Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - YouTube

Worth a watch.  He says basically watch out for the 'experts.' Sometimes they are called intellectuals. Problem with the state of israel is that the entire place - a dictatorship - is run by bureaucrats, who see themselves as intellectuals, as nearly all Jews do.

"There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs." Thomas Sowell

We are in the midst now of how many total lockdowns? Is it 3? We have been in a general one for so long I don't know where one begins and one ends. It's been nearly a year that we have been required to suffocate under these dirty rags they call masks, even if one is alone in a park at 5 AM. Nobody within sight. Are you going to give COVID to a tree? Do we really need social distancing AND masks?

Right now there are rules against having guests in one's home. Did Soviet Russia engage in tyranny like that? Both neighbors on my floor are in bidud (quarantine) for the 3rd time. Nobody is sick. My entire building has been in bidud. Nobody is sick. These people need to work. I know people that are utterly out of cash. And they are all going nuts, 2 adults and 8 kids cooped up in a tiny apartment.

“You can rigidly enforce only those laws that most people believe to be good laws, that is, laws that proscribe actions that they would avoid even in the absence of laws.”
― Milton Friedman, Why Government Is the Problem

Tonight I am attending a Zoom wedding. You know what happens at a Zoom wedding? There aren't separate rooms for men and women. It's all mixed together. You can't look away. You stare at a screen where half the faces are female. How do you look away from half a screen. The men and the women all chat with each other on screen.

I know of another wedding where they are in a quandary about what to do. It had been planned a year ago. I heard of a school bus driver that yesterday was given a 5,000 NIS fine for driving kids to school. That's some society, you impose ridiculously oversized fines for the high crime of helping children to get some schooling. And guess what, the wicked Knesset is planning to raise the fines. I guess as long as you are bankrupting everybody, might as well go all the way. 

And why? After a year of this so-called pandemic, the scamdemic, even with the bogus data, less than half as many people have died from COVID (really most are just with exposure to COVID and not infected) than die EVERY YEAR from cigarette smoking in israel. Anybody in a panic about the 8,000 a year that die from smoking? Or the 800 from second hand smoke?

Yesterday, the Israel National News reported that former American baseball player Hank Aaron died from COVID at age 86. Actually, he was interviewed two weeks ago as he received a vaccination and he sounded just fine. Said he was fine. No coughing, no trouble breathing. What do you mean he died of COVID? I can't even find any articles saying he ever had COVID, ie. took a PCR test. He more likely died from the vaccination. Listing deaths as COVID is just this thing to do. It's an assumption fed by propaganda. If you sneeze from pollen, people assume it was a COVID sneeze. We are in the midst of a global insanity.

Here's Mr. Aaron getting his COVID shot two weeks ago. Not a cough or a sneeze. Sounded very good for an 86 year old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg9pacnG-TA

I know somebody who went to the post-office yesterday and saw a woman getting screamed at by a barbaric israeli male (redundant expression?) for not having her mask on her nose. (I saw a different barbaric israeli male yelling at a woman about garbage cans two weeks ago.) Then the police came to the PO because some moser called them on account of somebody not wearing a mask. Can you imagine losing your olam haba over that? You think these rags on your face do anything other than make you sick from breathing in your own dirty carbon dioxide? It's theater. Try to get the police to stop bicycles racing down the sidewalk. No interest in that, but masks? Oh, that's serious.

Thomas Sowell talks about how intellectuals have never had more power in history. And intellectuals are not held accountable from the consequences of their influence. 

Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World - Full Video

"I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise." William F. Buckley

the entire world

"The true and complete Redemption depends on “bringing the entire world to recognize the sovereignty of G-d.” Every person must hasten this, and help prepare the world to serve G-d as one.

Although one might think his interaction with non-Jews is mainly for economic purposes, a Jew’s real intention should be to guide and inspire them to fulfill their Seven Noahide Laws.

The Seven Noahide Laws are not simply legal matters – they are principles which precede and give meaning to all other laws. Laws only apply to people who are living; once someone is alive, he can be told to follow the law. But true “living” means being connected to Torah, which is “our life,” and observing its Mitzvos, by which “we live”.

So, first and foremost, one must see to it that his non-Jewish neighbor is alive!"

7th Lubavitcher Rebbe

from Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel

The Mahiril says that Elul is a time to remove thorns from the ground so seeds can be planted. Many do teshuvah on Yom Kippur but repeat their sins afterwards because they didn’t uproot the shoresh of the sins. (You need to remove the thorns to do that.)

Around 40 years ago, Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel was at a hotel in Eretz Yisroel that was owned by the Agudah. Since they had given rooms half price to yeshivaleit, the hotel had become a meeting place for Roshei Yeshiva, Rabbanim, and yeshiva talmidim.

Since it was an Agudah hotel, they gave out free copies of Hamodia, the Agudah’s newspaper. One man, a Polish Jew, didn’t pick it up off the table. He didn’t seem like a kanoi so the Rav asked him about this.

The man said he was raised in the city of Lodz and studied at the local  yeshiva. He spent his days learning but was a curious young man and would read many of the non-frum newspapers, enjoying in particular a “well-written” column by an anti-religious communist. He started to lose interest in learning and eventually stopped putting on tefillin. By the time the Nazis arrived in Lodz, he was in his words a “goy gamur.”

Determined to join the Soviet paradise, he slipped across the border. Rather than find a Gan Eden as he hoped, he found a gehennom. The Russian communists, led by Stalin, despised Jews and tortured and killed the Jewish communists. Only this one young man and a friend survived from the group that had crossed the border. 

After the war, he came to Eretz Yisroel where he did teshuvah and became observant again. He vowed never again to touch a newspaper.

This is an example of uprooting the sin. 

We see this dynamic again in the Gemara where a bas kol offers Yerovam ben Nevat, the wicked king of the northern kingdom of Israel, the chance to do teshuvah and walk with Hashem, Dovid, and Yerovam in Gan Eden. Yerovam asked, who will be first? When told Dovid would be first, he rejected the offer.

How could he reject such an offer? A daf earlier we had learned that Yerovam merited to be king because he rebuked Shlomo HaMelech for marrying the daughter of Pharaoh. When the time for regel arrived, he reasoned that he would have to stand in the Beis HaMikdash while Shlomo’s son Rechaivm would sit, as only one person could sit on the throne. This would make him look like an eved. Rather than have that happen, he prevented people from traveling to Yerushalayim and set up idols to worship instead.

The shoresh of his sins was the desire to be b’rosh, in command. The Gemara is telling us he could do teshuva for all his sins, but as long as the shoresh remained, the teshuva would not last.

Says the Rosh Yeshiva, we must all examine ourselves to locate the shorashim that need to be uprooted.

scholarship is

 Professor Isadore Twersky, cited his teacher, Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson, who said that:

“Scholarship is not what you happen to know about a subject; scholarship is what there is to know about that subject.”

Not contingent upon land

"Israel is to be fully constituted as a nation before it receives a land of its own. Its existence as a nation is therefore not contingent upon whether it possess as land of its own. Indeed, whether or not it will possess a land of its own will depend on whether it will faithfully discharge its task as nation.” 

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Shemos 6:8