domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23m ago
Rabbi Balkany, the leading lobbyist for Haredi Jewry in DC, married into one of most important Haredi dynasties, did not blackmail billionaire Steve Cohen in order to reap a meager 180k salary from his school. However, as you note, this is my fault, for not providing the abundant evidence necessary to persuade an unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat naive reader who cannot make the natural extrapolation that a highly influential DC fixer for decades is not blackmailing Steve fucking Cohen just to receive a tiny salary from his Jewish day school.
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His salary was 180k, while his revenue stream from his small business Rite Care was 450k
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One of the two requested subjects of donation was a different Haredi school that he was not involved in, which he had no way of financially benefitting from
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He was involved in “expediting” Jewish school funding through DC connections as early as 1987
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“In 1994, Milton Balkany, a conservative Republican active in political fundraising,[22] tried to have Luchins excommunicated by a Jewish religious court,[13] blaming him for having "caused yeshivas in the land of Israel to lose money",[23] after Luchins had complained about Balkany's efforts to compel Israeli government officials to use U.S. aid money for projects Balkany favored in Israel.[24]”. This is not someone who is in it for greed! He is more like the sacrificing commander of a foreign army. He is in it for his tribe, giving them money and funds. Trying to have another Jew excommunicated because he didn’t want American aid going for Yeshiva funding. This is a very loyal lieutenant of the Jewish cause.
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He helped Jewish funding as far away as Russia
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He worked to ensure orthodox Jews got half of NYC’s school vouchers
This is not a guy who does things for personal benefit. In typical fashion, I imagine he would have pocketed some of Cohen’s money, or sent some of it to another Jewish endeavor. But the overarching real reason behind doing this was to fund the Jewish schools. Haredi corruption is like this. The Cars4Kids, the 1bil in nyc public funds, etc.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26m ago
I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
35m ago
−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
erwgv3g34
40m ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
53m ago
Great work! I've included some real lightweight shit in there this year so it's been easy.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?
My father was a career NCO in the USMC, retired in the early 90s. Apparently the military is, or at least was, ripe with various theories and conjectures. His take on UFOs/UAP was that someone(s), somewhere made a decision to deliberately trick a small number of the most gormless, credulous service members in all the branches into having sort of staged experiences to leave them with the impression that there actually was knowledge of UFOs in the USG somewhere, its generally well covered up, but somehow a steady trickle of corporals and specialists were leaving the service absolutely convinced that they saw something they weren't supposed to see or otherwise experienced direct evidence of aliens. I've met a few of these intrepid veterans myself over the years and they really did seem absolutely convinced, though they were quite poor at actually communicating their experiences of describing the 'evidence' they witnessed. As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
The most common story I heard was usually about them witnessing some technology or phenomena that obviously could only have been reverse engineered from, or made out of, salvaged alien technology. A few attributed nuclear power/weapons generally to this.
No_one
1hr ago
Bureaucrats used to be a lot better in the 40s, accumulation of bloat and it all went to the shitter after Carter on purpose lost that lawsuit over competence exams.
FtSoA
1hr ago
God, if only big-business-influenced technical-bureaucratic elites really ran things, instead of the ideologically captured bureaucratic and political and academic progressive elites we actually have (on average, of course). It's so weird to conflate Big Business and Big Government in a world where Lina Khan Thought is popular on Left and Right.
Independent central banks are wonderful inventions it must also be said.
In other words, FDR-loving progressives are responsible for the administrative state's regulatory growth and misadventures, not our kindly corporate overlords, who fundamentally wanna make a buck by increasing consumer welfare.
We have not had "an ostensibly apolitical technocracy" in many government agencies in a long time. The DoD and DoJ were some of the best ones here, but public administration theory gave up on neutrality/objectivity as "impossible" a long time ago as a field.
Sadly, the consistent attempt of political neutrality, or even the pretense, was a load-bearing effort, even if imperfect. Hard to get it back now.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
worse the under-ripe, mealy fleshed green bananas with skin that squeaks when you touch it.
This is my favorite type of Banana, I also stagger my Banana purchases, so I can have more of these. They ripen so fast though :(
FtttG
1hr ago
I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26.
I'm one behind you, out of the same target.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Goshdarn whippersnappers… they used to have RESPECT for proper punctuation⋮ back in my day the teacher would hit the back of your hand with a ruler if you put spaces inside your ellipses⋱
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
No, it's a Jewish billionaire being blackmailed by a Jewish fixer for the fixer's own personal benefit. There's no evidence whatsoever that you've supplied or that I've been able to find that the motive for the blackmail was to "support jewish causes" or ideological in any way shape or form. I don't know how you're overcoming the Occam's Razor presumption that this was bog-standard personal corruption and greed, rather than anything ideological.
I always use all of the various hyphen forms. It got drilled into me in legal writing. Since some poorly written legislative codes include hyphens (e.g., "section 1-a" instead of "1(a)"), it's important for readability of citations to always distinguish between hyphens and en-dashes. And I was always taught separating a clause with em-dashes was for important elaborations, while parentheses were for asides that weren't necessarily vital to the meaning of the sentence. This seems a useful enough distinction to keep the em-dash in my repertoire, despite the AI connotations.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2hr ago
but to spread the benefits to others who are less fortunate.
The most straightforward reading of your word choice would be colonialism, which would not make you the most progressive person here.
Contrarian countersignaling that you'll make the world a worse place because bad things are good, actually.
A statement that nobody believes about their own position, of course.
It is just as easy to smear restorative justice advocates as believing "bad things are good, actually" as it is the right-winger calling for, say, England to sink the small boats.
Are the people that care more about murderers than their victims just doing contrarian countersignaling? How should one decide they're sincere but the other side isn't?
Electoral reform along the lines of single transferable vote is literally my single issue, because I think it's actually a credible path to a more functional government.
Any thoughts on if it's possible/reasonable to fix the gerrymandering issue or is the catch-22 deliberate and useful for some reason?
No_one
2hr ago
In case anyone is unclear on what the 'managerial state' is, here's a handy explainer:
The managerial state is the system in which technical–bureaucratic elites, rather than elected politicians or private owners, exercise effective control over economy and society. James Burnham argued that the separation of ownership from control in large corporations produced a new “managerial class” whose power rests not on property but on its command of administrative expertise; the state becomes the ultimate lever, so that “the institutions which comprise the state will … be the ‘property’ of the managers” . Critics such as Samuel Francis add that this regime replaces law with administrative decree, federalism with executive autocracy, and limited government with an unlimited apparatus that pursues open-ended social goals in the name of abstract ideals like equality or positive rights .
World War II was the catalytic moment for America’s managerial turn. Wartime mobilization created vast federal agencies that coordinated production, prices, and labor; the organizational techniques forged in battle were carried into the post-war civilian economy as Washington converted military supply chains to consumer manufacturing, subsidized higher education for millions of veterans (GI Bill), and normalized Keynesian macro-management . The Cold War then locked this arrangement in place: a permanent defense–industrial complex, rising federal share of GDP, and an alphabet soup of regulators (EPA, OSHA, EEOC) extended managerial oversight into labor relations, environmental quality, and social equity, while the new social-science “policy expert” displaced the traditional politician as the central figure in legislation and adjudication .
By the 1970s the managerial state had become bipartisan and self-sustaining. Regardless of which party won elections, power continued to migrate toward executive agencies, independent central banks, and transnational regulatory networks; large corporations operated as quasi-public utilities under federal charter, and citizens were recast as clients whose behavior is continuously shaped by tax incentives, administrative rules, and court orders . The cumulative effect has been a shift from constitutional self-government to what critics call “soft totalitarianism”: an ostensibly apolitical technocracy that expands its jurisdiction by discovering ever-new social problems requiring expert management, while insulating its own authority from democratic reversal .
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Obama is frustrated over not having EVEN MORE POWER (as is Trump), but neither consider power a curse. Nor Clinton, nor Trump.
I can think of two rulers throughout history who were actually reluctant -- and the second (Washington) is probably just American lore.
Do you truly believe classical liberalism is at all viable in a society that's not heavy on small businesses, small companies and independent farmers ?
Look how it ended up the first time - it stopped being viable due to increased scale of businesses. In the US it started getting replaced by the managerial state in late 1930s and this was mostly finished by 1980s.
shoeonfoot
2hr ago
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone
Marry her.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
From "That Hideous Strength":
“It all began,” he said, “when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it — it will do as well as another. And then gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.”
“What haunting?” asked Camilla.
“How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney — and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites?
But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”
…“So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?”
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
Light is pretty unambiguously the villain and, spoilers,
This week I finished Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See, which a friend had suggested we read together, I hated it, spoilers ahead.
For most of the book, Doerr adopts a tone that felt very Scholastic Book Fair. The two kids existing in parallel, the Marie-Laure blind French girl, and Werner the German radio nerd who ends up in the wehrmacht despite not being all that enthusiastic about Naziism, bumble along through WWII running into mild oppression along the way. No concentration camps, just trains running through. We get wartime privation, but not starvation, and it impacts Germans as much as the French. Werner does go around killing partisans by tracking their radios, but they were partisans. Marie-Laure's father is taken prisoner, but he was concealing a priceless diamond. It's constantly hinted that the German soldiers will do bad things, but they mostly don't. Then we get to the end of the book and there's a fairly explicit gang rape scene when the Red Army gets to Germany.
And it was a real tone shift, and I'm left kind of stumped as to why the author made that choice. The book as a whole is too anti-German to be trying to smuggle in that Stalin was the real villain here and Hitler did nothing wrong, and it's not anti-German enough to be cheering on the vengeful rape of German shiksas like the Hebrew edition of Night. It just felt gratuitous.
Though I disliked the book as a whole, it was well written so I see why it got a Pullitzer, but there was nothing much going on for too much of the book, just not my thing. He does a decent shift at creating a blind protagonist without making her completely useless, but at some level I was still like "Ok, she's blind, the bombs are falling, there's no way out of this that isn't Deus Ex Machina." But the ending fell flat for me.
I also read the novella Fat City by Leonard Gardner after seeing it recommended as a classic boxing book. It's a picaresque of mid-century Stockton, through two struggling bums vaguely trying to make it as professional boxers. It did a good job of capturing the feeling of training and competing in fight sports, and a general sort of struggle of masculinity in the main characters, who have big dreams and minimal capability to reach them. Also a lot of long scenes of farmwork for those of you thinking about illegal immigrant labor jobs. Highly recommend this one, it's very short and tightly written, no extraneous pages.
I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26. My wife getting me a kindle, combined with LibGen, has been a huge improvement in reading for me. I still love physical books, but I also love the infinite access to a huge number of books. On a trip I'm not limited to what I brought with me if it turns out it sucked, if I finish a book at 9pm I can start the next one without even getting up. I'm ahead of my targets, so maybe I can afford to get stuck in on Infinite Jest soon, though I'm now onto On the Marble Cliffs by Junger which is another short one, I'm curious to get more into his mature work after how amazing Storm of Steel felt.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.
On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.
Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).
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