Canada’s Carney embraces tighter ties with E.U. despite Trump warning

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/09/17/trump-suggests-canada-joining-eu-could-be-hostile-act/

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed European lawmakers after E.U. officials said Canada could become the bloc’s first “associate member.”

 Brushing aside new threats from President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday made a forceful case for pulling closer to the European Union in the face of Washington’s hostility.

Asked about Trump’s remarks, Carney told reporters in Strasbourg, “Canadians are united that nobody is going to tell us what language we speak, nobody is going to dictate our culture, or with whom we can strike agreements.”

Carney Says Canada and E.U. 'Are Not Fair Weather Allies' as Trump Threatens Europe Over 'Hostile Act'

 https://time.com/article/2026/09/17/canada-european-union-membership-carney-trump-tariff-threats/

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday welcomed the prospect of Canada becoming an “associate member” of the E.U., just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “laughable.”

When speaking about forging closer ties with the E.U., Carney referenced seeking strategic autonomy through “deep co-operation in the full range of strategic capabilities, including critical minerals, defense industrial capacity, AI and compute, energy security, space and payments.” He insisted Canada and Europe must not be dependent on “individual nations or individual companies” as this “creates vulnerabilities, particularly when supposedly global companies prove national in the breach

RFK Jr. signals vaccine skepticism will continue

 https://www.axios.com/2026/09/17/rfk-vaccine-safety-anti-vaccine-gathering

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday returned to the the anti-vaccine group he founded, using a keynote address to signal the Trump administration isn't done questioning the safety of routine shots and expanding carveouts to federal mandates.

He again questioned the safety of routine childhood vaccines and asserted they play a role in the development of chronic illnesses — questions that ignore decades of science supporting the vaccines' safety.

The big picture: A pre-midterm pause on Kennedy's vaccine rhetoric ended weeks ago, when he stood with the president as Trump signed an executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccinations, splitting the childhood MMR vaccine into three shots and delivering vaccines at separate medical visits.

Vance secretly tried to help Clinton defeat Trump in 2016

 https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/09/17/report-vance-secretly-tried-to-help-clinton-defeat-trump-in-2016/

Before he was Trump's running mate, Vance reportedly pressed a top Clinton adviser to fight harder in the Midwest, according to Vanity Fair.

A person who served as a liaison between Vance and Clinton's campaign told the magazine that Vance asked to be connected with Sullivan, who later went on to serve as national security adviser under President Joe Biden. At the time, the future vice president was known mainly for his best-selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," which was later adapted into a popular and influential Netflix series.

Vance's office denied the report ouright. "A lot of people asked the vice president for advice in 2016," his spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk, said. "He never worked for any campaign, but he called on both Republicans and Democrats to take care of working-class towns like Middletown, Ohio. We reject 100% the claim that he tried to help Hillary win."

In 2016, Vance publicly declared that he could not vote for either Trump or Clinton, and ultimately cast his ballot for independent candidate Evan McMullin. At the time, he even warned that Trump could become "America's Hitler." The turnaround came in 2021, when Vance aligned himself with Trump and the MAGA movement.

Freud: The Making of an Illusion

"But Freud, even stripped of his scientific pretensions, is destined to remain among us as the most influential of twentieth-century sages. Without those pretensions, in fact, his cultural sway becomes a more intriguing phenomenon. Although the peers who knew his writings perceived the flaws in his system,6 intellectuals in later years were spellbound by his self-portrayal as a lone explorer possessing courageous perseverance, deductive brilliance, tragic insight, and healing power. Much can still be learned from that episode of mass infatuation, in which I myself naïvely participated fifty years ago. And the seriocomic history of the psychoanalytic movement itself is instructive as a cautionary demonstration of what can happen when a pseudoscience, lacking any objective means of adjudicating internal differences of judgment, becomes a worldwide enterprise whose outposts inevitably loosen their ties with the founding c"

 "By exaggerating Freud’s competence in various respects, this Freudolatry has obscured the central drama of his career. His temperament and self-conception demanded that he achieve fame at any cost. His apologists tell us, as Freud himself did, that the cost was irrational opposition from a prudish world. As we will see, however, the cost was much steeper: it was nothing less than his integrity as both a scientist and a physician. Although many readers expect a sensible book about Freud to manifest its objectivity by weighing certain hard-won contributions against certain errors or excesses, such predetermined evenhandedness renders him more puzzling than he actually was. We have been told, for example, that he disregarded every element of scientific prudence and that he achieved fundamental breakthroughs in psychological knowledge.8 How, then, did he do it? No one can say; the attempted explanations vaporize into the useless notion of “genius.” It is better, I suggest, simply to ask what the biographical evidence tells us at every juncture. If, as a result, we lose a former hero, we may at last gain a consistent picture of the man."

Start reading this book for free: https://read.amazon.com/kp/kshare?asin=B01NAYNITF&ref_=kar_wh_ca

Here’s what a Fed rate hike means for your mortgage, car loan and credit cards

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/16/heres-what-fed-rate-hike-means-your-mortgage-car-loan-credit-cards/

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time since 2023, but that won’t mean the mortgage rate or car loan you’ve been eyeing will suddenly shoot up.

Fed action is one piece of the puzzle in how banks determine loan rates and could contribute to a trend of interest rates slowly rising over time

Fed rate changes often have a more direct effect on shorter-term loans, or loans with variable rates, such as adjustable-rate mortgages. Those rates can move up and down as the Fed’s rate does.

Vance: US cannot let its Mideast foreign policy be ‘subservient to Israel’

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/vance-us-cannot-let-its-mideast-foreign-policy-be-subservient-to-israel/

US vice president says allies sometimes disagree, Trump has shown he’s ready to ‘part ways’ with Netanyahu for sake of American interests; envoy Huckabee insists relationship ‘solid’

US Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that Washington can’t let its policies in the Middle East be “subservient” to those of Israel, and must place its own interests first.

Asked if America would go to war with Iran or some other power to defend Israel against an existential threat, Huckabee said only, “If it was in America’s best interest, the president would act. But that’s what he’s required to do.”

Sen. Cassidy says measles surge will be administration’s ‘terrible legacy’

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/09/16/trumps-third-surgeon-general-nominee-nicole-saphier-face-senate/

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) on Wednesday said the nation’s worst measles outbreak in the United States in 35 years is “going to be a terrible legacy for this administration,” citing recent deaths in Pennsylvania.

“Misinformation and misguided policies are leaving children and adults unprotected against disease that we know how to prevent,” Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said at the outset of a hearing for three key administration nominees.

“It deeply concerns me to see politicians giving medical advice which has zero scientific backing. Scaring mothers into delaying or even altogether skipping their child’s vaccine is wrong, and it makes America sicker, not healthier,” said Cassidy, who lost his primary bid for reelection this year.

Psaki: Donald Trump does not appear to know what A.I. is

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

 "Next, we consider the science of psychology. Incidentally, psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease—lots of different “spirits,” etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit which comes into the air; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease; on the other hand, his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been checked carefully by experiment, and there is no way to find a list of the number of cases in which it works, the number of cases in which it does not work, etc."

Start reading this book for free: https://read.amazon.com/kp/kshare?asin=B004OVEYNU&ref_=kar_wh_ca

Essays After Eighty

 "After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other—thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty began to extend the bliss of fifty—and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances."

Start reading this book for free: https://read.amazon.com/kp/kshare?asin=B00HK3F0B4&ref_=kar_wh_ca

Tumah why Prohibhited

 Chinuch (159) The wisdom of God is greater than all wisdom and that He only commands a thing for our good and for our great benefit — we have no difficulty or question in all of the prohibition of foods and distancing of impurity, in everything that the benefit to us is not known and graspable by investigation; as we truthfully know, it is all for the good. And do not wonder, my son, about the matters of impurity, if it is very hidden from every creature — as it is possible that impurity injures the soul and makes it a little sick. 

Chinuch (362) The commandment to send the impure out of the camp of the Divine Presence: It is known to the Sages that the matter of impurity weakens the power of the intellect and mixes it up and separates between it and the pure and perfect Elevated Understanding. And it will be separated until it is purified. And it is as it is written regarding the matter of impurity  “and do not become impure with them and be impurified  in them” —The sources of intellect are stupefied by impurity. Hence it is not fitting for a person who is sullied by impurity to be in the holy and pure place, wherein the spirit of God is found And this matter can be compared metaphorically to the palace of a king from which we distance any man that is leprous or disgusting in his body, or even in his clothing. 

Derech HaShem (01:05): And there are surely many different levels about the matter of the powers of evil that we mentioned, and that which is influenced by them. And generally that which is influenced by them is called impurity, darkness, pollution, mundane or that which is similar. And that which is influenced by the shining of His countenance, is called holiness, purity, light, blessing and that which is similar to it

Kli Yakar (Vayikra 21:02) For his kin. The reason for the prohibition of impurity is because of the spirit of impurity that remains attached to the human body. Therefore it is said he shall not become impure for a soul and it does not say “by a soul” because the soul itself is pure and has no aspect of impurity. However, the soul is the cause of impurity because all other living creatures that do not have a rational soul but only a life force — their death is merely the separation of the four elements, and the Angel of Death is not involved with them at all. Therefore, they do not have severe impurity. But the human soul does not depart except through the Angel of Death, who removes it from there against its will,

Mamar HaIkkarim (03)However the truth of the existence of good and evil is that the Master placed holiness and impurity into the world. The explanation of holiness is the existence of closeness to Him and that of impurity is the existence of distance from Him. Holiness is the impact that the Master, effects upon someone who is fitting for it and the influence that descends upon him. And impurity is the distancing that G-d distances Himself, and the absence that He so produces. However the truth is that the Master, created various spiritual powers for this purpose. And darkness and pollution are effected by them, such that in every place that you find this pollution, He will remove His holiness from there and remove His light from there, . And these are called the powers of impurity. 

How R. Moshe Feinstein wrote responsa, and what was his window to the world.

https://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-r-moshe-feinstein-wrote-responsa.html

 Shaul Seidler-Feller conducted an interview with Rabbi Moshe Tendler in which he discusses his illustrious father-in-law Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. The middle paragraph, where R. Feinstein's four-step method of writing responsa is described, is particularly interesting:

My shver was uniquely sensitive to society. Despite what they write in all the books about him, my shver never failed to read the Yiddish newspaper – either the Tog in the early years or the Morgn-Zhurnal later on – cover-to-cover every single day. People publish that he would walk down the street and avert his eyes when he passed by newspaper stands. There are a thousand talmidim of his who will testify, “I bought the paper and handed it to him in the lunchroom in the yeshivah,” but it does not make a difference for some people – they do not want to hear that. Even when he was not well and the doctor insisted that he must lie down to sleep for an hour, he would go home, put on a bathrobe, and smuggle a newspaper into the bedroom so that his wife would not see it. He sat there reading the whole time, rather than sleeping. I used to ask him, “Why do you read this chazeray (junk)?” He would respond to me, “Dos iz mayn vinde” – this is my window [to the world]. He understood society and his piskei Halachah show that. He used to say, “People think that because I’m aware of society, I became a meikel (lenient decisor). What do they want me to do – paskn incorrectly? I’m not a meikel – I paskn the way it has to be. The Halachah takes into account societal factors.” This willingness to be exposed to society made his teshuvos more meaningful and more acceptable.

Journalism, Controversy, and Responsibility: halachic Analysis

 https://www.daat.ac.il/daat/english/journal/oppenheimer-1.htm

 I would, however, like to discuss whether there are halachic guidelines involved in newspaper reporting. How should a Jewish newspaper conduct its investigative reporting? For that matter, what is our obligation as readers? Does Halacha take a position on whether and how stories should be reported in the press. The public revelation of an impropriety can result in a lesson for others in the greater community, even if the transgressor refuses to mend his ways. The Talmud tells us that we should expose the hypocrites, i.e. those people who pretend to be righteous. Otherwise, people might emulate such an individual, believing his flawed behavior to be proper. Moreover, when he is published, people would incorrectly surmise that his "righteousness" didn't protect him. This would result in a chilul HaShem, a desecration of G-d's name.46 For this reason, Rabbi David ben Chaim HaCohen (Radach) wrote a public criticism of a rabbi who acted inappropriately in the bestowal of a Get and refused to concede his wrongdoing.47

The prohibition of lashon hara does not apply where the information is needed for a reason. It also does not apply when the subject of the information is a wicked person.48 The Chafetz Chaim writes that if there are persistent rumors about an individual's transgressions, and if the general public opinion is that this person is suspected of being guilty of these transgressions, he may be considered a wicked person and it is permitted to shame him.49 Similarly, the Talmud tells us that it is permitted to embarrass someone who is reputed to be an adulterer.50 It is even permitted to embarrass his parents.51 Since the purpose of the embarrassment is to effect a change in the wrongdoer's behavior embarrassing the person's parents has the effect of bringing additional pressure to effect this change. This ruling applies only when a person repeatedly transgresses and deservedly has a reputation for this behavior.52

The Talmud53 relates that there was once a young rabbi who developed a distasteful reputation. Ritva writes that it involved his meeting privately with unmarried women.54 Even though the community needed this young rabbi's Torah instruction, Rabbi Yehuda concluded that it would be a chilul HaShem to allow a reputed sinner to teach Torah to those who are aware of his alleged transgressions. Furthermore, suggests Ritva, covering up the transgression and allowing him to continue to teach would also constitute a desecration. Rabbi Yehuda, therefore, excommunicated him, even though the community would be deprived of the young rabbi's talents.55 We see from here that even if a person performs an important community function if his behavior is offensive, he may not continue in his community positions? This article will explore these issues.

Rabbi Greenblatt told this writer that there was a Yeshiva Day School principal who was abusive to children in his school. The incidents were investigated and found out to be true. The principal had a year to go in his contract and agreed to go quietly after the year would be up. An assistant principal was hired for the specific purpose of supervising the behavior of the principal. This solution was recommended by the posek to whom the problem was referred. What would have happened had the principal refused to go along with this solution? Rabbi Greenblatt said it would then have been appropriate to go to the newspaper and write an article saying there was a principal who was accused of mistreating children. The name of the principal should not be mentioned so that there should not be further embarrassment to him. If he still refuses to accept the posek's decision, then his name and more details can be written because the rights of the community supersede the rights of the individual who is threatening the welfare of the community, according to Rabbi Greenblatt. Once the principal agrees to the plans for his departure, no other articles specifically referring to him may be written since that would cause needless embarrassment.