Weekly Observations

Prinz Reuss, Shas B'Kiyus, Darryl Cooper, Natalism, and UBI

Jul 27, 2024

I want to try something new in the interest of making all of our lives more thoughtful and interesting. It happens to be that I consume a ridiculous amount of news, articles, and podcasts throughout the week. Some of them are interesting enough as to warrant me to send a few of them out to a couple friends of mine, so I thought why not have a place where I can regularly gather and distribute those links more broadly? Here it is: my weekly observations. If anyone is familiar with Tyler Cowen’s remarkable blog Marginal Revolution, it will be a mix between his “assorted links” post and Niccolo Solodo's “Saturday Commentary and Review”, both of which I highly recommend.

A far-right group in Germany is being put on trial for an attempted coup in which they planned to reinstate an obscure aristocrat named Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss as the new King of Germany. Reuss is known for his anti-semetic beliefs and stated that “the Rothschilds were responsible for the wars of the 20th Century”.

Members of the group, who called themselves the “United Patriots,” believed the government was run by pedophilic, illegitimate politicians who had access to a network of underground military bases. The plotters, prosecutors say, believed in the existence of a secret alliance consisting of sympathetic foreign intelligence services — including ones belonging to the United States and Russia — that would help the group overthrow the deep state once a signal was given.

But as idiosyncratic as their beliefs were, the authorities say, members of the group posed a real danger. The authorities found 380 firearms and 350 other weapons such as knives, axes and clubs. They also found 148,000 rounds of ammunition, explosives, military helmets and protective equipment, along with gold and cash valued at half a million euros, roughly $543,000.

Read the full NYT article here.

An 18 year old girl named Elke Bentley finished Shas (entire Talmud) in 2.5 years. Bentely, who is on her way to Harvard in the fall says she started when she was 16 and utilized Bekiyut style learning while listning to online “Daf” classes.

“On the flip side, you’re not learning all of the classic commentaries and questions and things like that,” she added. “But when you do this at a young age, what you’ve gained is scope. And then you go back and you do it more slowly, and you read all the commentaries and ask all the questions and you bring that whole scope into those questions. So it all just builds on each other.”
Bentley said her favorite way to learn, though, is in-depth, or “iyun.”
“Just because I learned it once in this very surface, fast way, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do it again, and again, and again, and again,” she said.

My Rosh Yeshiva and Elke agree, learning B’Iyun is superior. However, only Elke has finished Shas. Read the full JTA article here.

If you are interested in becoming the most knowledgeable person in your friend group about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict (as well as Arab honor culture, French imperialism in the middle east, and much more), I highly recommend Darryl Cooper’s 6-part podcast series called “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem” on the topic. It is 20+ hours but I promise it is worth it. Knowing this stuff and knowing it well has become even more important after 10/7. It gives you tremendous power not to be overtaken by the hive mind on either side. Listen to it wherever you find your podcasts.
Simone and Malcome Collins are an eccentric couple to say the least. They are part of what I would call broadly the “New Right” and the Rationalist community. Extremely intelligent, they both worked in Venture Capital, Simone even led a secret invite-only social club called Dialog for Peter Thiel, they have become famous for their “Pro-Natalist” stance, they founded pronatalist.org and seek to promote people to have more kids or else they believe the world is heading for a population collapse in the near future which could harm the chances of humanities long term survival. They are “building a new religion for their children” but have decided to give their kid’s a backup religion in case it fails and guess what they chose? Judaism. Watch their fascinating podcast “Based Camp” here:

OpenResearch’s UBI study which gave 3,000 low-income families $1,000 a month for 3 years with no strings attached is in. Sam Altman (of OpenAI) who raised $60 million dollars for the study including $4 million of his own money believes that UBI (Universal Basic Income) may become a crucial part of the future economic landscape as we inch closer to an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Read the full study here.