Connect with us

Substacks

In Australia, Jew-Hate Is Out of Control Alex Ryvchin

Published

on

When I was shaken awake by my panicked wife, around 5 a.m. on Friday morning, to the news that our former home had been the target of an antisemitic attack, I was upset—but not shocked. That’s because there is nothing unusual about what happened.

As co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, I spend my days advocating for my country’s Jewish community—which numbers around 120,000 people. And since October 7, 2023, I have woken many times to news like this. Staff, journalists, and politicians have all called in the small hours to inform me that a synagogue is burning, or that cars, daubed with antisemitic slogans, are on fire, or that yet another Jewish business has been vandalized.

But the most recent target of antisemitism in Australia is a building that was, until two years ago, my home—a whitewashed semi in Dover Heights, a comfortable Sydney suburb. This wonderfully ordinary place, which sheltered me, my wife, and our three small daughters from a global pandemic, was set on fire and vandalized. One of the arsonists also scrawled “Fuck Jews” on the side of a nearby car.


Read more

 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Substacks

Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

Published

on

By

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

Published

on

By

Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

Published

on

By

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Shadow Banned

Copyright © 2023 mesh news project // awake, not woke // news, not narrative // deep inside the filter bubble