were unambiguous that the “lab theory” was complete nonsense; dangerous nonsense at that. Now, they’ve had a conversion to the new Party line, such that it is “suddenly credible” [Ted Cruz mocks Washington Post as ‘clowns’ after fact-check declares Wuhan lab leak theory ‘suddenly’ credible, by David Rutz, Fox News, May 25, 2021].

And of course Facebook and YouTube banned users from mentioning the theory—and, incredibly, were still doing so three days ago[Why does Facebook still ban users from saying Covid was man-made even as Dr Fauci casts doubt on virus origins? And Italian journalist is censored by YouTube for claiming it was created in Wuhan lab, by Chris Pleasance, Mail Online, May 24, 2021]. They reversed course as of May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:, but you can still see their earlier ban on about.fb.com:

In many ways, how this change of mind took place is even more frightening.

It appears to me that there were two factors involved. Firstly, it gradually became clearer to people, especially scientists, that there was too much about the Narrative that didn’t make sense. And secondly, the science journalist Nicholas Wade went public, at the beginning of May, with a very detailed article in which he persuasively argued that a lab leak was the best theory and in which he highlighted the gaping holes in the earlier “fact checked facts” [The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 5, 2021].

Wade’s essay was so cogent, that it was very difficult for people to argue with it. However, the Regime Media is now asserting the “sudden” new facts based on the same kind of appeal to authority as they had previously.

Nicholas Wade has an important niche for himself as being just about part of the “Ruling Class,” having spent 30 years on the staff of the New York Times. His 2014 book on the ever-“controversial” issue of race, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human Historymanaged to tread that all-important fine line between the science and accepting Multiculturalist dogmas. Thus, the book was, on the one hand, denounced by many ideologue scientists as “racist” but, on the other, positively reviewed in The Wall Street Journal [by Charles Murray, May 2, 2014 and other respectable journals.

And it appears that due to Wade being just about part of the Ruling Class, he has been able to get away with his “medical misinformation” because, as the Regime Media reason and even Left-wing scientists reason, he’s just about “on our side” so we are prepared to listen to him, in a way that we would not to a scientist who was more of an outsider.

Thus, the Overton Window has shifted and Main Stream Media as well as the mainstream scientific authorities are shown up as what they are: people who are obsessed with power, control and the spreading of Leftist ideology; because, after all, the lab theory was “racist.”

Now, what about the idea, still unacceptable, that Covid-19 was deliberately leaked, a kind of biological warfare? Or that, even if it leaked accidently, it was originally developed as part of a biological warfare program?

The Regime Media will still condemn this as absolutely wrong and unsayable.

They must not be allowed to get away with it again.

From UNZ Review, here.

מקרבנות הפמניזם: אחוזי אבות גרושים המתאבדים

תוך חודש: ארבעה גברים גרושים או בהליכי גירושין התאבדו

בחודש האחרון התאבדו ארבעה אבות בתהליכי גירושין ואבות גרושים שנוכרו מילדיהם. ד”ר רונית דרור על התופעה המושתקת של המדינה.

שתיקה מסוכנת (צילום: Kristina Flour on Unsplash)

בשבועות האחרונים בכל פעם שאני פותחת את הפייסבוק אני מתוייגת בפוסט על עוד אבא שהתאבד. אני מקבלת הודעות על משפחות שרוצות לשוחח איתי. השבוע פנה אליי אח של אבא נוסף שסיפר לי שהם רק קמו משבעה. הוא השאיר אחריו שני ילדים. בשבוע שעבר סיפרה לי חברה, עובדת סוציאלית, על בן משפחתה שהתאבד. לפני שבועיים התאבד אב מהישוב אלעד. לפני פחות מחודש התאבדו שני אבות מהדרום. אחד מבאר שבע והשני מישוב קטן שלא ארצה לחשוף. לכל אחד מהאבות האלו ילדים שנותרו יתומים. כל אחד מהאבות האלה הוא בן למשפחה נורמטיבית וחמה. כולם אנשים מלח הארץ. נקודה.

מדובר בסוד האפל והנורא של החברה הישראלית היום. סוד גלוי לרבים שלא נוקפים אצבע על מנת למנוע אותו. מערכות שלמות משתפות פעולה עם נשים שבידן כוח בלתי סביר על מנת להתעלל בבני זוגן בהליכי גירושין קשים מנשוא. ואכן, בישראל מדווחים גברים רבים כי הם עוברים את תהליך הגירושין כמסלול ייסורים בלתי נסבל המגובה בחוקים פוגעניים וחד צדדיים.

מספר ושיעור מתאבדים ל- 000,100 לפי מגדר, בשנים 2010-2014 (מכון מחקר ומידע, הכנסת)

החל מתלונות שווא במשטרה שבדרך כלל גורמות להרחקה מיידית של האב מהילדים ומהבית מבלי לבדוק את נכונות או אמיתות הדברים. צווי הרחקה לשבוע במעמד צד אחד הניתנים בבית המשפט וצווי הגנה להרחקה לשלושה חודשים ויותר. חקירות. מעצרים. התמודדות עם האשמות על אלימות/פגיעות מיניות בבתי משפט. סכומי מזונות בלתי סבירים שלא מאפשרים לרבים את היכולת לכלכל את עצמם ו/או להשתקם מהגירושין. תביעות בהוצאה לפועל הכוללות סנקציות של מעצרים, שלילת רישיון נהיגה, עיכובי יציאה מהארץ ועוד.

תיוג מסוכן

גבר שהיה אב נורמטיבי לחלוטין רגע לפני שהתגרש, הופך באחת מסוכן, חסר מסוגלות הורית ועבריין. שלא לדבר על פגיעה בכבודם האישי והמקצועי וההתמודדות עם התפיסה החדשה של מי הם כגברים, אבות, בני זוג ובכלל כאזרחים בחברה. מצב זה הנחווה כהתמודדות עם מציאות בלתי אפשרית גורם לרבים להתמודד באופן של ‘הילחם או ברח’ בהתאם למשאבים האישיים שלהם. אבות הבורחים ומתנתקים מילדיהם נשפטים על חוסר מסוגלות ואי לקיחת אחריות בעוד שאבות הנלחמים על ילדיהם מואשמים כמסוכנים ואלימים.

:מספר ושיעור גברים מתאבדים ל- 000,100 איש לפי מצב אישי בשנים 2010-2014 (מכון מחקר ומידע, הכנסת)

ואכן, בעשור האחרון, מאז נחשפתי לפגיעה הנובעת מהטיה מגדרית בוטה זו, ראיתי שמי שבורח ובוחר בהתאבדות הוא זה שנלחם על ילדיו ונותק מהם. נתוני מחקרים מצביעים על כך שגברים מתאבדים פי ארבעה מאשר נשים. וגברים גרושים מתאבדים פי שבעה מאשר גברים נשואים, אך מדובר בהערכת חסר כי חלקם רשומים עדיין כנשואים, פרודים או כרווקים, מאחר שהם חיו עם בת-זוג או שמדובר בגניבת זרע, שאף היא תופעה שהחלה להיות נפוצה במחוזותינו.

הדחקה ושתיקה

ההתעלמות מהתופעה הזו היא הנוראה מכולן. ההימנעות של התקשורת מפרסום התופעה ומביצוע תחקירים בנושא, היא מחדל. השתיקה של המערכות וההסכמה שילדים יוותרו יתומים בשל התאבדות אבות היא בלתי נסבלת. המשך החוקים הדרקוניים נגד גברים דוגמת חוק האיזוק האלקטרוני שחברות הכנסת נלחמות עליו, הוא אסון. האילמות של כל המערכות האמונות לדאגה על הציבור כולו, החל במשרד הרווחה, בריאות, החוק והמשפט עד התקשורת שממלאה את פיה מים כשמדובר בגברים מהווה פשע נגד האנושות.

השבוע תוייגתי גם בפוסט על אמא שהתאבדה בעקבות ניכור הורי וטיפול לקוי של המערכת. וכן, שלא יהיה ספק לאיש. יש קשר ישיר בחוסר המקצועיות בטיפול באלימות במשפחה על כל סוגייה ובעיקר בחוסר האמפתיה והאנושיות שאיבדנו עבור גברים, שללא ספק החל פוגע גם בנשים.

ד״ר רונית דרור היא פעילה למען שוויון מגדרי ומטפלת בנכי צה״ל דרך משרד הביטחון.

מאתר מידה, כאן.