העורך Editor

From Wikipedia:

The yeshiva made headlines when one of its teachers and assistant principal, Joel (Yehuda) Kolko, was charged in 2006 with… Six former students also filed suit against the yeshiva, alleging the school administrators knew about Kolko’s molestation of students for decades, but sought to cover it up and intimidate students who spoke out. Kolko later pleaded guilty to two lesser counts of child endangerment and was sentenced to three years’ probation, later left the school, and died in November 2020. The suit also alleged that school principal Lipa Margulies waged “a campaign of intimidation, concealment and misrepresentations designed to prevent victims from filing lawsuits.” Four of the lawsuits were dismissed for being filed beyond the then five year statute of limitations. In October, 2016 it was reported that the school had reached a $2.1 million settlement on the two remaining cases.

Thanks to Yerachmiel Lopin for bringing this to my attention!

Needless to add, the Rasha was eulogized in Yeshiva World News, Matzav, Hamodia, Bechadrei, JDN, and perhaps more to come. (Not to mention being warmly greeted in The Purgatory Post.)

Rabbi Yair Hoffman over at VIN News tries a hilarious whitewash:

There were those, even among Rav Margulies’s many admirers, who felt that he was too overzealous in his vision to ensure the reputation and continuity of the remarkable Torah institutions he had built, and to disbelieve accounts of grave dangers in his institutions. And, sometimes, other Gedolim perceive the true depth of such dangers – whereas others do not. Rav Avigdor Miller zt”l had argued with Rabbi Margulis on such a matter. Boruch Hashem, however, there were wise Baal HaBatim involved in his Yeshiva who took the necessary steps to ensure that Rav Margulies’s vision continue, while still ensuring that, to some extent, those who were harmed or had tried sounding an alarm were vindicated.

The efforts of these dedicated Baal Habatim and family members made sure that Rav Margulies work and lifetime of dedication to Torah and its continuity, not only remain alive but thrive and prosper.

Independent Yerachmiel Lopin puts it slightly differently:

Rabbonim going back to Rav Avigdor Miller begged Lipa to fire Kolko. Some askanim were even willing to buy out Kolko and set him up to make money in some way that did not involve children. But Lipa refused. Over and over, he fought back using all sorts of dirty tricks. He kept Kolko employed until the Brooklyn DA finally charged Kolko with abuse. Lipa is guilty of the retzichah of neshomos for thirty years.

For more, see this.

באבד רשעים רנה

Brilliant article on Spiked here…

Some excerpts to give a taste:

Everything the government has got right on Covid-19 in the past 12 months has happened when it ignored ‘the science’. If the modellers hadn’t made such fools of themselves in the summer and autumn of 2021 they might have been taken more seriously by the government in the winter.

…

This was wilful blindness. By mid-December, everything we needed to know about Omicron had been explained to us by doctors in South Africa over and over again. They told us that it was much less severe. They told us to expect a large number of ‘incidental’ cases involving people who were in hospital with Covid but were not in hospital because of Covid. They told us to expect more children to be affected but with only very mild symptoms. They told us that Omicron patients rarely needed to be put on ventilation. They told us that there were relatively few deaths despite high levels of infection. All of this is now apparent in the UK’s healthcare data.

…

Predicting human behaviour in a pandemic is not easy, but most of the models don’t even try. If the modellers had noticed the international football tournament taking place in mid-summer they might have done a better job of predicting when the July spike in cases would end. If they noticed that the pubs are always quiet in January they might have made a better stab of predicting what is happening now.

Read the rest here…

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Easy Way to Become a Best Selling Author

January 09, 2019

If you’re stuck coming up with an idea for a book that can make you a best selling author, you’ll want to check this out. See how writing short little books with fewer than five hundred words can help you create Amazon and New York Times Best Sellers

So you know there is a future in writing books. But you just can’t seem to come up with a genre or book concept that you think you can finish. Plus you don’t have the time or patience to write an eighty thousand word novel.

Don’t despair. There is an entire genre of best-selling books that have fewer than five hundred words, and are just thirty-two pages in length.

Here’s an example:

Theodore Dalrymple starts an article on TakiMag:

The British government has managed to spend approximately $50 billion on a system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19. So far, the average citizen has been tested five times. Yet mysteriously, the British mortality rate is either above, or very similar to, that of countries that have tested and traced much less often. A parliamentary commission reported that there was no evidence that the whole system had had any beneficial effect whatever.

This was a very hasty and naive conclusion. It assumed, for example, that the real object of the system was to prevent illness and save lives. But if one puts aside this facile prejudice, one may come to the conclusion that it was an enormous success, for—in now traditional fashion—it shoveled enormous quantities of public money into private pockets, no doubt seriously enriching large numbers of people. If one assumes that the purpose of the expenditure was to create or reward a clientele class, not only does everything become clear, but it changes one’s opinion as to whether or not the whole thing was a success—in its own terms, of course.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened, nor will it be the last. For example, the government of Mr. Blair attempted to unify all the medical records of the country’s National Health Service, and spent more than $16 billion doing so, without a single thing to show for it—from the totally irrelevant point of view of streamlined medical records. From the point of view of a clientelistic relationship with a class of technocrats and miners of the public purse, though, for whom nothing succeeds like failure, it was a wonderful success. It would be interesting to know just how many millionaires were made by the whole scheme.

Read the rest here…