Educator, techie, roadtripper, fan of baseball and US Presidents. Blogging on education at https://teapawt.org/t.co/1GBDm1mW8a and roadtripping at
New Jersey
Joined May 2009
- Tweets8.9K
- Following440
- Followers1.5K
- Likes1.7K
Voting for socialists to cure the shortcomings of capitalism is like taking a cyanide pill to cure the flu. Sure, it will cure what ails you, but that will not even remotely be your biggest problem anymore.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Right now in the US, part of the Democratic Party has decided to play the "socialist" card. Days before the midterms, DSA candidates are winning primaries and the word isn't taboo anymore.
So today I'm going to show you why socialism never works. Not with ideology. With mechanics.
Let's start with a dumb question. How much should a loaf of bread cost?
You don't know. Neither do I. Nobody does. And that's exactly the point.
The price of a loaf of bread is the instant synthesis of millions of pieces of information that no single person holds: the wheat harvest in Kansas, the price of gas for the oven, the baker's wages, the shop's rent, a drought in Argentina, a war on the Black Sea, whether people feel like bread this morning or a bagel.
In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published a paper that should have ended the debate. His argument: without private ownership of the means of production, those means are never exchanged. No exchange, no prices. No prices, no economic calculation. The planner can't know whether a steel mill is worth more than a dam or a hospital. He's flying blind. He can't even tell that he's wrong.
In 1945, Friedrich Hayek drove the point home in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Useful knowledge is scattered across millions of minds. The baker knows things about his neighborhood that no ministry ever will. Prices are a telecommunications system: when tin becomes scarce somewhere in the world, its price rises, and millions of users economize on it without even knowing why. No committee, no ministry, no plan can replicate that. The market isn't an ideology. It's a distributed information processor.
Then Milton Friedman picked up a simple pencil. The wood comes from Washington State, the graphite from South America, the rubber from Malaysia. Thousands of people who don't know each other, don't speak the same language, maybe even hate each other, cooperate to make something none of them could make alone. Nobody gave them orders. Prices were enough.
Now run the experiment in reverse. Set the price yourself.
Cap rents below market: landlords stop maintaining, stop building, housing disappears. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a man of the left, said rent control is the most efficient technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it.
Cap the price of flour: shelves empty, lines form, the black market takes over. Venezuela, 2016. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth, and people standing in line for hours to eat. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans eventually fled.
Socialism smashes the thermometer and then acts surprised that the fever keeps rising.
And this is where it gets serious.
Because when the plan fails, and it always fails, the planner has two options. Admit the plan is wrong. Or blame the people. Saboteurs, speculators, kulaks, enemies of the people.
He always picks the second one.
Hayek saw it in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter with a chilling title: Why the Worst Get on Top. A central plan requires central power. Central power attracts those who crave power. And when reality resists the plan, reality has to be broken. Which means people have to be broken.
Stalin. He collectivizes the land. Output collapses. He blames the peasants and seizes the harvests. The Holodomor, 1932-1933: millions starved to death in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. Add the Gulag, the purges, the deportations.
Mao. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962. Backyard furnaces producing useless steel, insane grain quotas, local officials inflating numbers to avoid punishment, and the state requisitioning food based on those fake numbers. The result: the worst famine in human history. Estimates range from 30 to 45 million dead.
Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge abolish money, markets, property, and empty the cities. The dream of total planning, carried all the way. In four years, roughly one in four Cambodians dies.
Hitler. He sent communists to the camps, but his party called itself National Socialist and the economy answered to the plan and the party. Companies stayed private on paper, but the state decided what to produce, at what price, and for whom. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists of all parties" precisely because he saw the same root: the idea that the state must steer society toward a collective goal, and the individual must step aside.
Different eras. Different continents. Different cultures. Same mechanism. Same ending.
This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the system. Remove prices and you remove information. Remove information and you remove the ability to correct. And when you can no longer correct through prices, you correct through force.
So let me say it plainly. Socialism always starts nice. A rent freeze. Public grocery stores. Make "the rich" pay. Nobody promises the Gulag on day one.
But if America truly goes down this road, the rest of the story is already written. The plan will fail. There will need to be culprits. There will need to be power to punish them. And a socialist government holding the American state apparatus, its surveillance capabilities, its technology, its military, wouldn't be a regional tragedy. It could be the greatest tragedy in history.
The 20th century paid for this lesson with tens of millions of lives. We don't get to forget it in one generation.
Prices aren't the enemy of the people. Prices are the voice of the people.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
A few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.
Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.
Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.
Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.
The tourism industry, barely hanging on by a thread after three years of war, would plunge into the abyss. Above all, the damage to the sense of safety of Israelis, chronic world travelers, would be incalculable.
The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.
No thanks, medals or rewards are sufficient for the heroes who prevented what would undoubtedly have been the most devastating single attack on the State of Israel.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
This Jewish billionaire’s daughter suffered from a devastating brain injury that has left her fighting for her life. His response to that was to not only get her the best possible care, but to spend $400,000,000 of his own money to build the greatest brain research, rehabilitation and recovery institute in the world.
Truly remarkable. The world needs so many more people like Bill Ackman.
If you’re someone who hates the Jewish people, you should never be able to benefit from their accomplishments and gifts ever again.
At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.
I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.
After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.
By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.
The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.
The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).
I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.
When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.
Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.
Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.
Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.
Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.
We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.
Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.
Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.
If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.
With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.
We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.
We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.
Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.
The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.
While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.
On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.
Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.
Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.
Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.
The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.
Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.
We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.
Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.
We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.
We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.
If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.
We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.
We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.
For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
It's important to counter the brainwashing that kids are subjected to in schools, at home. By asking them to look at the facts and use reason to think for themselves.
For example, my daughter came home one day and said America was a bad country for starting a war with another country (Iran). I asked her, why do you think so? She said because the teacher said Trump is a bad man and he started this war.
So I showed her pictures of Iranian women covered head to toe in Niqabs, telling her that's how women there have to wear in order to go outside, or they get thrown in jail. She was shocked and nearly broke down in tears to see the images. I asked her, do you think that's fair, should girls or women be forced to live like that? She said no that's not fair, no girls should have to wear that. Then I told her, the women and girls there do not want to live like this anymore, and they protested in order to end this unjust rule, but the government there slaughtered them instead. She was again shocked. Then I asked her, do you think it's wrong to fight the people who would do this to Iranian women or any woman? Do you think it's wrong to try to help the Iranian women who are fighting against this rule? She said no, the people who do this to women are the bad ones.
Then I told her, do not always believe what the teachers say to you in schools. They do not know or understand everything that's going on in the world. Whether Trump is a bad man or not has nothing to do with this argument, does it? She said she understood. I then told her, when you hear a judgement statement, such as "so and so is a bad man", ask for specific reasons to back that statement. Ask for specific background, context, and circumstances that created their argument. If they cannot provide it, you hold your own thought, and go do research on your own, then learn, and form your own opinion. Do not copy and paste whatever your teacher tells you.
It is so difficult though. Every day there's something. But we must keep up this counter-brainwashing or else we lose our children to the Left once they move onto the higher education. Of course, find the balance, keep it age-appropriate. But my gosh, avoidance is not the solution when we're faced with such aggressive indoctrination by schools. We must push back or we lose the next generation.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Mamdani lied to the @UFT .
Last year, @EndJewHatred, @ShaiDavidai, @LizzySavetsky and I stood outside UFT headquarters with nearly 100 union members to protest their endorsement of @ZohranKMamdani.
Now @NYCMayor is showing the teachers union exactly who he is.
He reversed course on every major education promise he made:
1. Said he would end mayoral control.
→ He renewed it.
2. Promised to fight for smaller class sizes.
→ He cut a deal with Albany to delay the mandate by 2 years.
3. Claimed he would deliver the $10K Respect Check for paraprofessionals.
→ He’s now suing the City Council to stop it.
He talks about “workers’ rights” and “affordability” then fights the lowest-paid educators in the system over his ego.
He doesn’t want anyone else getting credit for helping workers in this city.
Only him.
This is the mayor we are stuck with for 3 more years.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Remember when Mamdani refused to attend the Israel Day Parade because of his "views on the Israeli government."
Well today, Zohran attended the Ecuadorian parade in NYC.
So let’s take a quick look at Ecuador’s human rights record.
To start, Ecuador’s own Truth Commission documented 456 victims of arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearance and killings between 1984 and 2008.
It found evidence of 68 extrajudicial executions and identified 17 forced disappearances. By 2024, only three convictions had been secured from the 119 cases documented by the commission.
Under the current government, soldiers abducted four Afro Ecuadorian boys between 11 and 15 years old. Their incinerated bodies were later found near a military base bearing signs of torture. Eleven soldiers were sentenced to more than 34 years in prison for the forced disappearances. Amnesty International has documented ten people disappeared during five military operations in 2024 and says the militarization ordered by President Daniel Noboa has facilitated these abuses.
Human Rights Watch recently documented Ecuadorian forces arbitrarily detaining Colombian farm workers, beating them, shocking them with electricity, staging mock executions, burning civilian properties and later striking two of those properties with air dropped munitions.
The United Nations has reported allegations of torture, unlawful detention and extrajudicial executions by Ecuadorian security forces. Its Committee Against Torture documented reports of punches, beatings with sticks and metal cables, pepper spray used inside cells, simulated drowning and sexual assault, with only four convictions from hundreds of cases involving abuse of authority and torture recorded between 2020 and 2024.
Ecuadorian forces have repeatedly used excessive force against Indigenous protesters. Noboa’s government accused protesters of terrorism, froze the accounts of Indigenous and environmental organizations, suspended community media and deployed the military against largely peaceful demonstrations. Government officials also organized protests against the Constitutional Court and publicly called its judges “enemies of the people.”
The United Nations recorded more than 680 deaths in Ecuadorian prisons between 2018 and 2023 amid corruption, extortion, weapons trafficking and a collapse of state control. More than 500 detainees have been killed in prison violence since 2021, while military control has brought reports of physical abuse, incommunicado detention and obstruction of medical care.
Ecuador’s former comptroller general, the official responsible for protecting public money and fighting corruption, was sentenced to ten years in a United States prison after taking more than $10 million in Odebrecht bribes and laundering the money in Miami. Transparency International gives Ecuador a score of 33 out of 100 for public sector corruption, ranking it 116th out of 182 countries.
So am I to assume that Mamdani supports all of these things?
Or is it just that he hates Jews?
You tell me.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Reconstruction has scarcely begun in Gaza, only about 5% of rubble has been cleared. Almost none of the pledged aid to Gaza is yet flowing. The key impediment: donors (including Arab donors) require Hamas disarmament as a precondition for aid - and Hamas won't do it.
Humanitarian improvement is held hostage by Hamas, which has put its own dominance ahead of its subject population's human needs.
The Palestinian dilemma is that while their political movements are very successful at stoking anti-Israel odium, those same political movement's feel almost zero concern for the people they purport to speak for.
Israel has many enemies. The Palestinians have few friends. True friends would push for Hamas to lay down its arms so reconstruction can begin.
The strategy of "resistance" has failed again and again since the Arab Revolt of 1936. It's time for a strategy of "Take the deal even if you don't love it because it's better than living in tents waiting for the next war to turn out better for you than the last war did."
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.
Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.
And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.
So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.
Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.
And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.
An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.
Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.
Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.
Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.
Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.
Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.
Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.
Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.
And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.
That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.
Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.
I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.
You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.
But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.
@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
The following Democrats 103 voted yesterday to cut aid to Israel.
Minutes later, they had the chance to cut aid to Jordan.
Not a single one voted yes.
This was never about ending foreign aid.
It was never about opposing foreign wars.
The target is the world's only Jewish state.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
Absolutely outstanding. Standing ovation stuff. This is the vision. This is the voice.
Big deal. MetLife Stadium has hosted the Siyum HaShas twice, and only one combined playoff game from the Giants and Jets.
Someone should explain to Bernie the concept of the "dustbin of history" so he knows what to expect when he gets there.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE CLEAR: NO MORE U.S. AID TO ISRAEL
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on an amendment introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie to cut the $3.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. I strongly support this amendment.
Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself against the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people. But it did not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian population. It did not have the right to kill more than 73,000 Palestinians and wound over 173,000 more — the vast majority of them women, children and the elderly. It did not have the right to destroy virtually the entire infrastructure of Gaza — the schools, the health facilities, the water systems, wastewater plants, the electric grid that a civilian population depends on to survive. It did not have the right to destroy or damage 92% of all housing units in Gaza. In other words, Israel did not have the right to commit genocide. And it did not have the right to escalate its violence and annexation of the West Bank while the world's attention was focused elsewhere.
Tragically, almost five months ago, Israel, with strong support from the Trump administration, launched a reckless and illegal war against Iran — a war that has killed thousands of people and left an already unstable region of the world even more unstable. That war expanded into Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have now killed more than 4,000 people and displaced some 20% of the entire Lebanese population. That is not "defending Israel". These are regional wars of expansion and terror, waged without a clear strategy, and without an end in sight.
The American people are catching on. Polls show that nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters now oppose sending military aid to Israel, as do more than one-third of Republican voters. Just 16% of all Americans support giving Israel unconditional aid.
And I am proud that this past April, 40 out of 47 Senate Democrats — a record number — supported my bill to block arms sales to the far-right, extremist Netanyahu government.
We have enormous unmet needs in our own country. Today, while 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, tens of millions of Americans cannot afford housing, healthcare, childcare and other basic needs. Congress must focus on the needs of their constituents, not an Israeli government that is undermining American values. I urge my colleagues in the House to vote yes on the Massie amendment.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
US Rep. Ro Khanna is a charlatan and dishonest. His tour was halted on the bus because they entered a closed military zone (CMZ) which is prohibited (due to safety) to civilians. Police were called in to discuss the problem with the tour organizer who had repeatedly attempted to enter the CMZ in the past as well. The bus has to wait until the arrival of the officers to the scene, which is what caused the delay. It was not a "detainment" and no one was arrested. Police stated they have already reviewed the body cam footage of police at the scene confirming this account. The tour participants were also briefed and then continued on their way. Much like Rahm Emanuel, this is another example of a propagandist (who behaves as if he is paid by America's enemies) intentionally orchestrating a scene to provoke attention and whine about Israel.
Ro Khanna you are truly pathetic.
US Rep. Ro Khanna said armed Israeli settlers detained his group during a West Bank visit this week, alleging they blocked his vehicle for more than an hour before Israeli security forces intervened.
jpost.com/middle-east/articl…
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
In summary: The New York Times ran "Israeli-trained rape dogs" on its front page without credible evidence.
But when faced with allegations against a U.S. Senate candidate, it ignored the story.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
As perhaps the most visibly recognizable Hasidic Jew in America today, I've spent the last fifteen years meeting tens of thousands of Americans who've never encountered a Jew before, while conducting a more comprehensive field study on antisemitism than any you'll ever read in an academic journal. The conclusions I've reached is that many of the experts who've built careers studying Jew-hatred don't actually understand why it exists, how it spreads or how it can be reversed.
First, many of the loudest voices in the online Jew-hatred ecosystem don't actually hate Jews, they're mostly in it for the grift. Jew-hatred has become their business model because outrage pays and Jews are the product.
Meanwhile, the rank and file are different. Many are predisposed to believe the worst about Jews because they've never actually met a Jew personally, or because of a negative experience which they've generalized to an entire people. So when Jews live an authentic Torah life, treat others with dignity, and genuinely strive to make a Kiddush Hashem, those assumptions often begin to crumble.
Across my years of experience, individual Jews living with authenticity and behaving with humility can accomplish more than those multimillion-dollar campaigns to "fight antisemitism." Too often the instinct is to expose, deplatform, or destroy the lives of anyone expressing antisemitic views instead of engaging in self-reflection. And while there are certainly times when public accountability is necessary, making social and professional destruction the primary strategy often validates the grifters' narrative that "the Jews are trying to silence us," and instead of weakening the movement, it can deepen resentment and push ordinary followers further into it.
At the same time, Jewish tradition teaches that hatred of the Jewish people serves as a wake-up call, urging us toward teshuvah and a closer relationship with Hashem.
If we imagine that we can continue living however we please while defeating antisemitism through political power, social pressure, or public campaigns alone, we risk missing the message entirely. Worse still, as recent history suggests, when we ignore that spiritual dimension and think we can make Jew-hatred disappear through aggressive force, the consequences can be severe. (See how the international Jewish boycott against Nazi goods worked out.)
On the human level, we should engage people, build genuine relationships and make a Kiddush Hashem. On the spiritual level, we should recognize that the ultimate answer is teshuvah.
When Jews make a Kiddush Hashem, the marketplace for antisemitism begins to dry up. The grifters depend on stories -- real, exaggerated, or fabricated -- that reinforce the worst stereotypes about Jews. The more Jews return to Torah and sanctify Hashem's Name through our conduct, the fewer believable stories there are to sell, the less receptive the audience becomes and the weaker the business model of professional Jew-hatred grows.
If we fail to do so, no strategy no matter how sophisticated or aggressive will protect us.
People like Platner are the reason I don’t support doing this across the board with antisemites. Unfortunately, many people who hate us are also just terrible people who have horrible morals and many sins besides hating Jews. Why would we want their support?
There is of course a percentage of people who are simply misinformed abt Jews and could learn and grow when presented with real facts, but many of the “big name” antisemites are simply bad people and I think bringing them over to our side would do our nation a bigger disservice.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross retweeted
הריאות שחייבו אותי להתגייס
אני בחור חרדי.
כל החיים שלי היו תורה, תפילה ומשפחה.
בצבא אין לי מניין קבוע, אין לי סדרי לימוד, קשה לשמור על רמת הכשרות ועל אורח החיים התורני שאני חי לפיו.
אך כשהסתכלתי סביבי בשנים האחרונות, וראיתי את המחירים העצומים שאנשים שילמו עבור עם ישראל, הקושי כמעט נעלם.
ההחלטה להתגייס החלה להבשיל במוחי כבר בבוקר השביעי באוקטובר.
כשיצאתי לבית הכנסת לא ידעתי מאום על הטבח שמתרחש חמישה קילומטרים אוויריים מהעיר שבה אני מתגורר, שמועות קלושות והזויות שהתגנבו לאוזנינו נתקלו בחוסר אמון מוחלט.
במהלך התפילה, כשרקטה נפלה ברח' מול בית הכנסת ואף כוח חירום לא הגיע לזירה, התחלנו להפנים שמשהו גדול אכן קורה.
כעבור מספר דקות נשמע לפתע צרור יריות עז, ופתחתי בריצה אחוזת אמוק לביתי, לאשתי ולילדותיי.
הריצה והיום הנורא שבא אחריה לא הרפו ממני, תחושת חוסר האונים וההבנה שבשעה שאחיי נרצחים ונטבחים, אני נס להסתתר בביתי כשאין לי שום דרך לבוא לעזרתם, היכו בי ללא רחם, והמחשבה הראשונית שהמצב לא יכול להמשיך ככה החלה להבליח לתודעתי.
במשך השנה וחצי שבאו לאחר מכן ראיתי שוב ושוב את המחיר שעם ישראל משלם כדי שאני, אשתי ובנותיי נוכל להמשיך לחיות כאן.
ראיתי מאות לוחמים יוצאים מביתם ולא חוזרים אליו עוד.
ראיתי הורים קוברים את ילדיהם.
נשים צעירות הופכות באחת לאלמנות.
ילדים קטנים שיגדלו כשאת אבא הם מכירים בעיקר מתמונות ומסיפורים.
ראיתי בחורים צעירים שכבר קבעו תאריך לחתונה ולא זכו לעמוד תחת החופה.
כאלה שהשאירו אחריהם אישה בהיריון.
וזאת עוד מבלי לדבר על הפצועים בגוף ובנפש, ועוד ועוד.
ככל שחלפו החודשים, השאלה שהחלה להבהב בי באותו בוקר של שמחת תורה הלכה והפכה קשה יותר להשתקה.
ובמאי 2025 קיבלתי החלטה.
סגרתי את המשרד, אותו פתחתי בדם יזע ודמעות, ויצאתי ללשכת הגיוס.
בשל סיבות אישיות, הליך הגיוס התארך הרבה מעבר לצפוי.
במהלכו נפל דבר.
לפני מספר חודשים, המלחמה נכנסה אל תוך המשפחה שלי ממש.
חמי, עמרם חזן שיח' אב ל־9, התמודד כבר למעלה מעשור עם מחלת ריאות קשה.
בשנים האחרונות מצבו הלך והידרדר, עד שהגיע למצב שבו רק השתלת ריאות יכולה להציל את חייו.
וכך, אט אט, ראינו אותו הולך ונובל אל מול עינינו,
ותרומה אין.
כבר התחלנו בהליך המורכב של השתלה בארה"ב.
אלא שה' רצה אחרת.
ב־ג׳ בשבט תשפ״ו, 21 בינואר 2026, נפל רס״ם במיל׳ עשהאל באב״ד ז״ל.
עשהאל אב לחמישה, נפצע קשה מס' חודשים קודם בקרב בדרום רצועת עזה ונפטר מפצעיו.
לאחר מותו, משפחתו בחרה מתוך אצילות נפש לתרום את איבריו ולהציל חיים.
הריאות של עשהאל הושתלו בגופו של חמי והצילו את חייו.
פתאום המחיר של עם ישראל נשם בתוך הבית שלי.
בכל נשימה של חמי יש היום חיים שניתנו לו בזכות לוחם שיצא להגן על עם ישראל ולא שב לביתו, בזכות משפחה שאיבדה בעל ואבא, וברגע הנורא ביותר בחייה בחרה להעניק חיים למשפחה שלי.
קשה לי להסביר במילים מה ההבנה הזאת עשתה לי.
עד אז ביקשתי להתגייס מתוך תחושת ערבות ושותפות. הרגשתי שאינני יכול לעמוד מהצד בשעה שאחיי משלמים מחירים כבדים כל כך. אבל פתאום זה הפך למשהו אחר.
משירות מתוך ערבות ושותפות - לשירות מתוך תחושת חובה מוסרית, אישית, ראשונה במעלה.
אלא שאז נחתה עליי הבנה נוספת חייה מוחשית ובועטת.
הסיפור הזה לא מתחיל ונגמר בחמי.
לא צריך שבכל משפחה יהיה מושתל ריאות שקיבל את חייו מלוחם שנפל, כדי להבין את הדבר הפשוט הבא:
כולנו נושמים היום בזכותם.
אצל חמי אלו הריאות של עשהאל שמכניסות אוויר לגופו.
אצלנו הריאות הן שלנו - אבל האוויר שבתוכן, הבית שאליו אנחנו חוזרים, הילדים שאנחנו משכיבים לישון - כל אלה מתקיימים בזכות אנשים שיצאו להילחם עבורנו, וחלקם לא שבו.
עשהאל מסר את נפשו עבור עם ישראל, ולאחר מותו העניק לחמי את היכולת לנשום.
רבים אחרים מסרו את נפשם כדי שאני ואתם נוכל לנשום.
באוגוסט הקרוב אתחיל את שירותי הסדיר.
וכן, יהיה לי קשה עם מניין, עם כשרות ועם אורח החיים התורני שלי.
אז מה.
אני נושם.
