Monday, February 28, 2022

Over the past week — and over the past generation — Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.


How Putin Destroyed the Three Myths of America’s Global Order

 

Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Putin — every century gets dictators who strip away pleasant illusions about where the world is headed.

 

21st-century man.

Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.

Over the past week — and over the past generation — Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.

Putin isn’t the first individual to give the “civilized world” a reality check. In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace. In the 20th century, a collection of fascist and communist leaders showed how rapidly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression. More recently, no one has smashed the intellectual pieties of the post-Cold War era as thoroughly as Putin.

We shouldn’t be surprised: In 2007, as Western intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the liberal international order, Putin warned that he was about to start rolling that order back. In a scorching speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the spread of liberal values and American influence. He declared that Russia would not forever live with a system that constrained its influence and threatened its increasingly illiberal regime.

He wasn’t kidding. At home and abroad, Putin’s policies have assailed three core tenets of post-Cold War optimism about the trajectory of global affairs.

The first was a sunny assumption about the inevitability of democracy’s advance. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton talked of a world where democracy and free markets would “know no borders.” In 2005, President George W. Bush touted the ambition of “ending tyranny in our world.” Putin had other ideas.

He reversed Russia’s unfinished democratic experiment and constructed a personalistic autocracy. To see Putin publicly humiliate his own intelligence chief on television last week was to realize that the world’s vastest country, with one of its two largest nuclear arsenals, is now the fiefdom of a single man.

And Putin has hardly been content to destroy democracy in his own country. He has contributed, through cyberattacks, political influence operations and other subversion to a global “democratic recession” that has now lasted more than 15 years.

Putin has also shattered a second tenet of the post-Cold War mindset: the idea that great-power rivalry was over and that violent, major conflict had thus become passe. Russia has now waged three wars of imperial restoration in the former Soviet Union (in Ukraine, Georgia and Chechnya). Putin’s military used the Syrian civil war to practice tactics, such as the terror-bombing of civilians, that seemed ripped from earlier, uglier eras. Now Russia is prosecuting Europe’s largest conventional war in 75 years, featuring amphibious assaults, the aerial bombardment of major cities and even nuclear threats.

Violence, Putin has reminded us, is a terrible but sadly normal feature of world affairs. Its absence reflects effective deterrence, not irreversible moral progress.

This relates to a third shibboleth Putin has challenged — the idea that history runs in a single direction. During the 1990s, the triumph of democracy, great-power peace and Western influence seemed irreversible. The Clinton administration called countries that bucked these trends “backlash states,” the idea being that they could only offer atavistic, doomed resistance to the progression of history.

But history, as Putin has shown us, doesn’t bend on its own. Aggression can succeed. Democracies can be destroyed by determined enemies. “International norms” are really just rules made and enforced by states that combine great power with great determination. Which means that history is a constant struggle to prevent the world from being thrust back into patterns of predation that it can never permanently escape.

Yet here Putin has done the U.S. and its friends a favor, because that lesson is sinking in. A week of Russian aggression accomplished what a decade of American cajoling could not — a commitment by Germany to arm itself in a way befitting a serious power. Democratic countries around the world are supporting the most devastating sanctions campaign ever aimed at a major power; they are pouring weapons into Ukraine to support its surprisingly vigorous resistance.

Most important, Putin’s gambit is producing an intellectual paradigm shift — a recognition that this war could be a prelude to more devastating conflicts unless the democratic community severely punishes aggression in this case and more effectively deters it in others.

We’re in the early days of what could be a long, brutal war. Ukrainian resistance might crumble; Putin might make himself master of a much-expanded empire. But early indications are that he may be on the verge of a rude realization of his own: Robbing one’s enemies of their complacency is a big mistake.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-28/ukraine-crisis-putin-destroyed-3-myths-of-america-s-global-order

Friday, February 25, 2022

Why is Russia invading Ukraine and what does Putin want?

 

Let's imagine Ukraine is a Nato member and starts these military operations. Are we supposed to go to war with the Nato bloc? Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not
Vladimir Putin
Russian President

By air, land, and sea, Russia has launched a devastating attack on Ukraine, a European democracy of 44 million people. For months President Vladimir Putin had denied he would invade his neighbour, but then he tore up a peace deal, sending forces across borders in Ukraine's north, east and south.

As the number of dead climbs, he is now accused of shattering peace in Europe and what happens next could jeopardise the continent's entire security structure.

Where have Russian troops attacked and why?

Airports and military headquarters were hit first, near cities across Ukraine, including the main Boryspil international airport in Kyiv.

Then tanks and troops rolled into Ukraine in the north-east, near Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million people; in the east near Luhansk, from neighbouring Belarus in the north and Crimea in the south. Paratroops seized a key airbase just outside Kyiv and Russian troops landed in Ukraine's big port cities of Odesa and Mariupol too.

Moments before the invasion began, President Putin went on TV declaring that Russia could not feel "safe, develop and exist" because of what he called a constant threat from modern Ukraine.

Map of explosions1px transparent line

Many of his arguments were false or irrational. He claimed his goal was to protect people subjected to bullying and genocide and aim for the "demilitarisation and de-Nazification" of Ukraine. There has been no genocide in Ukraine - it is a vibrant democracy led by a president who is Jewish. "How could I be a Nazi?" said Volodymr Zelensky, who likened Russia's onslaught to Nazi Germany's invasion in World War Two.

President Putin has frequently accused Ukraine of being taken over by extremists, ever since its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted in 2014 after months of protests against his rule. Russia then retaliated by seizing the southern region of Crimea and triggering a rebellion in the east, backing separatists who have fought Ukrainian forces in a war that has claimed 14,000 lives.

Late in 2021 he began deploying big numbers of Russian troops close to Ukraine's borders. Then this week he scrapped a 2015 peace deal for the east and recognised areas under rebel control as independent.

Russia has long resisted Ukraine's move towards the European Union and the West's defensive military alliance Nato. Announcing Russia's invasion, he accused Nato of threatening "our historic future as a nation".

How far will Russia go?

Russia has refused to say if it seeks to overthrow Ukraine's democratically elected government, although it believes that ideally Ukraine should be "freed, cleansed of the Nazis". Mr Putin spoke of bringing to court "those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians".

It was a thinly veiled hint and by invading from Belarus and seizing Antonov airport close to the outskirts of Kyiv, there is little doubt that the capital is well within his sights.

In the days before the invasion, when up to 200,000 troops were within reach of Ukraine's borders, he had focused his attention on the east.

By recognising the Russian proxy separatist areasof Luhansk and Donetsk as independent, he had already decided they were no longer part of Ukraine. Then he revealed that he supported their claims to far more Ukrainian territory. The self-styled people's republics cover little more than a third of the whole of Ukraine's Luhansk and Donetsk regions but the rebels covet the rest, too.

 

READ THE ENTIRE EXCELLENT ANALYSIS: 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56720589?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Thursday, February 24, 2022

When You Have A Dunce Claiming To Be A Godol - "When the Russians will cross the Dardanelles River, it will trigger the start of a series of events before Moshiach comes"


Russia has officially waged war against Ukraine. Russian security officials announced that they have successfully attacked Ukraine’s air defense systems. neutralizing the infrastructure of Ukrainian Air Force bases as smoke can be seen billowing from a Ukrainian military airport in Chuguev. Ukraine also reported that enemy Russian forces have completed seized control of two villages in the country’s east as underground subways have been converted into bomb shelters.

And while the fear of war has sent many people scrambling for safety, one rabbi is making preparations for the Messiah’s imminent arrival.

Rabbi Elya Ber Wachtfogel, principal of Yeshiva (seminary) Gedolah Zichron Moshe of South Fallsburg, New York donned formal clothing only worn on Shabat (Sabbath) clothing last week when he heard the news of the movement of Russian warships through the Dardanelles River. The response of the rabbi is based on the Zohar whose Kabbalistic teachings reveal that when the Russians will cross the Dardanelles River, it will trigger the start of a series of events before the Messiah comes.

The significance of wearing Shabbat clothes to welcome the Messiah was initially proclaimed by the iconic rabbi – the Vilna Gaon who said that the Jewish people need to wear Shabat clothes when the Messiah is about to arrive.

Rav Elya Ber recently told a talmid, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 70 years.”

Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel, rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Gedolah Zichron Moshe of South Fallsburg, put on Shabbos clothing last week when he heard news of the movement of Russian warships. The response of the rosh yeshiva is based on a Kabbolah that he has that when the Russians will cross the Dardanelles River, it will trigger the start of a series of events before Moshiach comes, and therefore, in his words, “Men ken shoin untun Shabbosdike kleider.”

Rav Elya Ber recently told a talmid, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 70 years.”

 Those close to Rav Elya Ber that he first heard this kabbolah when he was 10 years old from his father, the mashgiach, Rav Nosson Wachtfogel. Rav Nosson heard it from Rav Doniel Movoshovitz of the Kelmer Talmud Torah, who heard it from the Alter of Kelm, who heard it from someone who heard it from Rav Chaim Volozhiner, who heard it from the Vilna Gaon.

 

Dardanelles (Çanakkale Boğazı) is located in Turkey

Turkey_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Uwe Dedering (talk) - Turkey_location_map.svg

Location map of Turkey


 

Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine


 

The situation now: Ukraine’s government said it faced “a full-scale attack from multiple directions.” Shelling and missile strikes were reported across the country. Follow our live coverage. NYT


SKY NEWS LIVE:

https://youtu.be/9Auq9mYxFEE

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The ultra-Orthodox self-segregate from Israeli society, but the Walder affair is revealing major cracks in the 'wall of holiness.' A day of reckoning is coming

 


שר התורה רוצה את העניבה שלי? תגיד כבר משהו משמעותי--- The Sar HaTorah wants my necktie? Say something significant already!
 
Black Ties Matter - That's It!
עניבות שחורות חשובות--זֶה הַכֹּל.

The Haredi leadership: Crime and its punishment 


 
'We believe victims' fliers placed on billboards of a Haredi neighborhood on December 31, 2021. (Courtesy)
'We believe victims' fliers placed on billboards of a Haredi neighborhood on December 31, 2021. 
 
 

The Chaim Walder affair is not “just” a shocking case of a prominent public figure, a Haredi educator, whose shame, hypocrisy, and wickedness were exposed — there are many such cases, in all sectors. Nor is it “just” a reminder of the extent of the life shattering phenomenon of sex offenses in the Haredi sector — these are, unfortunately, common everywhere. The affair has the real potential to effect fundamental change in the fabric of Haredi society.

The Haredi sector’s remarkable growth since the founding of the state is the result of a successful strategy adopted by its leaders. First, self-segregation from Israeli society on all levels of life and fortification behind “walls of holiness.” Second, providing an alternative to civic leadership through the glorification of a rabbinical leadership whose authority derives, ostensibly, from a heavenly source.

The meticulous self-segregation and stringent adherence to leadership directives that boast da’at Torah (infallible religious authority) have been a force multiplier vis-à-vis Israeli society. They have enabled the Haredim, against all odds, to preserve their unique identity, and, at the same time, become a major factor in Israeli society. But nothing lasts forever. The Haredi strategy, with its two components, is rapidly losing its power.

Self-segregation is made possible through control over the shaping of communal consciousness. In recent years, however, dictators of the hashkafa tehora or “pure view” in the community’s synagogues and yeshivot, in its sectoral press and street-posted broadsides, have encountered a formidable adversary — the Internet. This is a modern Tree of Knowledge, available to everyone. Haredim can choose whether to bite into the apple (or the device of a competing company). 

It turns out that they are gulping with gusto: about two-thirds of them are connected to the Internet. A mighty digital battering ram is striking the walls and undermining their stability.

And then comes the Chaim Walder affair, which puts the second component of the Haredi strategy — the leadership — to the test: The paragon of Haredi education, a figure known and admired by the entire community, turns out to be a sexual predator. The blood of his many victims is boiling. This was not an unconventional Haredi like Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the disgraced founder and chairman of ZAKA who was similarly accused of rape and sexual assault within the Haredi community, but rather a role model for the community — a decades-long spokesman for the “pure view” in the Lithuanian Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman. The crisis is huge. How will the leadership respond?

Some of the leadership looked this religious and moral evil in the eye, and averted its gaze. Yated Ne’eman has used the honorific acronym “zt”l” (his righteous memory should be a blessing) in regard to this man with blood on his hands. One of the most revered Lithuanian rabbis accuses those who revealed Walder’s wrongdoing of murder. This outrageous inversion of the truth is a sin that will bring its own punishment.

The sin is easy to identify: the Haredi leaders who are abandoning Walder’s victims are violating an explicit prohibition: lo ta’amod al dam re’echa — “Do not stand idly by while your brother’s blood is at stake.” The Torah sets a standard for the moral conduct of religious leadership in the case of the egla arufa — the decapitated calf. It says that if the corpse of a murdered person is found in a public area and it is not known who the killer is, the local leadership — the “elders” of the nearest city — are responsible for conducting an atonement ritual and declaring “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it.” The Sages ask: “Would it ever enter our minds that the elders of the Beit Din (tribunal) were murderers?” However, because the crime took place “on their watch,” they are required to perform an educational and moral act of purification. Such measures are called for all the more in the Walder affair when the criminal’s identity is known and when he himself is regarded as a leader of that community.

And now for the punishment: the Haredi public recognizes the sin. The fraudulent crime of some of the Haredi leadership, having surrendered to their fears, is clear to its adherents. Brave glimmers of this recognition can be seen everywhere – Mishpacha Magazine and Radio Kol Chai are especially worthy examples.

Rabbi Saadia Gaon (in the 10th century), explaining the responsibility placed on the elders of the nearby city, states that “just as it is proper to castigate one for doing what he ought not have done, so should he be castigated for neglecting to do what should have been done.” The elders described in the Bible neglected their duty to safeguard the murder victim. Today’s elders are neglecting their duty to protect the victims.

The Haredi public is shaken; many understand, and strongly support, what is written here. It may be that, alongside the suicide of Chaim Walder, we are witnessing the “suicide” of some of the Haredi leadership. 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-haredi-leadership-crime-and-its-punishment/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2022-01-05&utm_medium=email

 



Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Silence obscured the truth in Ukraine for decades, but 75 years later the details of the genocide have emerged..

 

The WWII Massacres at Drobitsky Yar Were the Result of Years of Scapegoating Jews


Drobitsky Yar menora
The Drobitsky Yar menorah commemorates the genocide that happened in Kharkov, and across Ukraine.
 

In the winter of 1941, silence fell across the Jewish communities of Ukraine, as one by one, they were snuffed out. “This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentations,” wrote Soviet-Jewish journalist Vassily Grossman in 1943, after the Ukraine had been liberated by the Red Army. “In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Bristol, Yagotin… A people has been murdered.”  In the following years the quietude would be amplified as the Soviet Union, recovering from the ravages of war, disappeared the disappeared, never acknowledging the Jewish lives taken from its lands.

When the Germans began their occupation of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, around 2.5 million Jews were trapped in the region. After the Nazi invasion, which was expedited by local collaborators, only 100,000 to 120,000 survived. But for more than 50 years, the details of this brutal tragedy remained largely unknown beyond the Iron Curtain. Little information was shared with the outside world, and inside the Soviet Union, the truth was suppressed. Instead of death by the Nazi system of concentration camps, the genocide of the Soviet Union’s Jews was committed via a barrage of bullets. Among the numerous massacre sites is Drobitsky Yar, a ravine outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov where some 15,000 Jews were shot or forced into mass graves to die of exposure. The horrific murders began December 15, 1941 and continued through January 1942—all in sight of Kharkov’s non-Jewish residents.

“People died basically just outside their homes, in pits and forests,” says Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar at the Kennan Institute, a part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “They were killed in full view of their neighbors. If their neighbors did not directly murder them, they certainly witnessed them.”

The conditions that led to Ukrainians supporting such violent action against their countrymen began decades earlier, a tangled knot of prejudice and conspiracies. According to Tabarovsky, the legacy of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Holodomor (a forced famine that resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33) created enormous strife and instability. The conditions were almost like a 20th-century version of the Thirty Years’ War (a series of religious wars that spread across Europe and resulted in millions of deaths), she says.

Although Jewish residents of the Ukraine experienced long stretches of peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, they were also the most systematically oppressed minority. In 1919 alone, around 1,300 pogroms took place in the Ukrainian territories, resulting in 50,000 to 60,000 deaths and 1 million displaced people, Tabarovsky says. When the Bolsheviks instituted programs to promote minority culture and representation in government, some Jews rose out of poverty and into relatively stable careers. There were Jewish books and theater, Jews in government positions. The sudden increase in visibility led to further suspicion and unhappiness, which quickly spiraled into a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory linking Jews with the communist government that enacted murderous policies including the Holodomor

By the time World War II had begun, some Ukrainians initially looked to the Germans as liberators. They welcomed the destruction of the Jews, who represented all the ills that had befallen them since the country was subsumed into the Soviet Union. By October 24, 1941, the German soldiers had crossed Ukraine and captured the eastern city of Kharkov. The Germans latched onto the Jews-as-Communists narrative, ordering the deaths of anyone who fit either of those categories.

In the occupied city of Kharkov, a decree was posted on December 14 ordering that all Jews be evacuated or shot on the spot if they resisted. Jewish citizens were identified by their neighbors, stripped of their clothing and valuables, and forced to a factory where they were held for weeks. Starting from the beginning, groups of Jews were periodically marched out to the Drobitsky Yar ravine and murdered. Men, women and children of all ages were killed.

Engineer S. S. Krivoruchko, one of the few survivors of the Drobitsky Yar massacre, described being marched to the ravine, which was “strewn with bits of rags and the remains of torn clothing… On the edge of the ravine stood a truck with machine guns. Terrible scenes erupted when people understood that they had been brought here to be slaughtered.”

Decades later, forensic experts uncovered 13 grave-pits around Kharkov. The corpses in these mass graves lay “in extreme disorder, fantastically intertwined, forming tangles of human bodies defying description.” Their work showed that the Germans had used bullets and carbon monoxide poisoning and fire to kill thousands of Jews, horrible acts of murder that would have been known to Kharkov’s residents. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth separated Jews from Soviet citizens and many Soviet citizens from their own pasts. The murder of Jews and the transfer of property eliminated the sense of responsibility for the past.”

This forced distancing from the past and the truth continued even after the Ukraine was recaptured by the Soviet army. Stalin erected monuments, but only recognized the victims as peaceful Soviet citizens; their Jewish ethnicity was completely ignored. Part of this was undoubtedly due to anti-Semitism. Stalin once told Franklin D. Roosevelt that Jews were “middlemen, profiteers, and parasites.” But another part of this suppression had to do with creating the myth of a singular, national identity for all members of the Soviet Union. They needed stability and unity, or the nation would fracture.

Tabarovsky, who grew up in Russia during the Soviet period, never even learned about the Holocaust in school, though she later grew to be a scholar on the subject.

“Cities [in the Ukraine] used to be 70 percent Jewish, 80 percent Jewish,” Tabarovsky says. “You come to the remnants of a Jewish cemetery and kids wander there and have no idea what it is. That is like the memory of an entire people is erased.”

And Tabarovsky says that although modern Ukraine is very supportive of Israel, they aren’t taking the time to go back through the past and understand what it means today. Tabarovsky says the only way to heal from this history of silence and suppression is for Ukraine to revisit the past. She believes the country could look to Germany as a model for reconciliation, even though it will mean unearthing old, painful problems.

“The way you deal with the past determines what kind of society you have in the moment,” Tabarovsky says. “If you don’t address the root causes of what happened in the past, then what’s to prevent you from recreating that in the future?”

Saturday, February 19, 2022

And Good For The Jews, Especially The Miami Jews -- און גוט פאר די אידן, בפרט די מיאמי אידן

 

What can eating 10 prunes a day do for you?

 

The amazing thing that eating 10 prunes a day does for your body.

pLUMS ARE an evocative comestible for Musrara-born artist Yoram bouzaglo. (photo credit: YORAM BOUZAGLO)

Many people think prunes are a sure cure for constipation, yet they have several other important benefits, especially for postmenopausal women. How many prunes should be eaten every day?

Prunes, which are dried plums, sound like something you eat on Tu Bishvat or when constipated, but researchers at Penn State University suggest older menopausal women should consider eating several prunes daily. Their study found that prunes can help prevent or delay bone loss in older women.

The authors of the study published in the journal Advances in Nutrition claim that prunes can reduce physical inflammation and oxidative damage, both of which contribute to bone loss. "In postmenopausal women, lower levels of estrogen can trigger a rise of oxidative stress and inflammation, increasing the risk of weakening bones that may lead to fractures," said Dr. Connie Rogers, a professor of nutritional sciences and physiologist who conducted the study. "Incorporating prunes into the diet may help protect bones by slowing or reversing this process."

Osteoporosis, a condition in which the bones become brittle and weak, is quite common in women over the age of 50. Estimates show that about 200 million women worldwide live with osteoporosis, with the condition causing nearly 9,000,000 bone fractures annually. Several medications for osteoporosis are now available, but researchers believe that more and more women are looking for holistic ways to treat or completely avoid the condition, especially through diet.

Plums 150 (credit: Laura Frankel)

Prunes contain essential nutrients

The human body works to maintain its bone health through an ongoing process which constantly builds new bone cells while removing old bone cells. However, around the age of 40, the breakdown of old bone cells begins to surpass the production of new bone cells in the aging body. This imbalance may result from various factors including inflammation and oxidative stress.

It’s important to clarify that oxidative stress isn’t connected to feelings of stress or pressure. Oxidative stress refers to the imbalance between the levels of free radicals and antioxidants in cells. Prunes are full of minerals, dietary fiber, vitamin K and phenolic compounds and all of these nutritional benefits may help fight the harmful effects of inflammation and oxidative damage.

Ten prunes daily can strengthen bones

The team analyzed data from 16 preclinical studies conducted in rodents – for this study, ten preclinical studies and two human clinical trials. In all these studies, the results remained almost the same. Eating prunes led to two positive benefits: less oxidative stress/inflammation and stronger bones.

Specifically, clinical trials found that eating about ten prunes (100 grams) daily for an entire year improved bone mineral density within the forearms and lower spine.

Similarly, consumption of between 50 and 100 grams of prunes daily for six months prevented major bone density loss and lowered inflammation levels significantly compared to other older women who didn’t eat prunes.

The research team assumes that prunes cause healthier changes within the gut microbiome, and subsequently lowers inflammation in the colon. Such developments probably reduce the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as oxidative damage markers. Further research is already planned to more thoroughly investigate how eating prunes consistently over the course of a year affects bone health, inflammation and intestinal function.

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698313?_ga=2.102825792.1353864315.1645640985-1866855919.1617831228&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+supports+Ukraine+s+sovereignty+-+without+mentioning+Russia&utm_campaign=February+23%2C+2022+Night&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

Friday, February 18, 2022

Ignoring Chaim Walder’s alleged victims, Chief Rabbi David Lau visited the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) author’s home on Tuesday night ....

Chief Rabbi Lau visits shiva of alleged rapist Chaim Walder -  Haim Walder was a suspected  child rapist and serial sex offender who killed himself to avoid investigation and trial. 

Rabbi Lau should be fired today from his government job which is financed by taxpayers. This is just the latest example of the moral bankruptcy of the chief rabbinate.

 

Lau was photographed in a tent that was set up outside the Walder home for the shiva. 

Ignoring Chaim Walder’s alleged victims, Chief Rabbi David Lau visited the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) author’s home on Tuesday night to comfort his family, who are sitting shiva.


 
Walder was found dead in a cemetery on Monday in what is suspected to have been a suicide. He was facing multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault of minors since a Haaretz expose last month.
Walder was a well-known author of children’s and young adults’ books in the haredi world. His series Kids Speak (in Hebrew, Yeladim Mesaprim al Atzmam) has sold more than two million copies in communities across Israel and the Diaspora. 
 
 
WALDER RECEIVED A HERO'S FUNERAL BY THE HAREDI COMMUNITY


 
He was accused of raping minors and young adults, all of whom he met in his line of work as a therapist and children’s author. 
 
Lau was photographed in a tent that was set up outside the Walder home for the shiva. 
 
Lau’s visit to the shiva drew condemnations across social media particularly due to his silence on the Walder affair and not saying anything about the author’s alleged victims. So far, more than 20 testimonies have been brought to the rabbinical court in Safed that had convened to hear the accusations. 
Haim Walder was a suspected rapist and serial sex offender who killed himself to avoid investigation and trial. Rabbi Lau should be fired today from his government job which is financed by taxpayers. This is just the latest example of the moral bankruptcy of the chief rabbinate.
 


The haredi media also ignored the victims and reported on the death of “Rabbi Haim Walder” without mentioning the severe allegations that were brought against him.  
 

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.

 

COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

 

Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change.

Eight cigarettes arranged in the shape of a coronavirus

It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. 

Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

President Joe Biden said in January that “this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and vaccine holdouts are indeed prolonging our crisis. The data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point. Last month, only 1 percent of adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they wanted to get vaccinated soon, and just 4 percent suggested that they were taking a “wait-and-see” approach. Seventeen percent of respondents, however, said they definitely don’t want to get vaccinated or would do so only if required (and 41 percent of vaccinated adults say the same thing about boosters). Among the vaccine-hesitant, a mere 2 percent say it would be hard for them to access the shots if they wanted them. We can acknowledge that some people have faced structural barriers to getting immunized while also listening to the many others who have simply told us how they feel, sometimes from the very beginning.

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk. Yet smokers, like those who now refuse vaccines, often continue their dangerous lifestyle in the face of aggressive attempts to persuade them otherwise. Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

In either context, public-health campaigns must reckon with the very difficult task of changing people’s behavior. Anti-smoking efforts, for example, have tried to incentivize good health choices and disincentivize bad ones, whether through cash payments to people who quit, gruesome visual warnings on cigarette packs, taxes, smoke-free zones, or employer smoking bans. Over the past 50 years, this crusade has very slowly but consistently driven change: Nearly half of Americans used to smoke; now only about one in seven does. Hundreds of thousands of lung-cancer deaths have been averted in the process.

With COVID, too, we’ve haphazardly pursued behavioral nudges to turn the hesitant into the inoculated. Governments and businesses have given lotteries and free beers a chance. Some corporations, universities, health-care systems, and local jurisdictions implemented mandates. But many good ideas have turned out to be of little benefit: A randomized trial in nursing homes published in January, for example, found that an intensive information-and-persuasion campaign from community leaders had failed to budge vaccination rates among the predominantly disadvantaged and low-income staff. Despite the altruistic efforts of public-health professionals and physicians, it’s becoming harder by the day to reach immunological holdouts. Booster uptake is also lagging far behind.

This is where the “new normal” of COVID might come to resemble our decades-long battle with tobacco. We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort. This plausible outcome has important, if uncomfortable, policy implications. With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use. Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated. And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

To compare vaccine resistance and smoking seems to overlook an obvious and important difference: COVID is an infectious disease and tobacco use isn’t. (Tobacco is also addictive in a physiological sense, while vaccine resistance isn’t.) Many pandemic restrictions are based on the idea that any individual’s behavior may pose a direct health risk to everyone else. People who get vaccinated don’t just protect themselves from COVID; they reduce their risk of passing on the disease to those around them, at least for some limited period of time. Even during the Omicron wave, that protective effect has appeared significant: A person who has received a booster is 67 percent less likely to test positive for the virus than an unvaccinated person.

But the harms of tobacco can also be passed along from smokers to their peers. Secondhand-smoke inhalation causes more than 41,000 deaths annually in the U.S. (a higher mortality rate than some flu seasons’). Yet despite smoking’s well-known risks, many states don’t completely ban the practice in public venues; secondhand-smoke exposure in private homes and cars—affecting 25 percent of U.S. middle- and high-school children—remains largely unregulated. The general acceptance of these bleak outcomes, for smokers and nonsmokers alike, may hint at another aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others. A large number of excess deaths could end up being tolerated or even explicitly permitted. Noel Brewer, a public-health professor at the University of North Carolina, told me that anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu. And yet this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person. Noymer, of UC Irvine, said that the effects of endemic COVID, even in the context of persistent gaps in vaccination, would hardly be noticeable. Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

Chronic problems eventually yield to acclimation, rendering them relatively imperceptible. We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums. I have no doubt that the system will adapt in this way, too, if the coronavirus continues to devastate the unvaccinated. Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

COVID is likely to remain a leading killer for a while, and some academics have suggested that pandemics end only when the public stops caring. But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

Benjamin Mazer is a physician specializing in laboratory medicine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Cases Are Dropping Globally, but Omicron Subvariant Is Spreading, W.H.O. Says --- Nu --- So WHO's on First!?

 

The Omicron surge seems to be slowing in much of the world, but a subvariant that scientists believe is even more contagious is on the rise, and a decline in testing has muddled the global picture, the World Health Organization said.

New cases worldwide dropped 19 percent from Feb. 7 to Feb. 13, compared with the week before, according to the agency.

The W.H.O. also said that the subvariant of Omicron, BA.2 appeared to be “steadily increasing” in prevalence and that BA.2 had now become dominant in several Asian countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Denmark was the first nation to report that BA.2 had overtaken BA.1, the version of Omicron that first swept through the world.

Scientists have said there is no evidence that BA.2 is more lethal than BA.1, though BA.2 could slow Omicron’s decline. Vaccines appear to be just as effective against BA.2 as they are against other forms of Omicron.

The Omicron wave has yet to crest in what the agency calls the Western Pacific region, which includes Oceania, the Pacific islands and East Asian countries like China and South Korea that recently celebrated the Lunar New Year, a holiday period that typically involves large family gatherings. Cases in the region rose 19 percent last week, the W.H.O. reported.

In the Pacific, two island nations that had no confirmed cases until recently are now grappling with the arrival of the virus. In Tonga, an outbreak began after ships brought aid to help the country recover from a volcanic eruption and tsunami in January. And the Cook Islands reported its first case last week.

The W.H.O. said caseloads were falling in the other regions. But cases are still rising in parts of Europe, including in Slovakia, Latvia and Belarus. And in Russia, new cases have increased by 79 percent over the past two weeks, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

On Wednesday, Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.’s Covid-19 technical lead, cautioned that a drop in testing rates around the world has meant the reported global case numbers might not reflect the true spread of the virus.

“We need to be careful about interpreting too much this downward trend,” she said. She said the bigger concern was the increase in reported deaths from Covid-19 for the sixth week in a row.

The W.H.O’s Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes the Middle East, reported the most fatalities, and the Western Pacific region reported the second-most, according to the W.H.O.

In the Americas, many countries did not move fast enough to slow the transmission of BA.1, W.H.O. officials said on Wednesday, and they must be better prepared for whatever version of the coronavirus comes next.

“This will not be the last variant, and the future of the pandemic is still extremely uncertain,” said Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the W.H.O.’s Pan American Health Organization, adding that “a new variant could emerge at any time.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/17/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine
at the subvariant of OmicronThe Omicron surge seems to be slowing in much of the world, but a subvariant that scientists believe is even more contagious is on the rise, and a decline in testing has muddled the global picture, the World Health Organization said.New cases worldwide dropped 19 percent from Feb. 7 to Feb. 13, compared with the week before, according to the agency.The W.H.O. also said that the subvariant of Omicron, BA.2 appeared to be “steadily increasing” in prevalence and that BA.2 had now become dominant in several Asian countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Denmark was the first nation to report that BA.2 had overtaken BA.1, the version of Omicron that first swept through the woScientists have said there is no evidence that BA.2 is more lethal than BA.1, though BA.2 could slow Omicron’s decline. Vaccines appear to be just as effective against BA.2 as they are against other forms of Omicrohttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/17/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine


Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Although The Present Tensions Are Much Larger & More Complex Than Ukraine Itself - The Ukranians Were Complicit In The Murder of 1.5 Million Jews! Not Much Sympathy From This Jew!

 Ukraine’s part in the Holocaust

 

In this July 16, 2007, photograph, French priest Patrick Desbois, front, and members of his team walk to what used to be a well where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive, in Bogdanivka, Ukraine, during World War II.   

Carl Gershman’s May 28 op-ed, “Ukraine must confront its Holocaust history,” drew attention to the fact that, of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1.5 million were murdered on Ukrainian soil.

It was not only the involvement of large numbers of Ukrainian nationals in the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads that was responsible for this result but also the official comprehensive involvement of the Ukrainian Police in assisting the Nazis’ roundup of Jews for the more mechanized efficient killing fields of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec.

Mr. Gershman referenced the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska as an example of what happened. But it would be useful to note what a U.S. federal court found in 1981 in the case of U.S. v. Osidach, in which it upheld the Justice Department’s stripping of the defendant’s U.S. citizenship. He had been charged with having served as police chief in Rava-Ruska, where he was responsible for rounding up the town’s 18,000 Jews.

The court had concluded that a careful review of the record shows “that what occurred in that town was not an isolated instance of conduct but totally consistent with the general pattern of persecutorial conduct by the Ukrainian police throughout the Galacia region.”

During the Germans' census of December 1941, local officials in Kharkiv played a crucial role in identifying Jews, evicting them from their apartments, and forcing them into a temporary ghetto in the barracks of the Kharkiv Machine-Tool Factory and the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. The tenth district council was particularly closely involved in ghettoization, and formed a security team to help German soldiers prevent escapes. Employees of that council, along with former ghetto guards, looted the possessions of the Jews after the Germans and, with other indigenous accomplices, helped murder them and dispose of the bodies. The behavior of these local actors sheds new light on the “Ordinary Men” debate.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ukraines-part-in-the-holocaust/2019/05/31/9922ad8e-8259-11e9-b585-e36b16a531aa_story.html