Month: September 2017 – י״ז באלול תשע״ז

When a wild creature, a common product of the government’s welfare and public education system, enters some decent working man’s home, rapes and murders his wife and daughters, steals his goods, and destroys his home, if, by some extraordinary circumstance, the rapist is then caught, he is put in prison, where he is fed, sheltered, and clothed for the rest of his life with money extorted from the victim. That is called government justice.

Source: Someone.

Some Jewish scholars have fatal “Spectatoritis” – they don’t do any real work (neither for nor against; neither with nor without profit), so they don’t know anything beyond the activity of book reading (ergonomics?). Nor do they recognize their knowledge might be lacking.

We learn not only from reading, but also from doing. And when your books are wrong, they must be corrected by experience. Hyehudi has already mentioned this idea, but it bears repeating.

Here’s an impressive Allied forces simple sabotage manual written for the average citizen under especially hostile regimes. For strictly historical interest, of course! I read many of these manuals, and this one specimen is one of the least awful, practically, and in terms of writing style.

Note: The technology has changed since, but the social dynamics of humans have not.

Here are the various file formats for selection from Gutenberg. Here is the plain-text version, and here is the one with the library stamps and vintage fonts (self-sabotaged, really).

I can hypothetically think of so many hypothetical current, local, and halachically licit applications to the adages within (hypothetically speaking, of course!).

It’s not as though Jews in Israel are living under a hostile regime, of course, perish the very thought! (And that’s why I can’t supply any internal hyperlinks.)

Perhaps you can relate.

Sometimes a thought bugs me again and again until I recite it. Then, having done its job (?), the thought leaves, and I get some mental relief.

Whenever I think of Donald Trump, he reminds me of Robert Moses.

Done.