FJJ -LETTER TO THE EDITOR

 Wool Coat 

VS Puffed Coat

The letter below was written to the FJJ (Flatbush Jewish Journal)  "Letters to the Editor "

It's from a Yeshivishe Lady who laments the fact that the "Oilom Ha'Torah" is no longer wearing Wool Coats and instead choose to wear Puffed Coats!

I'm not kidding! I did think that it must be a prank, but this back and forth in the Letters to the Editor responding to this crazed sicko has been going on for weeks! 

This week she responds holding on to her bizarre rant about puffed coats!

Now this may very well be a prank, but either way, this is a microcosm on what is the thought process of Chardeim and their "Mesorah"! 

Dear Editor

After reading the passionate responses to my letter about wool vs puffer coats, I want to apologize. Clearly, I did not do a good job explaining my position. I’m sorry. Hopefully I can clear things up. 

The most common response was that wool coats “aren’t warm enough.” Give me a break. Our parents and grandparents wore wool in far colder climates than ours, and they survived just fine. Is it less convenient to wear traditional coats in this harsh winter weather? Maybe. 

But sometimes you have to make sacrifices in order to uphold a higher ideal

We’ve seen this play out before. 

The Haskalah did not begin overnight with open rejection of Shabbos, kashrus, or tsnius. It began with small “reasonable” adjustments to mesorah (like shortening the mechitzah), each one justified as harmless and practical. 

We are fortunate that so-called “radical” yiddin stood firm against these “reasonable” adjustments and kept true to their mesorah. If not for them, where would we be today?

 As I said before, “it’s just a coat” is never just a coat. When external standards erode in the name of convenience, standards of behavior soon follow. A person cannot remain firm internally when the externals change with the direction of the wind. Many of us have seen this happen to people we grew up with, or maybe even to ourselves. Pause for a moment and think. You’ll see that I’m right. Putting on a wool coat is a visible declaration that you are part of a mesorah that outlasts the immediate, here-and-now. The fact that it’s less convenient is even more of a reason to make the switch. 

When a man carries himself with this clarity and conviction, it radiates outward: it steadies his marriage, and it earns the respect of his children. I urge everyone to think this over before jumping on the attack bandwagon.

 Mesorah Defende

The harms of eating too much sugar

 I’d like to commend Rochelle Rothman for highlighting the harms of eating too much sugar.

 While mentioning weight gain, mood swings/irritability, fatigue/ low energy, cravings, high blood pressure, acne/premature wrinkling, joint pain, sleep troubles, digestive problems, brain fog and gum disease and cavities, there are several more health issues strongly associated with sugar consumption.

 1. 100 grams (3 oz.) reduces immune response by 50% for up to six hours, increasing the incidence of autoimmune diseases and cancer. It promotes tumor cell growth; cancer cells actually feed on sugar! 

2. Excess sugar is stored as fat, which often gets deposited in the abdominal area. That’s an indicator of insulin resistance, which leads to elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure, and increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.

 3. Also increased is the risk of stroke, aneurysm, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, thyroid issues, and more, including male hair loss. 

4. Mental health patients consumed 200% more sugar than others, studies show. When sugar was removed from prison diets, there was a 90% reduction in prisoner violence. Keep that in mind if you’d like to see your kids fighting less (or focusing better.

5. Sugar causes cellular aging, which leads to shorter lifespans. DNA repair is turned off, leading to inflammation, which is at the root of all chronic disease and aging.

 6. Alzheimer’s is sometimes called Type III diabetes; brain cells become insulin resistant and are starved of energy. Many such patients have seen remarkable improvement and even reversal of their conditions with a keto-type diet.

 7. Excess sugar disrupts cells that keep the colon and gut healthy, which is crucial for the optimal health of body and mind and disease prevention.

The new and much improved food pyramid recommends no added sugar for good reason. According to researchers, sugar is a toxin; no studies have ever shown any benefit whatsoever from consuming it.

 Artificial sweeteners are not the answer; they come with their own set of health risks, and in any case will not help with weight loss. 

What is very concerning is that sugar is highly addictive, and we are giving our children a lot of it – in school and elsewhere. Sugary and highly processed foods make up 80 to 90% of our kids’ (and sometimes even our) diets, displacing the nutrient rich whole foods needed for optimal health. (What’s the likelihood that they will be able to switch to a healthier diet if and when they develop health problems when they’ve become addicted to sugary and processed foods?) 

 We parents and mechanchim (and well meaning candymen) are putting them at unnecessary risk of the chronic diseases and mental health issues listed in Mrs. Rothman’s article  We can do better. 

Calling All High School Educators!

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✨ Applications are now open for the 2026 cohort.

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✈️ Fully funded summer intensive in Israel (July 6–10)
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Limited spots available for high school educators.

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Take out the popcorn: Fiery moments from Bondi hearing on Epstein files

 

Beautiful Sight of Charedie Whose Wife Died Dancing with his Daughters

 

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US to Expand Passport Revocations for Parents Who Owe Child Support

 

 Parents who owe a significant amount of child support soon could lose their ability to travel internationally as the Trump administration expands and steps up enforcement of a 30-year-old law that allows the federal government to revoke American passports until payments are made, three U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

While passport revocations for unpaid child support of more than $2,500 have been permitted under 1996 federal legislation, the State Department had in the past acted only when someone applied to renew their travel document or sought other consular services. In other words, enforcement depended on the person approaching the department for assistance.

Starting soon, however, the department will begin to revoke passports on its own initiative based on data shared with it by the Health and Human Services Department, according to the U.S. officials familiar with the plan. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the change has not yet been publicly announced.

The number of people who could be affected was not immediately clear, but it is believed to be in the thousands. Because of the potentially large universe of those owing child support who currently hold passports, the State Department will make the change in tiers, the officials said.

The first group to be affected will be passport holders who owe more than $100,000 in past-due child support, the officials said. One of the officials said fewer than 500 people meet that threshold and could avoid having their passport revoked if they enter into a payment plan with HHS after being notified of the pending revocation.

The official acknowledged, though, that if and when the threshold is lowered to a smaller past-due amount, the number of those affected will rise significantly. The official could not say when any further changes would take effect or estimate how many people might then lose their passports.

Since the Passport Denial Program began with the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the initiative has taken in nearly $621 million in past-due child support payments, with nine collections of more than $300,000, according to the Office of Child Support Enforcement at the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS did not respond to questions about how many people are in arrears, instead referring the AP to the State Department. The State Department did not immediately respond to a query about the move.

People Wondering Why Rav Landau Needs Notes for a Simple Message??

 

People wonder why a Gadol would need written notes for such a simple message, and the reason is straightforward: most people don’t understand what’s actually happening.

Why would a Rosh Yeshiva, someone who knows Kol HaTorah Kula, require notes to deliver a message that even a young child could articulate? The answer is simple—he is relying entirely on the information provided to him by those around him. As far as I know, Rav Landau doesn’t follow the news and isn’t on social media. Everything he hears comes through his handlers, the askanim who filter and frame the information he receives.

A clear example took place in 2023, six months after October 7th, during the Beit Shemesh mayoral election. Certain Charedi factions were determined to remove Dr. Aliza Bloch, a Shomeret Torah U’mitzvot, and put forward their own candidate, Shmuel Greenberg—who, ironically, they later turned against to the point that he now requires heavy security just to leave his home.

To rally support, they rented a stadium—despite previously insisting that entering such a venue was forbidden—and managed to gather nearly 4,000 people for a Degel HaTorah event. On a Motzei Shabbos, they brought the elderly Rav Landau from Bnei Brak so he could address the crowd. I was there.

Rav Landau spoke for about five minutes, reading from notes. And what was the message?

He declared that this municipal election constituted a “Milchemes Mitzvah.” Therefore, he said, eligible bochurim should close their Gemaras and vote. If they were learning outside Beit Shemesh, Degel would provide buses so they could travel back and forth—a trip that would involve at least five hours of missed learning—all because this was supposedly a “Milchemes Mitzvah.”

This took place during a period of daily IDF casualties, constant sirens and runs to shelters, only months after October 7th. Yet according to this logic, the events of October 7th were not a Milchemes Mitzvah, but voting in a local mayoral race was. It’s hard to make sense of that.

And this brings us back to the original question: why did Rav Landau need notes for a five‑minute speech?

Because he was reading what others prepared for him. That’s the entire point.

The ones mocking Rav Landau are the Chareidim themselves who are afraid what he would say if he didn't have the notes! They think that he is basically a "dummy" and so they feed him crapola and hay and place it in a note for him to read!

זו תורה וזו שכרה

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CNN Black reporters Believe Blacks are too Dumb to have Voter ID

 

Scott Jennings ignites CHAOS on CNN when he asks “how” the SAVE Act strips voting rights from people of color.

ALENCIA JOHNSON: “[Trump] is championing a bill that would take voting rights away from a lot of black people in this country.”

JENNINGS: “Wait, what voting rights is… pic.twitter.com/MDW4YMV4Bd

— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) February 12, 2026

UN Secretary-General António Guterres Congratulates Iran on Anniversary Of Iran Islamic Revolution

 

This is vile and disgusting.

This is the equivalent of congratulating the Nazis on the anniversary of them taking over Germany.

Shame on the UN.

DEFUND THE UN pic.twitter.com/cTVdV8Giwi

— Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری 🇮🇷 (@gghamari) February 11, 2026

Renting your life: The hidden tax of the digital cloud

by Carmen Targownik

 If you ask your grandma what a cloud is, she will tell you that it’s a white and fluffy thing in the sky. In the tech world, too, the cloud is a great concept: You can upload your pictures to a big cloud castle in the sky that keeps them nice and safe. Always there, ready for you whenever and wherever you need it.

I love to rely on the cloud. It gives peace of mind to believe that someone is taking care of my most personal information, without having to worry about backing up a disk.

When we start using a cloud, we click accept and start using its convenience for free, but one day, we receive a ransom note (an email) saying that our storage is full. Either we keep paying monthly to keep both the space and the access to our data available. Or we don’t pay, and our access to our most sensitive and valuable data gets restricted. We don’t just lose the service of storing our images, we lose the access to our memories, our records, our work… The bubble pops and we understand the reality of the cloud: It’s huge warehouses, somewhere far away, in a cold place that will keep the computers from overheating.

Eventually, we pay and start renting our life back. The only way we can access our own data is through a middleman and a monthly fee. The relationship between us and the company changes. Suddenly, they are holding our personal data, and we have to pay our way back.

By uploading our photos to the cloud, we are handing over the sovereignty of our data to a company. Google, Amazon and Microsoft (“the big three”) currently hold around 63% of the market share of cloud infrastructure, and when we use them, we trust them blindly.

These companies are not just “renting out” their storage space for normal consumers. When we use clouds, they double tax us. They earn from our subscription fees, and also from using our data to improve their algorithms, their AI models, etc. (Some companies say that they “anonymize” personal data, but there is no way of knowing.) Their business improves, and they earn even more. In Scott Galloway’s Book “The Four,” he argues that the big tech companies “[…] are in a race to become the operating system for our lives. The prize? A frictionless existence that we pay for with our data, our privacy, and eventually, our agency.”

In November 2025, Amazon and Google announced that their cloud services were starting an Interconnect partnership. It was marketed as a victory for “multi-cloud” convenience, but by linking their infrastructures, these giants have ensured that our data stays within their combined ecosystems. The partnership will make it even harder for us to track who really has access to our data and to withdraw it.

We can argue that clouds are similar to banks. They keep our valuables safe, and they use them for their own investments, right?

In October, an eight-hour outage of the Amazon Cloud services (AWS) affected more than 17 million users across more than 60 countries, according to Ookla Research, costing companies across the US millions of dollars.If banks lose your money, you are protected through deposit insurance.When data gets lost by a cloud, there’s no way to recover it – it’s gone.If we want to switch banks, we can close our account and go to another one.

But “data gravity” prevents us from simply exiting the cloud. As the amount of our data on the cloud grows, it pulls us deeper into the company’s convenient ecosystem. From there, it’s a spiral. The more data you have, the more convenient the cloud is and the harder it is to leave.Removing your data becomes a technical difficulty.

This data concentration on a few tech giants has given them more power than some countries have. They can change the terms of service and raise prices. We, the users, have nowhere else to go, because when it comes to handling digital data, there aren’t enough laws to protect us. We might think that we know how to use these tools, but we can only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the companies use our data.

In December 2025, Time magazine named “Architects of AI” as the person of the year. If we want to keep using advanced tech in 2026, we need to look further than convenience. We need to find solutions that we believe in, to escape the spider web of data. By installing a home cloud — storage we control — we can take back the power from the companies and return to being the true owners of our data. We can take back our sovereignty over our own digital life.