The dumb kids aren’t going to help us much. So we might as well concentrate our resources on the smart kids.
Why This 14-Year-Old Kid Built a Nuclear Reactor
In his quest to better the world,Taylor Wilson captured the interest of Homeland Security and ended up with radioactive pants.
* The Eye of Sauron has now turned to Prairie View, Texas:
“Texas County’s Racial Past Is Seen as Prelude to Sandra Bland’s Death”
Prairie View was so racist in the past that their government funded a college for black people there 140 years ago, but never mind. In other countries with oppressed minorities, the government funds colleges for them also – there is the University of Gypsies in Romania, Rohingya U. in Burma, etc.
Apparently, white people harm black bodies even when said black bodies string themselves up – a virtual lynching for a virtual age.
If you listen to the tape, the traffic stop goes reasonably well until the trooper asks Bland to put out her cigarette and she refuses. You would think by now that all black parents have had The Talk with their kids and that part of the Talk is that if a cop makes a reasonable request that you do not invite trouble on your head by disobeying him. Failing to do so displays a lack of common sense. Maybe Sandra Bland wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but I think this goes beyond that – there is some sort of willful desire to push the limits to see how much you can get away with due to your “racial immunity” and sometimes the racial immunity fails and you reap the whirlwind. All she needed to do was put out the cigarette and 5 minutes later she would have been on her way but she couldn’t bring herself to do that much.
* A prominent Democrat, retired four star General Wesley Clark, thinks the FBI should identify “radicalized” Americans and toss them in re-education camps just like the communists. He said this on national television but no one was outraged. If an American seems upset by the loss of a girlfriend or can’t get a job and may do something violent, lock them up says the General.
* On the weekend in Chicago, 32 people were shot, of whom 6 died. Country not shaken.
Comments on Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites its History by Marc B. Shapiro (Oxford – Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015).
Bar Ilan professor Aryeh A. Frimer writes:
But what I found particularly troubling with Changing the Immutable was the last chapter, which deals with lying in pesak. After going through the many examples Shapiro cites, the reader is left with one clear impression. One sometimes needs to be careful about trusting a Posek, since he may well be misrepresenting something in his ruling. It could be the source and authority of the prohibition. For example, is the prohibition based on a biblical commandment (positive or negative), rabbinic edict, custom or mere public policy (slippery slope) considerations? Alternatively, the expressed reason may not be the real grounds for the prohibition. In addition, the application may be much broader than halakhically permitted. To my mind these are shocking revelations: these are not sins of omission but commission; the perpetrators are scholars and religious leaders; and these deviations constitute intellectual dishonesty at its worst.
Our author is not insensitive to this dissonance. In an attempt to explain how these scholars justify not being fully honest in pesak, Shapiro writes in the last two pages of the book (pp. 284-285) about “redefining truth.” He indicates that these decisors see nothing wrong in what they are doing, since their ultimate goal is the “higher good”. As they see it, they have ultimately prevented their respective communities and congregants from sinning and deviating from the proper path of shemirat mitsvot. The fact that these scholars have bent the truth, and distorted Jewish law in the process, is of lesser importance. The ends in these cases, justify the means.
It is with these jarring observations that the book comes to an abrupt end, without any further comment or soul-searching. This is despite the fact that on page 239ff, Shapiro brings one citation from Hazal after another about the centrality of truth, and the seriousness of the sin of lying. After all, the Torah itself commands us: “mi-Devar sheker tirhak” – “From untruthfulness, distance thyself” (Exodus 23:7). If what the author writes in the last chapter is true, then Hazal’s eloquent statements about the importance of honesty have become nothing but a mockery. It raises serious moral questions with insufficient and unsatisfying answers. How are we now supposed to educate our children and talmidim as to the cardinal nature of truth and truthfulness?! How are we to live with such a clash between theory and practice?
Marc B. Shapiro responds:
I understand why Professor Frimer is troubled by what I wrote, and to a large extent my conclusions diverge from his own. All I would say is that the matter is complex, and rather than attempt to simplify matters, as I feel Frimer has done, we must attempt to understand how the same Sages who spoke about the importance of truth could at times countenance departure from it. This is a challenge that requires sensitivity and nuance, and appreciation of changing times and values. When Frimer sees a text that permits false attribution, he sees prevarication and hypocrisy. But a historically attuned outlook would seek to understand rather than condemn. Ironically, it is Frimer who is judging the Sages and decisors, because if their ideas do not conform to his understanding then these ideas are regarded by him as problematic.
Thus, Frimer cites the famous 1865 pesak din of Michalowce and tells us that R. Moses Schick and R. Esriel Hildesheimer opposed it since they saw it as departing from the truth. While their position is certainly significant, what about the fact that among Hungarian rabbis they were a minority, and most of the leading Hungarian rabbis supported the pesak? How is my argument refuted by citing Rabbis Schick and Hildesheimer if they were opposed by most of their colleagues? Doesn’t the fact that most of the Hungarian rabbis opposed Rabbis Schick and Hildesheimer support my position?
As for the various rabbinic opinions cited by Frimer, I don’t deny that these opinions exist, and in my book I refer to Frimer’s famous article on women’s prayer groups in which he cites these opinions. But I also make the point that there is an alternative tradition which allows much more leeway for authorities to at times diverge from the truth. I also believe, contrary to Frimer, that this is a mainstream position. Since this position is held by R. Ovadiah Yosef and R. Hayyim Kanievsky, I don’t see how it is possible for one to state that it is not a mainstream position.
The point of the chapter, however, was not to advocate for one position or the other, but to focus on the alternative tradition, the existence of which is more or less suppressed today. I was explicit that my aim was to show how far some were willing to go in sanctioning deviations from the truth, and I indicate that there are views in opposition to these. However, my intent was to study the views of those with a “liberal” perspective on the importance of truth. It is this tradition that I wished to explore, and to rescue it, as it were, from the well-intentioned apologetics. I never state that this is the only authentic position. On the contrary, one can find the opposite perspective presented in numerous articles. This is why I thought it was important to present alternative views, from the Talmud until the present, views which I think show that there is a rabbinic conception of the Noble Lie…
To Frimer, and others like him who have the same reaction after reading chapter 7, I can only say that modern views of how to understand texts, and what we today regard as truth, cannot be used as a measure with which to judge people who lived in a very different time and had a very different understanding of these sorts of matters. It is their understanding that I seek to explore, rather than foisting my own value judgments upon them. Unlike Frimer, who is involved in halakhic writing and attempting to influence the community in religious matters, I write from a more “objective” perspective, without such concerns. As such, while Frimer wishes to “uproot” what he regards as unacceptable views of certain poskim. I seek to understand the phenomenon and to describe it.
When, on p. 284, I speak about redefining truth, I am not speaking about poskim per se but about how to understand the entire phenomenon that I have documented in the book. The question is how does the importance of truth coexist with what we have seen, and it is in this context that I discuss how truth need not be seen as equivalent to factual or historical truth.
I agree with Frimer that none of the great poskim supported lying in pesak as a normative option on a regular basis. Yet as I have already indicated, I believe that there is a tradition that allows for not being frank at certain times, when it is thought that other values are at stake. In the book I state that we should understand this position in a sympathetic fashion even if it is at odds with how today we generally approach matters.
Frimer asks how are we supposed to educate our children and students as to the importance of truth and truthfulness if what I say is correct. This is a good question with which educators need to struggle, but it is not a refutation of what I have written. If my position is correct, the world will not collapse. It will just be one more Torah matter, alongside Amalek, yefat toar, slavery, homosexuality, etc., that at certain times is not in line with contemporary values.
In rural, small-town Iowa, a group of parents and community leaders is seeking to prevent students from the local taxpayer-funded middle school and high school from attending future versions of an anti–bullying conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens.
The last one — in April — left many of the denizens of Humboldt, Iowa up in arms, reports Des Moines NBC affiliate WHO-TV.
Iowa Safe Schools, an activist group out of Des Moines, hosted the conference.
It was quite something.
Among the nearly two dozen speakers, “only two” addressed bullying, one attendee estimated, according to EAGnews.org.
The rest of the sessions involved issues such as “how to pleasure their gay partners.”
Middle school girls from Humboldt (pop.: 4,690) had the opportunity to learn “how to sew fake testicles into their underwear in order to pass themselves off as boys.”
One speaker wore a dress made out of condoms to which could be “used as needed.” . . .
Nate Monson, executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, said parents who worry about middle school kids hearing about anal sex with strap-ons and analingus are “disgusting.”
“It’s incredibly frustrating that adults are being the problem and being the bully,” Monson told the Des Moines NBC affiliate.”
My observation of my father and mother’s actual belief is this: since everyone is naturally gay, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited. Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become “who they really are.” It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other “isms.” If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be “normal” and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish. As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as “straight culture” goes the way of the dinosaur. As my mother used to say: “Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”
I know, I know. The stupidity of that particular thesis is boundless, and the actual consequence is forty-year-olds in therapy for sexual abuse, many, many suicides, and ruined lives for just about EVERYONE. But someone needed to say it. Will anyone hear it? There were six Johnny Does at my father’s trial, who would not testify, and two victims, who did. One of the victims I am in touch with. He was silenced so fiercely by fans of my mother years ago that he is not able to talk about it to this day. I don’t know the fate of all the Johnny Does, but I do know one of them is dead in his forties from an eating disorder, never having been able to talk about what happened, and I know at least one of the people on the list of 22 names I gave the cops as a potential abuse victim died from suicide last year. I also know a number of victims of my father who would not testify because they love him. As a personal note, I can understand why: of my parents, he was by far the kinder one. After all, he was only a serial rapist. My mother was an icy, violent monster whose voice twisted up my stomach.
A very brief note on my “stepmother:” she now denies ever having been gay, after 22 years with my mother, and she has married a man. So what was was she “born”? Was she born gay, and is now living in “denial” of her “true nature” as the gays would have it, or was she besotted in a childish way with my mother, who did what celebrities do, and took advantage of her innocence and emotional infantility? She was 26 when she got involved with my mother, and told me later she felt she had been “molested” by my mother. I can’t use that word for her: she was 26. But she DID call my mother “mommy” and most of the emotional content of their relationship was an attempt to prove that she was a “better daughter” than I was: a competition that for me, was over before it began. I am my mother’s daughter. It is a biological reality. Giving my mother orgasms does not make my stepmother a better daughter, simply a fool. And as it can be noted now, she MUST be the “better daughter” because I blew the whistle. I don’t speak to her.
This March I met Katy Faust online: one of the six children of gays who filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court opposing gay marriage. We corresponded, and I left CA. I am still reeling from the death of my last bits of denial. It IS the homosexuality that is the problem. It IS the belief that all sex all the time will somehow cure problems instead of creating them that is the problem.
So I have begun to speak out against gay marriage, and in doing so, I have alienated most of even my strongest supporters. After all, they need to see my parents as wacky sex criminals, not as homosexuals following their deeply held ethical positions and trying to create a utopia according to a rather silly fantasy. They do not have the willingness to accept the possibility that homosexuality might actually have the result of destroying children and even destroying the adults who insist on remaining in its thrall.
Now for all well-meaning people who believe I am extrapolating from my experience to the wider gay community, I would like to explain why I believe this is so: From my experience in the gay community, the values in that community are very different: the assumption is that EVERYONE is gay and closeted, and early sexual experience will prevent gay children from being closeted, and that will make everyone happy.
If you doubt me, research “age of consent” “Twinks,” “ageism” and the writings of the NUMEROUS authors on the Left who believe that early sexuality is somehow “beneficial” for children.
Due to my long experience with the BSDM community (bondage/discipline, Sado-Masochism) it is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are. To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.
What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial, and the sure knowledge (don’t think for a second that they DON’T know) that the only way to produce another homosexual is to provide a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be “ruined” by attraction to a girl.
If you’re OK with that, and you might not be, it is worth your consideration. If you think I am wrong, that is your privilege, but watch out for the VAST number of stories of sexual abuse AND transgenderism that will come about from these gay “marriages.” Already the statistics for sexual abuse of children of gays are astronomically high compared to that suffered by the children of straights.
Naturally my perspective is very uncomfortable to the liberal people I was raised with: I am “allowed” to be a victim of molestation by both parents, and “allowed” to be a victim of rather hideous violence. I am, incredibly, NOT ALLOWED to blame their homosexuality for their absolute willingness to accept all sex at all times between all people.
But that is not going to slow me down one bit. I am going to keep right on speaking out. I have been silent for entirely too long. Gay “marriage” is nothing but a way to make children over in the image of their “parents” and in ten to thirty years, the survivors will speak out.
He became known in 2012 when he founded the White Student Union, a white pride organization that patrolled the Towson University campus in Maryland to protect students from a perceived wave of black-on-white crime. Since then, he has proved adept at angering anti-racists and racists equally. At an annual conference for Stormfront, one of the world’s largest white nationalist online forums, in November last year, he managed to get himself barred from all future Stormfront events by giving a speech titled “Death to America,” in which he called for nothing short of the complete dismantling of the United States.
“I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power,” Heimbach says. “All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogenous states. In countries where races are mixed, one race will always dominate the others. That is why we need separation. Not because the white race is better than the black race. We need to stop the hate and separate.”
Still, for all his talk about respect for other races, his politics, like most others on the far right, has a prominent streak of anti-Semitism. He firmly believes that the Jews are working diligently behind the scenes to eradicate the white race, faith and culture. “We can’t win against them by arguing,” he said at the Stormfront conference. “You can’t out-Jew the Jew. It’s like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, eventually someone’s going to knock the board over and poop on it. Let’s stop worrying about out-Jewing them or outsmarting them. Let’s just stand for what we believe in, which is faith, family and folk — the three things that make us a nation.”
This story sounds pretty typical of black-white relations. We have a hard-working white woman who does a business deal with a charming black guy who does not pay her, lies, and then kills her.
Ambition brought Carrie Jean Melvin to Hollywood, where she chased a career in entertainment between waitressing and working odd jobs.
Unlike so many with similar dreams of stardom, Melvin had a side gig that police say led to her death.
On a Sunday night in early July, as Melvin, 30, walked toward a restaurant near Sunset Boulevard with her boyfriend, someone walked up behind them, aimed a shotgun at her head and pulled the trigger. The gunman fled in a black sedan, police said.
Following weeks of investigative work, Los Angeles police on Friday arrested the man who they say fired the shot: Ezeoma Obioha.
A onetime security guard with a fledgling clothing line and civic ties, Obioha, 31, had contracted with Melvin’s newly launched social media company to market his business, LAPD Lt. John Radke said. A dispute erupted when Obioha wrote her a check that bounced and she threatened to take him to court, authorities said. She never received the several hundred dollars she was owed, police said.
“I’m thankful that he was apprehended and arrested, but we can’t celebrate,” her father, Bernie Melvin, said Saturday. “This was a violent, senseless, meaningless act.”
Her father said he knew his only daughter was dealing with a client who had written a bad check. The ordeal strained her finances and forced her to add waitressing shifts. She couldn’t celebrate her father’s birthday in mid-June or visit her parents’ home in Morro Bay for Father’s Day, he said.
Jeff* emails:
There are three things that interest me about this story: (1) I got the link from Instapundit which is very widely read and usually sympathetic with gay issues, (2) that Moira says some things about male homosexuality that are anathema to the general narrative; first when she says that young men who are used by older gays see themselves as gay because the activity produces an orgasm, second when she says that homosexuals need to get to young men before they have their first experience with women and three that she believes that homosexuality is “imprinted” by conduct and environment rather than having a genetic cause. (3) that despite her feelings and experiences she still loved her father and her musical work is inspired by her mother.
There are few things that separate her from most of the anti Gay marriage activists: (1) she is not religious. So much of the opposition to same sex marriage comes from religious people, (2) she has first hand knowledge of same sex relationships, (3) she has first hand knowledge of the rationalizations gay people go through and (4) she has first hand knowledge of the consequences inflicted on others by at least those gays who share her parents’ perspectives.
The New Republic has a story (sympathetic to gays) about how gay marriage will change the nuclear family.
Concerning the Gawker story outing Tim Geithner’s brother for trying to set up a tryst with a homosexual porn actor, Nick Denton said that if he hadn’t pulled it he would have lost 7 figures worth of advertising.
I was born into a family of famous gay pagan authors in the late Sixties. My mother was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and my father was Walter Breen. Between them, they wrote over 100 books: my mother wrote science fiction and fantasy (Mists of Avalon), and my father wrote books on numismatics: he was a coin expert.
What they did to me is a matter of unfortunate public record: suffice to say that both parents wanted me to be gay and were horrifed at my being female. My mother molested me from ages 3-12. The first time I remember my father doing anything especially violent to me I was five. Yes he raped me. I don’t like to think about it. If you want to know about his shenanigans with little girls, and you have a very strong stomach, you can google the Breendoggle, which was the scandal which ALMOST drummed him out of science fiction fandom.
More profoundly, though was his disgust with my gender, despite his many relationships with women Moiraand female victims. He told me unequivocally that no man would ever want me, because all men are secretly gay and have simply not come to terms with their natural homosexuality. So I learned to act mannish and walk with very still hips. You can still see the traces of my conditioning to reject my femininity in my absolute refusal to give in and my outspokenness, and my choice of theatrical director for much of my life. But a good part of my outspokenness is my refusal to accept the notion that “deep down I must be a boy born in a girl’s body.” I am not. I am a girl reviled for being a girl, who tried very hard to be the “boy” they wanted.
Suffice to say I was not their only victim of either gender. I grew up watching my father have “romances” (in his imagination) with boys who were a source of frustration because they always wanted food and money as a result of the sex they were subjected to, and didn’t want HIM. (OF COURSE!) I started trying hard to leave home when I was ten, after the failure of my first suicide attempt, and to intervene when I was 13 by telling my mother and her female companion that my father was sleeping with this boy. Instead of calling the cops, like any sensible human being, they simply moved my father into their apartment, which I called “The Love Nest” and they moved back into our family home.
Naturally that made things much worse. I had already been couch-surfing at the home of my directors from the Renaissance Faire for some time, but nobody could take me all the time. As might be imagined, where my father was, there were teenaged boys, drugs, and not a whole lot of food, though I wasn’t really starved in my teens once my mother’s books began to sell really well. I lived all kinds of places as a teen, though I moved back in with my father when I started college…
…Now it should be noted that boy lovers do not think of what they are doing as “molestation.” To them it is sex, they imagine it is consensual, and any objections will certainly be overridden by the orgasms they are certain they can produce, and it is the shame of these orgasms that silences the boy-victims, and persuades them they “must” be gay. (Regardless of subsequent heterosexual marriages and children.)
…Years ago I read [Jeffrey] Satinover, who believed that gays were largely “pansexual” that is, preferring sex with EVERYONE of EVERY age and EVERY gender rather than wanting to be limited to one person, and he regarded it, credibly, as a moral and ethical problem, rather than a sexual “orientation.” I can’t tell you how many lesbians I know who simply hate men, or who have been raped and can’t face sex with men because of that.
…My observation of my father and mother’s actual belief is this: since everyone is naturally gay, it is the straight establishment that makes everyone hung up and therefore limited. Sex early will make people willing to have sex with everyone, which will bring about the utopia while eliminating homophobia and helping people become “who they really are.” It will also destroy the hated nuclear family with its paternalism, sexism, ageism (yes, for pedophiles, that is a thing) and all other “isms.” If enough children are sexualized young enough, gayness will suddenly be “normal” and accepted by everyone, and the old fashioned notions about fidelity will vanish. As sex is integrated as a natural part of every single relationship, the barriers between people will vanish, and the utopia will appear, as “straight culture” goes the way of the dinosaur. As my mother used to say: “Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”
…This March I met Katy Faust online: one of the six children of gays who filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court opposing gay marriage. We corresponded, and I left CA. I am still reeling from the death of my last bits of denial. It IS the homosexuality that is the problem. It IS the belief that all sex all the time will somehow cure problems instead of creating them that is the problem.
So I have begun to speak out against gay marriage, and in doing so, I have alienated most of even my strongest supporters. After all, they need to see my parents as wacky sex criminals, not as homosexuals following their deeply held ethical positions and trying to create a utopia according to a rather silly fantasy. They do not have the willingness to accept the possibility that homosexuality might actually have the result of destroying children and even destroying the adults who insist on remaining in its thrall.
Now for all well-meaning people who believe I am extrapolating from my experience to the wider gay community, I would like to explain why I believe this is so: From my experience in the gay community, the values in that community are very different: the assumption is that EVERYONE is gay and closeted, and early sexual experience will prevent gay children from being closeted, and that will make everyone happy.
If you doubt me, research “age of consent” “Twinks,” “ageism” and the writings of the NUMEROUS authors on the Left who believe that early sexuality is somehow “beneficial” for children.
Due to my long experience with the BSDM community (bondage/discipline, Sado-Masochism) it is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are. To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.
What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial, and the sure knowledge (don’t think for a second that they DON’T know) that the only way to produce another homosexual is to provide a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be “ruined” by attraction to a girl.
If you’re OK with that, and you might not be, it is worth your consideration. If you think I am wrong, that is your privilege, but watch out for the VAST number of stories of sexual abuse AND transgenderism that will come about from these gay “marriages.” Already the statistics for sexual abuse of children of gays are astronomically high compared to that suffered by the children of straights.
Naturally my perspective is very uncomfortable to the liberal people I was raised with: I am “allowed” to be a victim of molestation by both parents, and “allowed” to be a victim of rather hideous violence. I am, incredibly, NOT ALLOWED to blame their homosexuality for their absolute willingness to accept all sex at all times between all people.
