העורך Editor

I copy-and-paste from the author himself:

One of the numerous challenges in writing my Torah Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom is that I am trying to make it suitable for as broad an audience as possible – including the charedi community. In cases where I run into an insoluble conflict between Chazal and science, I simply acknowledge the conflict (and I will write something in the introduction that outlines the range of approaches). But one animal requires me to point out that the Talmud Bavli misunderstood the Mishnah (although I am writing it more delicately than that!)

Many students of the Gemara have been perplexed by a mysterious creature called the bardelas, which appears in several places in Shas. People ask, is it a cheetah? A hyena? A polecat? (And, some people ask, what the heck is a polecat, anyway?) Even Tosafos admits to being perplexed.

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Quoting the NYT (?):

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members.

In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.

“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.

Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out.

“It felt like women were invisible,” said Mr. Muhazeb, 33. He added, “The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care.”

Yes, this relates to Israel.

Read it here…

Excerpts from another energetic Ann Coulter column:

Nowhere is the explosion of phony experts more annoying than in the bloated ranks of foreign policy hacks. It’s as if the world decided to solve the problem of “elite overproduction” by creating a full employment program for them as government bureaucrats and quotation providers.

Thus, a recent Times article accused Donald Trump of “Flying Blind” by stripping the government of high-quality intelligence experts, horrifyingly, just as he’s trying to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Instead of relying on experts, as other (obviously better) presidents have, Trump, the Times reports, “has taken a different approach …: He’s fired them.”

Meaning he will not be deferring to people whose sole objective in life is being quoted in the Times. Without losing accuracy, the cited authorities could all be identified as professors of Trump-Hating.

To prove what a nightmare Trump’s housecleaning is, the Times quotes the very sort of experts he’s sidelining. Evelyn N. Farkas at the McCain Institute in Washington, DC (very confidence-inspiring) said of the expert-less administration: “They’re flying blind without the expertise.” Amazingly, that’s just what the Times thought.

Because only true “expertise” could get us to spend $2.313 trillion over two decades to turn Afghanistan into the exact same country it was when we invaded — except with an extra $7.1 billion in U.S.-made weapons — or, in a mere three years, cost us $180 billion and tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians in order to give Vladimir Putin an even stronger hand than when he first invaded. (Hey, maybe we’re getting better at this!)

New definition of “expert” updated by me 10 seconds ago: “Someone who agrees with us, preferably who’s been repeatedly proved egregiously wrong.”

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As if Trump is nursing some ancient grudge, like the Greeks and the Turks, the Times describes the pink-slipped NSC experts as those who worked on the “nearly decade-old investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

Of course, the reason it’s a “decade-old” is that these nincompoops have been noodling almost nothing else for the past decade, rather than, say, wondering if Hamas had anything up its sleeve. It took them 10 years to prove that the Russians did not steal the 2016 election. It only took me about 20 minutes.

We all should hold a grudge against those guys.

Read the rest here…!