37.03/ While I'm grateful that Coca-Cola has gone through the trouble to make their products kosher for #Passover, I cannot understand drinking Diet Coke willingly. Honestly, if unlabeled, I'd assume it was some drug-store's generic cola.
37.05/ Two things, so far, that I hope are permanent changes after the pandemic ends:
1. Total disability accommodations in work, school, and entertainment. In 2022, we should be able to zoom into everything we virtually accessed in 2020-21
37.06a/ #ReshetKeshet. I'm tired of the gaslighting, here's the truth: #Passover is difficult. It's meant to be. Your feelings & emotions are valid & true.
The cleaning is arduous & the demand for simcha is a recognized sacrifice.
37.06b/ I call it 'gaslighting' because the mechanism of all mysticism is destabilizing propaganda that tells us we can't trust our senses.
The mystics malign chametz as 'satan' & say asceticism is optimal. We rationalists cry foul at this bunk.
37.07/ Amazon has decided to embrace evil. It's an Internet-era process I'll call 'Facebookization': once a company that does important & useful things becomes a monopoly, their lust for nihilistic greed squeezes every penny from its employees while gouging & hurting customers.
37.08/ Spellcheck... I love you, but I will never, ever use the word 'fir.' I mean 'for' 100% of the time.
I promise I will actively avoid that word even if I were suddenly interested in pine trees.
37.09/ #ReshetKeshet. Speaking of gaslighting (see 37.06), I need to find a filter for google (see 37.07) that allows me to search Torah subjects and not get flooded with messianic links & other supersessionist insanity.
Turn the other cheek & get the heck out of my religion.
37.10/ Ah, for the Venn diagram of periodic table punsters, see the original post & some top replies:
37.12/ Been saying this for years but I'm glad this guy gets the guff first. Metric system has many things going for it... except Celsius. Should've made boiling 1000 not 100?
37.17/ This is profound and true: the mass vaccination effort is the pinnacle of human civilization: mutual aid combined with the highest level of medical & communication technology and conducted by a functioning, caring government.
37.18/ Exactly. This is why we need to excoriate enablers along with the predators/perpetrators. Banning Trump (ym'sh) neutered him. De-platforming WORKS
37.19/ My daughter said her class had an argument over whether an image was of pink vs. purple. I immediately suggested "fuchsia" & showed it to her & she agreed.
Another triumph for my youthful love of the box of 64 Crayola crayons!
37.21/ Filed under "the world can be weird," when I was trying to nail down the size of a 'pras' (see 37.20) I looked up 'egg olive pras size' and discovered a type of egg called an 'olive egger' and I can see the future page of gemara based on this
37.22/ #ReshetKeshet HOLY GUACAMOLE! Hebrewbooks has just uploaded every volume of "אספקלריא" Aspaklaria, the self-described "compendium of Jewish thought." This is an amazing series that both expensive & huge. Now it's free & searchable!
37.23/ This is good advice: 8 oz. of water for each piece of matzah. I've known people who had significant deleterious health effects from too much matzah. No joke. It's almost literally like eating glue, if you're not careful.
37.24/ As an orthodox rabbi, it's odd to see a controversy involving race insensitivity to NOT be about something orthodox did. As a sociologist, I'll say this type of appropriation seems sadly inevitable for a type of reflexive, unthinking syncretism.
37.26/ Did not know this. Not surprised that the indifference was basically misogyny.
I'll look further into it b/c the Genovese murder has taken on mythic value and it'd be valuable to turn it into a model of the culture for enabling abuse
37.28/ I'm running out of time before #Shabbat, but this Aesop fable reminds of the dvar Torah I gave about the 'rasha' of the four children. #Passover
37.30/ I hope the analysis in this short thread is correct, that the GOP prefers to legislate through their stolen courts because doing so in Congress exposes their terrible policies & is nearly always a failure
37.33/ Exactly. I mean, I was reluctant to jump on the criticize Birx Bandwagon because of the inherent structural and cultural misogyny against women in power... but boy howdy she was terrible
102.02/ Ambivalent Shabbas for me because while I was in rage-sorrow over the grievous injustice & harm wrought by the lawless RedHats, I also saw Shabbas as a refuge from the news.
102.03/ Parental Achievement Unlocked: just sent two of my kids on the train, travelling alone for their first time on their own, to see their grandparents.
100.03/ In honor of the goofiest holiday, here's one of my favorite @TheOnion headlines ever: theonion.com/nation-hoping-…
(This is my long-time custom)
99.02/ A good example of living in two worlds, religious and secular, is the coincidence of two sacred days: the 2nd day of #Shavuot on #DDay. Last night, after Yom Tov, only after reading the news a bit did my mind shift from "sacred to my religion" to "sacred to my citizenship"
99.03/ Pedantry Corner: it irks me to read divrei Torah about #Shavuot that enshrine incredibly recent customs as facts to derive universal truths. "This is the reason why Jews stay up all night..." or "why we eat dairy" - nope. Please don't make fads into load-bearing verities.
98.02/ Valuable thread about the gun industry and I learned from him an excellent term I will now incorporate into my social theory: Agnotology = "the cultural production of ignorance."
98.03/ Wow: "The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members." (Scientific American) scientificamerican.com/article/the-sc…
97.02/ #ShavuaTov everyone. My wife texted from Israel that she got positive PCR test when she landed in Israel - one day before they rescinded that requirement! She's asymptomatic, thank God, but I just don't know how it could've been avoided b/c the 'rona is rampant y'all.
97.03/ It was in the 90s today and my downstairs A/C broke days ago and I can't get a guy here until Tuesday. I told them they can prioritize others because my upstairs A/C works, Thank God, so it's not a safety issue for us. But I wouldn't mind it getting fixed soon.